I’ve recently installed Cantabile and am experimenting with a variety of uses. Love the product so far…the routing paradigm is exactly what I need to control Eurorack modular stuff with Reaktor (for example).
Unfortunately, right out of the gate, I’m getting a bit flumoxed with latency. The lowest I’ve been able to achieve is 384 samples with Asio4all.
When running Reaktor, also using the same Asio4all driver, I can comfortably reduce latency down to 128 samples. 384 is working OK from a playability standpoint, but it sure feels better when the latency is 128.
If I set the latency on Cantabile to 256 samples, it may work for a while, but then “degrades” - the output gets distorted and garbled. Any use of the audio control panel in Cantabile may cause the issue as well. Rebooting may or may not help, but ultimately, the only way to get Cantabile to run reliably on my system is to increase sample count to 384 or greater.
I’ve run through the ebook on tuning the machine and have implemented everything applicable. I’ve run LatencyMon and dpclat and neither indicated there was a misbehaving driver. Dpclat does show dpc latency of about 1000us.
Machine is running Windows 10, is a 3.5Ghz I5 2500 CPU, with 16GB of RAM. Sound card is an MAudio Delta 1010 (actually I have two installed).
Another odd thing is, I can only use the Asio drivers with Cantabile. The WASAPI (only says “Out” no “In”) driver shows up in the drop down, but if selected, only “none” shows up when right clicking to attempt to add a port.
I’d be very happy if I could get a reliable 256 samples.
Any suggestions on how to get down to the magical 256 (or lower!) sample level?
In Cantabile, the only drivers listed are ASIO4ALL, a variety of other ASIO drivers (including an MAudio driver), and the WASAPI (output only) drivers. In Sonar, I see WDM/KS drivers, but they don’t appear in the Cantabile drop down.
I had previously tried the MAudio ASIO driver and didn’t have much luck with it. Today, I just tried it again, and 256 samples is working fine so far.
Maybe that is the solution.
If not, anything else I can do? Should WDM/KS drivers show up in Cantabile? They don’t show in Reaktor either FWIW…
I don’t think you want to mess with any non-ASIO drivers if you can avoid it. If the M-Audio driver is working you should be ok. I hate to say it but the next solution I’d look at would be a newer piece of hardware… I bought a used Scarlett cheap for basically the same reason.
Well so far, after about an hour, it is still running glitch-free at 256 samples using the MAudio ASIO driver.
I did not test the MAudio driver after making all of the tuning changes, so maybe the tuning + MAudio ASIO driver did the trick.
On my system, the behavior when using each driver is a bit different. For example, with ASIO4ALL, just clicking on the Tools/Options menu, takes a couple of seconds. When using the MAudio ASIO driver, it is almost instant. I don’t know if this is normal or expected.
I really like the MAudio interface and wasn’t quite ready to get a newer piece of hardware for a while.
In any case, thanks for the suggestion to try the Maudio driver!
It is my understanding that ASIO4ALL was a hack that wrapped your WDM soundcard drivers in an interface that appeared “like” ASIO to DAWs that could not see anything but ASIO in days long past. Therefore, it can only give the best performance the WDM drivers are capable of at a given CPU speed.
There have supposedly been some odd situations where ASIO4ALL actually did outperform a device’s regular ASIO drivers, but actually that is only according to accounts, and I’ve never actually witnessed this to be the case.
Cantabile, and most modern DAWs, can talk directly to the WDM drivers nowadays without requiring a “middle-man”, and consequently will be more efficient exhibiting better latency performance.
If anyone knows of any recent developments in ASIO4ALL that contradict what I’ve come to understand about it, I’m interested in hearing about it of course.
WDM/WASAPI in Windows 10 is seeing some continual development and improvement according to some press from MS I’ve seen, so it is edging closer to being “ASIO-like”. But like I say, you no longer require a wrapper like ASIO4ALL for most situations, and can output directly to WDM/WASAPI.
You should show all the WASAPI drivers in the lower half of the Audio Engine dialog. That is odd. Are they disabled in the Device Manager by any chance? (Or have exclamation marks next to them in the Sound, Video and Game Controllers area?)
There are WASAPI drivers listed in the Audio Engine dialog, but I was unable to use them.
First off they all say “WASAPI Out” such as:
WASAPI Out - Multichannel (M-Audio Delta1010
WASAPI Out - Line 3/4 (M-Audio Delta 1010)
WASAPI Out - Line 5/6 (M-Audio Delta 1010)
and so on. If I pick any of them, when I right click when making a port assignment, the only option available is “none”.
Driver status in device manager looks fine. I don’t know if “WASAPI Out” means Out only? Also, even if it were to work, there doesn’t appear to be a way to get access to all 16 audio I/Os.
I wonder if that’s a result somehow of the driver profiling the system and thinking there’s an issue. You might try completely blasting your WASAPI drivers and reinstalling… (but I guess you can’t really, that’s an internal Windows thing isn’t it.)
I’ve never used WASAPI, I don’t really know that much about it.
Sorry, now I do see what you mean. I have the same thing on my downstairs unit - the WASAPI options are outputs only. Hitting “Add” to an input channel only reports “there are no assignable channels available.”
Just to clarify, Cantabile only supports WASAPI for output - not input yet. I have a task slated for this, but it’s not hit to the top of the priority list just yet.
