Yesterday I swapped from using the manufacturer’s drivers for my MOTU Ultralight Mk3, to using ASIO4ALL, as it lower buffer sizes. Running at 192 samples, one of my big fully-loaded Cantabile songs was showing a load of around 33%.
Then today I powered up Cantabile, and the same song was showing a load of around 82%, and occasionally glitching at 100% when I was playing. I went into options, set the buffer size to 240, and the load returned to about 33%. But interestingly, I then changed the buffer size back to the original 192, and the load remained around 33%.
I don’t know - with the MOTU drivers, the Cantabile buffer size dropdown doesn’t give me any option other than 256 (not even any larger ones!). With ASIO4ALL I get loads of different sizes going up in 8-sample increments. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong - I’d expect the MOTU drivers to allow me to set whatever I like.
This highlights another issue I’ve had…the MOTU Audio Console does nothing. I launch it and nothing appears (either as a window or tray item). I launch it from the command line and I get no errors, just the prompt again. Maybe I need to reinstall. But this is the same on both my home/studio machine and my two live machines.
[EDIT] I’ve just re-installed the drivers on one of the machines, and Audio Console now works, and I’ve changed the buffer size. So perhaps it stopped working on all my machines after one of the Win10 updates. Thanks Torsten.
The question remains, however, why the load was appearing high at 192 samples, then dropped low after changing the buffer to something else then back again. Mysterious.
I’ve seen this with ASIO4ALL too - though very rarely and usually I’ve tied it back to laptop on/off mains power and/or power options high performance vs balanced scheme and/or accidentally running debug vs release mode builds (though that last one wouldn’t be your problem :).