Still getting massive stalls with my setup. Slightly odd behaviour: I work out of one setlist, loading individual songs which are fairly simple - one or two VSTis, sometimes with a reverb/delay plugin (Valhalla). Often I get one large stall with loud audio buzz within a few mins of launch, then usually no further problems, but occasionally a brief (not problematic) stall of similar nature when switching songs. Get the impression reverb tails may be involved, i.e. doesn’t seem to be an issue with dry setup, but removing the effects plugins. Time load usually several 100%.
I also get a big stall when trying to set new bindings.
NUC7 i7 PC
16GB RAM
ESI Maya22 interface
Cantabile Solo
Plugins: Modartt Pianoteq; GSi VB3; OB-XD; Valhalla; Poise
I’ve been methodically through GlitchFree.
Link to 2 profiles from such behaviour experienced this morning. Grateful of any help.
Seems to only occur early on in a session - conveniently this has meant I’ve been able to gig without major issues.
Went through GlitchFree again and realised I had allocated 2.4GB for paging file rather than 24GB (150% of my RAM) so corrected this, but problem persists.
check that you don’t have an hardware problem (USB cables, audio interface)
try cycling the Cantabile audio engine off/on to see if the problem disappears
use the Task Manager to check if some other process is using most of the CPU during the stalls
try reinstalling the drivers for your audio interface
This is just what I would try first if I had the same problem. Maybe I could also try selecting null audio in Cantabile, so that the USB cable and audio interface is not involved, just to exclude a problem with the plugins (but I suspect that Cantabile and the plugins are not the cause of the problem).
I’d experiment with a different audio interface - the ESI Maya has a bit of a dodgy reputation.
Given the output from the profiler, it looks like some sporadic interference from a background process blocking some resources,rather than an issue around Cantabile or your plugins per se. I’d take a hard look at all hardware device drivers and at any background system tools
If you’re on a 13th or 14th gen Intel CPU, I recommend updating your motherboard bios to the very latest bleeding-edge version, even if it’s labeled “experimental” or “alpha” by your motherboard manufacturer. I had a problem that looked just like this last year, and it turned out to be caused by the Intel voltage bug. Took me months to finally diagnose it. Updating my bios to an experimental alpha version fixed it.
If that’s not the cause, I’d say it’s likely the result of some background task occasionally interrupting everything. When that happens, Cantabile’s Profiler blames the pause on whatever plugin happened to be running when the background task intervened, just like what you’re seeing. The offending task can be hard to spot using Task Manager or other monitoring tools because it doesn’t actually consume much cpu. It merely freezes everything else as it acquires locks to critical system resources. The best way I’ve found to find the culprit is to (temporarily!) deactivate non-critical background services from the Windows Services control panel, and uninstall all non-essential software, especially anything that might try to check for updates.
I was using an ESI Maya 44+ without problems until I udated to Windows 11 24H2 from 22H2. After that nothing worked well, I had audio delays - not like normal latency but more like a half-second delay after hitting the keys. Not a joy when trying to soundcheck on a gig! Restarting fixed things for a very short while and installing the latest Maya driver made it worse! I went back to using my UR22 interface and everything worked normally again.
It’s pity because the small form-factor of the Maya made it very usable in my setup but 24H2 has given some problems including with the touch screen.
Another thing to check is your USB Power Suspend settings in Device Manager.
Even if you have set a USB device not to go into power save mode, major Windows updates have a habit of restoring the energy saving mode (Microsoft knows better, you know…).
I had never experienced anything like that until the last week, when I experimented with substituting ASIO4ALL for the official focusrite Saffire driver. Very strange.
It happened on two occasions. I upped the buffer slightly to one of those odd values you only see in ASIO4ALL… 170’, or something like that. Not been able to get it to happen since.
I didn’t add that I have the same problem when subbing a Steinberg UR22c interface for the ESI one (I agree the reputation is poor but its small form factor means it can live inside my keyboard!)
All USB ports are set to never suspend.
I have been around the houses with my BIOS - I’m on the latest version but it’s 7th gen so hasn’t been updated for years. Not sure how I would go about finding an experimental one to flash but the problem described by Hamlen does sound similar to mine…
Thanks, I did run LatencyMon a while back and managed to capture a massive stall but couldn’t work out what was causing it. I’ll have another go this week
