Guys, thanks for the responses. First a quick comment about my system and BiaB: after I finished the above note, I shut down both browsers, waited a couple of minutes for their processes to exit memory, then fired up BiaB, which had been up since last night. In fact, I had a tune with five RealTracks loaded that had been playing fine last night. So I just decided to go with it. It sounded horrendous. Total distortion. But I waited, wondering if it might clear up, which sometimes happened. But it didn't. So I stopped the tune and checked what audio drivers I was using. MME. I switched to M-Audio's ASIO driver, and fired the tune back up. Same difference. I called up M-Audio's little mixer utility and tried various buffer settings, all the way up to the max of 4096, didn't make a bit of difference. So I quit out of that tune altogether and turned to working on one that just used MIDI -- which works fine.

To address your comments in order:

rharv: Yeah I thought of trying buffer settings both ways, I went lower as well as higher, but it didn't matter. The 1010 and the 66 take the same audio driver so they must share similar internals.

fiddler: I'm not so quick to blame the OS just yet, unless PG has done something like optimize BiaB heavily for Win10 that they're not telling us about. v2017 worked just fine on this machine with 8 gigs fewer ram than it has now. My next motherboard will have PCI slots. You can still find 'em with PCI slots. The good ones tend to be rather pricey now, unfortunately.

The M-Audio card with all the cables coming out of the back is, I believe, the 1010, which rharv appears to be still using with good results. Yes, these cards are older, but they're still quite capable. My Delta-66 has a single dedicated cable that connects to either a 4x4 breakout box or an Omni I/O -- a small, dedicated mixer, which is what I have. The Delta cards handle 24/96k signal processing; mine handles it just fine. Which just got me to wondering, come to think of it. I've been running everything here at 44.1k. I wonder what would happen if I changed the parameters within BiaB to a higher number, might that have a positive effect?

guitarhacker: I have a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 that has some sort of problem -- it doesn't work right now. But I also have an Alesis interface that's the rough equivalent to it. I've used it before and it works OK, although it requires that I use ASIO4All, which I'm not too crazy about. So if I feel like condemning my M-Audio, which I don't believe should be condemned because it's worked just fine with everything I've thrown at it, I'll give the Alesis a shot before I go and blow a whole wad of cash on another interface.

Good to know about the resource requirements on the drivers. I've seen a note pop up on Sonar before but didn't pay much attention to it because, frankly, I didn't know what was causing it. Now I know. At this time, however, I do not have any other piece of music software active, nor did I when this problem was occuring.

Last edited by cooltouch; 02/17/19 03:36 PM.
Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums