what audio interface are you using? Audio interface and driver settings are (amongst others) key determining factors for any drop-outs or glitches.
Specs-wise, your system should be more than capable of playing audio - but of course it would be interesting what your song files are doing beside playing autio files. Maybe something is happening within the rest of the song (plugins) that is overtaxing the system, thereby affecting the overall output. As soon as something in your audio chain is stressing out your system so it doesn’t deliver the next audio block in time, there will be glitches in output. Very probably the source of your glitch isn’t your media player, but something else happening.
That’s why @dave_dore’s pointer to the Profiler is spot-on - you can find out if something in your song is creating buffer underruns.
My interface is a Presonus Quantum 3 2626. I’m running it at 44.1. I’m using Cantabile to play back media players which are a few audio and one midi for a tempo track. Also I have bindings for my set list to automate my guitar FX. I’ll check out the profiler tonight.
So I just ran the Profiler and when I had a drop out it showed nothing in the Profiler. So I opened up my task manager and Cantabile was maxing out my CPU. Cantabile was going between 60% and 80% CPU. It was never like this before. I was using about 6% CPU recently. Next I opened up my DAW Studio One 5 and it was maxing out my CPU as well. What the heck is going on here? Something has recently change on my PC. My custom power plan is still activated. I just don’t know what may have happened.
I just sorted out why my CPU was high. I thought maybe because the Profiler showed nothing that it was my Presonus 2626 interface. I read online that clicking on the “Enable optimized PreSonus power plan for Thunderbolt audio streaming” might fix the drop outs but no my CPU went through the roof! But… I’m still getting drop outs…
It might help figure it out. I heard where some Win10 updates caused strange CPU load changes on some laptops and PC’s so that might be it.
Dave
You run it with all the apps closed except it and with the current audio interface and driver plugged in. It will tell you what process and/or driver is causing the dropouts.
And you could also check your Windows update history to see if it coincides with the current trouble starting up.
I ran LatencyMon and it said everything was good. I watched this video and made all the changes that needed to be done, it seemed to make a little difference with the occasional spikes I’m getting in the Cantabile Profiler and it looks like the page faults are down too. Unfortunately I’m still getting drop outs. I don’t get why I can run a session in my DAW (Studio One 5) with lots of tracks and VSTs running and have no issues but playing one audio track and one midi track in Cantabile gives me drop outs. I’m getting the feeling it’s not Cantabile. Yes I’m frustrated… I really hope I can find the problem or I’ll have to go old school and use my DAW to handle all my show data. Back in the day when I was doing a solo live stream show to the internet I was running a full session of tracks minus my vocals and guitar and running Wirecast broadcasting software with 3 cameras with everything automated in Reaper and in 2 years of shows never had one glitch. It would be great if there was someone who could do a remote look into my PC and see if there’s anything that can be done.
Could you post your Cantabile song and any racks used in it here on this post for us to look at. And a screenshot of the Audio Engine settings you use in Cantabile.
I did a year of daily live shows in 2018-2019 using Cantabile feeding into Voicemeeter (Voicemeeter with A1 pointing to my MOTU ASIO box so I could tap off the outputs directly in the Voicemeeter System Settings) to get Cantabile’s output into OBS and live stream to YouTube, and never had any glitches then. (Two cameras for me.) Maybe something changed recently. I’ll recall my setup and see if I can get it to glitch.
I’ve seen some of your YouTube videos and it looks like it’s working great! I know there are people doing way more with Cantabile than me so this has to be something that can been fixed.
Thanks Leroy, I can’t answer why Studio One works well at the 64 bit buffer but the first thing I would try would be to adjust the audio buffer in C♪3 up in value from 64 to the next possible larger size and keep increasing it till glitches go away completely just so we see if it’s tied to that somehow. I realize you want to run at as low a latency as you can so this is just to gather info.
we’ll need the song files as well; the set list doesn’t contain the song files. Also, the media files you are playing would be helpful for diagnostics.
I was able to load Montucky Blues in Cantabile (couldn’t fully load Blue, since your Zip archive only contains a link to the MIDI file, not the real MIDI file). Not able to fully reproduce it, since I don’t own Helix Native, but the audio and MIDI files played back without dropouts even on my office machine with WASAPI drivers. Can you try if playback works without issues when you turn off (or even remove) Helix Native? Just to check for any funny side-effects on that front that I can’t reproduce…
But there’s something funky going on in the .wav file of Montucky Blues on the left audio channel - some glitchy sounds like a shaker going off at erratic times, e.g. around 01:00 or around 01:49; also at 02:00. I checked with an audio player - this has nothing to do with Cantabile, but is part of the original audio file. Not something I’d call a “dropout” but definitely a glitch; and these sounds are definitely at times that make no musical sense, so I don’t think they were intended…
Could you check the Wave file at these points and tell me if this is the kind of sound you mean with “dropouts”?
That’s weird, I just downloaded the zip file from Dropbox and extracted the files and both songs play fine with no glitches at all. Keep in mind that the glitches will happen randomly and sometimes not at all but then just when you think its gone it drops out and I mean no sound at all but the timeline is not effected. The midi files got copied wrong try these. Midi files.zip (488 Bytes)
OMG!!! I added a new song and copied one of my existing songs into it and saved it as a new file with a different name. Next I deleted the VST (Helix Native) in the new song to test if it would drop out and now all my songs (all 37) have no Helix VST in the racks! Please tell me there’s a way to get my show back…
When I load my original Cantabile show file with all my songs and there’s no Helix VST in the rack on all the songs. Are all the different saved versions of Cantabile connected?
when you delete the plugin inside a linked rack it will be apllied to all the songs the rack is loaded in. Try shutting down C♪3 then downloading the helix rack you uploaded here earlier and replacing the one you altered in your rack folder, then restart C♪3 or just add the helix native plugin back to the rack where you deleted it and check all the routes and bindings. You only have to fix the rack once.
