For whatever reason there is always a few like 2 or 3 people out of however many users on this forum who have this issue. It's very frustrating I'm sure because nobody else has this problem regardless of what kind of system they have. For 99.5% of us we install Biab, enter some chords, pick a style and hit Play and everything is good.
You mentioned ASIO with your Delta. That random crackling is a classic sign the buffers are too low. Just keep raising them until the crackling stops. It's also possible their old ASIO driver isn't that good, who knows? You can try downloading the freeware ASIO4ALL and see if that helps.
One point unrelated to this. You said you're using MS Security Essentials. Bad idea because it's simply not that good. One very big reason to upgrade to Win 10 is the new Windows Defender is much better and no it can't be added to an old Win 7 system. I'm not going into all that here, for a whole variety of reasons everybody should be on Win 10.
.... One point unrelated to this. You said you're using MS Security Essentials. Bad idea because it's simply not that good. One very big reason to upgrade to Win 10 is the new Windows Defender is much better and no it can't be added to an old Win 7 system. I'm not going into all that here, for a whole variety of reasons everybody should be on Win 10. Bob
I have a lot of drives and folders marked as safe in my AntiVirus, so that there won't be unnecessary scans ... Just dump MS security essentials, get a good antvirus, free ones like AVG are even a lot better. Use Malwarebytes and Spybot S&D occasionally takes out a lot of sh*t. too. F
Bob, thanks for your response. I really really don't want to be part of this tiny minority. I mean, there has to be a reason at some level that this is happening. It's especially infuriating because it is intermittent. One day, things are fine, then the next, they're terrible. Haven't changed a thing, in fact sometimes I haven't even turned off the machine -- or, in a few cases, even exited BiaB. So Yeah, I'm frustrated -- to put it mildly.
It's worth mentioning that I didn't have this problem with v2017. I would get the occasional rice krispie, which was solved by shutting down unnecessary processes or exiting other programs. But nothing like I'm getting now. So something's changed. And I'm not talking about going to 64-bit either. I'm running 32-bit and will continue to run it until they've got the bugs worked out of the 64-bit version. So something has changed with the 32-bit version that causes it to occasionally become a resource hog whenever RealTracks are being used.
I've known about increasing the buffers for a long time. Currently I have them set to 512 which I think, if anything, is a bit on the high side. But I'll give it a try and see if increasing them will get rid of the distortion.
I haven't tried BiaB yet today. I left it up last night and didn't turn off the machine. Last night it was running RealTracks without issues. Hopefully, today it will continue to run RealTracks without issues. I'd give it a try now, but it wouldn't be a fair test. I have two browsers open right now. In the past, when it was running right, having a browser open didn't affect it any, but I don't want to push things, so I'll try it out after I've finished this post and exited both browsers.
I've been using the M-Audio ASIO drivers for years without incident. They work just fine with other applications, such as Cakewalk Sonar, now Cakewalk by Bandlab, and others, such as Studio One and Reaper. I don't think the M-Audio ASIO drivers are the problem. I don't like ASIO4ALL because it wants to take over your system and not let anything else play. Also, its menu is rather arcane and choosy and often takes a bit of finessing before it is setup correctly. It's a last resort, but I guess I should try it when nothing else seems to work.
Guys, I used AVG for years and finally dumped it when it got way too possessive of my system and became harder and harder to install the free version. I've been using MS Security Essentials for probably 7 or 8 years and it has done a good job. Occasionally I'll run Malwarebytes or Spybot but all they catch are malware that's attached itself to my browser, most of which is rather inoffensive stuff. Intrusive, yeah, but not much else.
Okay, well, time to shut down the browsers and give BiaB another try. Hopefully it's still working okay.
I've known about increasing the buffers for a long time. Currently I have them set to 512 which I think, if anything, is a bit on the high side. But I'll give it a try and see if increasing them will get rid of the distortion.
It may be rare, but I've also heard from a couple people that actually decreasing this buffer on Delta cards instead can make a positive difference (only when using ASIO). May be worth a shot. FWIW I've found 512 to be a pretty acceptable and stable setting for the 1010 interfaces I've worked with. Never tried these drivers on a 66 though .. we have a few 1010s but no 66 models to test on.
Last edited by rharv; 02/17/1907:26 AM.
Make your sound your own! .. I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome
I'd usually blame windows first ... these days you need to be more or less a windows (10) tuner before one can work with it. A delta 1010? had one some 7 years ago for at least 10 years; was a great one. But PCI, so i had to change it because of a newer type PC motherboard; no more PCI alas.
Before you spend the bucks to build or buy a new computer and all the time involved in setting it up for audio...... Just go and buy a new Focusrite Interface. You might spend between $150 to $250 dollars on it. But, you have a new interface and then be sure you upgrade the ASIO driver per the factory.
Aren't those Delta things pretty old and have the octopus looking mess of wires coming out of the back? Or am I thinking of something else?
BUT..... before you do that..... just wanted to check on something....
Be sure you're not trying to run your DAW and BB and or RB all at the same time thinking you're using ASIO for them. ASIO will only support the first one of those programs you load. Everything else gets MME or whatever else is available but it won't be ASIO. Perhaps you already know this. It catches me off guard occasionally. If I try to do playback on an audio/midi project it's a mess.
Actually Sonar warns me that ASIO is not available but BB/RB doesn't and will let me try to playback something that won't playback nicely on MME.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.com Add nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.
The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
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.
Time for an update on all this. Yesterday I finally got through to PGM's tech support and had almost an hour long discussion with one of their techs. He kept focusing in on my Delta 66 card as being the likely culprit for the playback noise. Even though my card remains very capable with its 24/96k sampling abilities, he explained that the architecture is very dated and that even the RealTek chip on my motherboard will handle playback better. I wonder if he'd still have that opinion if I were to tell him that the motherboard in this system is 10 years old. But, like the Delta card, it remains very capable. This isn't a slow system at all.
So anyway, he wanted me to configure Windows so that the RealTek chip was the default for playback, but an interesting thing has happened to my system. The monitor I'm currently using is an LG Ultrawide with HDMI connections only. So I had to buy a video card for it. The card I bought was a standard sort of card with decent video performance. It has an NVidea chip that handles the HDMI audio. Now, apparently, when I installed this card, the RealTek chip was removed from the selection possibilities in the Windows Sound panel. I checked with the Device Manager and it shows the RealTek as still being active, however, but there doesn't appear to be a way to get to it anymore. It's place is taken up now by the NVidea chip's sound driver. Until today, I was assuming that I didn't have any way to access the NVidea's audio. My monitor doesn't have built-in speakers, but just today I discovered that it has a headphones out jack. So I went back to the Windows Sound panel and made sure that NVidia was selected as the default for playback, then I fired up BiaB and loaded in a song with five RealTracks. And, guess what. It sounds even worse coming through that headphone jack, mostly because the fidelity through that headphone jack isn't all that great. So, so much for blaming it on my Delta card!
Yesterday, I explained to him that I wasn't having this problem with v2017, and his reply was "Apples and oranges," meaning I can't compare the two versions. Apparently, even though 2019 resembles 2017, the core of the program has been completely rewritten. I asked if PGM had heavily optimized BiaB for Win10 and he said, absolutely not, and that they have users who still have XP who are using v2019. I also asked him if he had any idea why BiaB straightens up and behaves occasionally. I told him that, when it behaves, I can have two browsers open with many tabs open, and I can be playing a file with five RealTracks and I won't be getting any audio problems at all. He didn't have any explanation for that either.
So, at least I'm not at the impasse I was just a little while ago, where I couldn't figure out how to get sound from the NVidia, but now that I have, I've disproved the tech's assertions that the Delta was the culprit.
One more observation: I just installed build 622. It seems like, with each successive build, this distortion problem is getting worse. So whatever PGM is doing to BiaB, they're really screwing it up for me. Unless I can get this straightened out, I'm sad to say that this will be the last time I upgrade Band in a Box, unless something significant changes on this end (like a new motherboard/processor, for example), such that it might warrant giving it another try.
Thanks for all the info, enlightening. Pot blaming the Kettle as usual thus.
NVdia, it's about the same with AMD radeon. I always install the most basic drivers, even deinstalled them letting Micosoft use it's own windows driver.
Also try to avoid any gamers stuff and especially onboard audio; i posted on this a while ago. Also disable the PC's motherboard HD chip in BIOS, and nevertheless the realtek HD drivers keep being reinstalled. To keep them out of the way definitely: just disable them in Device Manager and leave them be marked with a triangle.
One thing you could try is to disable your NVdia's software to save all sorts of stuff occasionally to some unneeded log file, that's a must with AMD called ATIrecord, set it to zero. You do that in the registry somewhere under Local Machine, SEE PICTURE BELOW. And disable any possible hardware (graphics) acceleration in it's driver settings. There is some more editing to do on a motherboards BIOS, but you'll have to find that out yourself for your type MOBO. Gamer sites are often a good source for that sort of info.
Don’t want to rain on your parade but I seem to recall that, some video card sound hdmi drivers can cause problems in BIAB. So much so that folks have had to turn them off (disable them) after windows update turns them back on.
Also you may find you can see your realtek chip drivers and use again if you do this. You may need to show hidden unused devices in your sound settings in control panel, or sound settings. Mike
How about if you go to MIDI options and uncheck the "Use DXi/VSTi synth" checkbox. Also, go to Audio | Audio Settings, and uncheck "Use RealTime plugins".
Now play your songs and see if the same thing happens, ignoring the fact that you might not hear MIDI.
Fiddler, I've thought about disabling the NVidia, but I'm concerned that I might screw up the video if I do this. Hopefully not. Nonetheless, it's something to try. I wonder, even if it isn't the active sound device, if it could be causing this mess?
Mike, I don't have any sound drivers that are hidden that I know of. Except the RealTek that I can't access now. Not a big loss, the way I see it, though. Maybe, if I disable the NVidia chip, it'll come back?
Andrew, that doesn't really solve my problem if I'm gonna lose my MIDI output. I'm not familiar with RealTime plugins. Can you explain what they are?
Okay, here's the latest. I had about an hour long talk with PGM's senior tech today. When I told him that the NVidia chip was also playing back garbage, he was at a loss. We tried various things, but nothing seemed to help. Finally, he suggested that I try and reinstall BiaB. A last resort, for sure, but when nothing else is working, it can't hurt to give that a try. So I installed 2019 into a fresh directory, leaving the old copy in place.
Well, guess what. The problem is largely cured. When I run this one file that has five RealTracks, it takes almost one chorus of 32 bars before it's finally settled down to where there is a minimum of rice krispies now. This file is one that was 100% generated by BiaB, by the way, using the Melodist to generate both harmony and melody -- so there shouldn't be anything particularly odd about its configuration.
Then I installed the 622 update. It appears that now it isn't as stable as it was before I installed the update. I'm talking the 32-bit version here. I'm trying out the 64-bit version now -- didn't try it before updating to 622. It seems to be about the same as the 32-bit version regarding stability.
Back when BiaB would occasionally run right, I've had two browsers running with a lot of tabs open, and it had no effect on BiaB's performance when playing this same tune. Now, however, with one browser open with multiple tabs, it doesn't like it. There's quite a bit of distortion and even slow-downs in tempo, although not as bad as it used to be. Doesn't seem to matter how long I let the tune run, either. It just doesn't like having anything else that sucks up resources running at the same time. Oh well, I can live with that. I usually run BiaB with nothing else resident anyway. I'm just glad to have it back. For now.
I just thought of something. If you go to the Windows Control Panel, then Sound, select your default Playback device, Properties, then Advanced, what's the Default Format? BIAB is locked into 16-bit/44.1 when using MME or ASIO, so if your interface and computer monitor are set to something else, that could be causing some playback issues.
Fiddler, I've thought about disabling the NVidia, but I'm concerned that I might screw up the video if I do this. Hopefully not. Nonetheless, it's something to try. I wonder, even if it isn't the active sound device, if it could be causing this mess?
With my AMD radeon card the basic windows drivers work OK, the card's name is even mentioned in Device manager. Deinstall it and let windows install it's own on reboot. (In my case i use Widows 10).
Kent's suggestion is a good one, i hope that does it. However i never had any issues due 'set' sample frequencies in Windows 10 (and 7 Ultimate before that). I use 44.1kHz mainly, thought occasionally i work with Adobe Premiere, and 48kHz audio. No problems with that. But i have a more modern RME interface, and merging realtime automatic sample frequencies & converting from the inputs might be a piece of cake there. You might be off better with some modern audio interface. My old M-Audio 1010 was a good one, alas my current MOBO did not have a PCI slot anymore, only PCIe.
Kent, those settings are something I do check on occasion. And they're pretty much always set to agreement with BiaB, namely 16/44.1k. One thing about my M-Audio, when BiaB is resident, it is locked into 44.1k, so I couldn't set it to a higher number even if I tried. I asked the tech about this and he said that 44.1k is the only rate that BiaB will use.
Fiddler, I plan to get another audio interface. Ideally, I'd like to figure out why my Scarlett 2i4 isn't working. And my Alesis interface, which is just okay, requires ASIO4ALL to run, which I don't particularly like using. I've got my eyes on a few that are up at auction right now -- a couple of Tascams and an M-Audio Ultra. The latter appears to be the most powerful of the three. Still a couple of days before the auctions close.
I have an iPad with a lot of music apps on it, so the interface will mostly be used to replace the broken Scarlett for use with my iPad, but I plan to give it a go on my DAW too, see if off-loading the audio tasks to an interface might free up resources and take care of some of the problems I've been having. Besides, I can most definitely use the MIDI ports.
Regarding this whole HDMI business, I've just run into another problem that I actually don't think is related to my PC at all. My monitor has two HDMI "in" ports. I have another HDMI cable running from the second port to a set top box for my cable access and then to my home stereo for audio. This way I can watch TV on my Ultra Wide monitor. Well, this morning I switched the monitor over to the second HDMI port and turned on the stereo and set top box, set the stereo to Video 1, same as I always do. I'm getting a picture, but no sound. And I'm thinking, there's no way any of this can be related to my PC, can it? I mean, the monitor, when used like this, is no longer part of my PC system, right? Unless that NVidia is piggybacking somehow and screwing things up. I've tried restarting the set top box and the stereo and neither had an effect. Next I need to go check connections just to be 100% sure that nothing physical has changed. Puzzling.
I would check out tascam if it's a good choice. Focusrite usually had a good support, had another model once and the techies sent me specially adapted drivers for some reason, curing a problem.
Yeah, I like Focusrite, for sure. The Scarlett 2i4 I have, I bought used. Come to find, it had a worn out USB jack, so I bought just a jack and soldered it in. Not a difficult thing to do. However, after I soldered it in, the Scarlett no longer works at all. I dunno what I did to cause this, but apparently I broke it somehow. I'm figuring the cost to get it repaired will probably be at least what it's worth. So it's been indefinitely retired.
I've just been browsing interfaces, and I think that, rather than go for the M-Audio or Tascams I mentioned, which may or may not even work, I'm gonna buy a new one instead -- a Behringer U-PHORIA UMC404HD. 4 in, 4 out, 24/192k. Solid pre's. It's priced reasonably for what it is and, perhaps most important for me, it has gotten consistent great reviews.
Andrew, that doesn't really solve my problem if I'm gonna lose my MIDI output. I'm not familiar with RealTime plugins. Can you explain what they are?
The purpose of that was a test to eliminate the possibility of the problem being caused by some plugin you have (inadvertantly?) selected. I read through the thread a couple times and couldn't see this mentioned. The default would be to have the Coyote Wavetable as your default synth with no audio effect plugins chained. Reinstalling the program to a new folder as you did pretty much removed this as the culprit, however to be sure you could still do the simple test... just uncheck the box as mentioned and see if your song still crackles.
Quote:
The problem is largely cured. When I run this one file that has five RealTracks, it takes almost one chorus of 32 bars before it's finally settled down to where there is a minimum of rice krispies now.
It doesn't sound to me like the problem is cured, since you're still getting crackling. However it does make sense, since the program will still be generating tracks while the song starts to play (using a different core), so you'll get higher CPU usage initially, and more likely to have problems. (FYI you can disable this "Speed up generation of tracks" in the RealTracks Prefs dialog.)
I suggest that you try disabling your network adaptor. Also disable wifi and bluetooth if applicable. Unplug your ethernet cable. Obviously this is just to troubleshoot. If it fixes the problem, systematically enable one thing at a time until it starts happening again.
Also, have you watched the Task manager during playback and have you noticed anything unusual? I have noticed that some people use a free program called LatencyMon, maybe do some research on that to see if it could help you.
I didn't have any plugins enabled. Just the MS Wavetable for MIDI cuz this was just sort of a test song file I had BiaB generate.
When I was talking to the PGM tech yesterday, the Task Manager was one thing we spent some time on. It was spiking all over the place when it was distorting really badly. But after I reinstalled BiaB, I booted the Task Manager and had a look. Completely different. There were small tremors in that top line, but that was about it.
As for my mention of rice krispies, they were quite minor and I've found in general that, once BiaB has had a chance to run a while, things will settle down.
I don't have Bluetooth or wifi on this machine. I can disconnect the Network adapter easily enough, but I'll bet that isn't the problem. Because, once again, I didn't used to have this problem prior to 2019. So I dunno why the network adapter should suddenly cause problems.
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