Hi all,
I play keys and run the click for our band, provided by the Cantabile metronome. I’ve noticed during our performances that sometimes the metronome sounds will stutter. The tempo does not change, it just sounds like the actual metronome click sound is delayed. It’s not consistent; the click will play delayed for a fraction of a beat and then be back on tempo for a few minutes, then glitch again just for a beat. It’s almost subliminal, I find myself thinking, “did I just hear that?” However other band members have noticed it as well. Again, the actual tempo doesn’t change, the clock keeps running correctly. It just feels like the audio playback of the metronome click stutters. I’m using the Cantabile “Modern” click sounds.
My other keyboard sounds are completely unaffected. I play a mix of Kontakt, Omnisphere, UVI, etc. piano and pads. I have run the Cantabile profiler during a session and do not see evidence of overtaxed cpu.
I have been unable to duplicate this at home in my studio, only during performances. The only difference between home and stage is audio i/o - at home I use a Behringer UMC and on stage I use the Dante Virtual Soundcard going into a Yamaha console over ethernet. (VST audio submixes go out to Dante channels 1-8, metronome click is on channel 9.) Laptop is the same - Lenovo laptop with Windows 10. I use different Cantabile profiles depending on where I am to map keys and channels (thanks Torsten for excellent advice on abstraction layers).
Anyone else run into this, or have ideas for troubleshooting?
Thanks!
James
Hi,
probably not very helpful but I also got the Dante Virtual Soundcard a few years ago and tried to get it to run stably at low latency, but always failed because the loads on the computer were too high as soon as I tried to push the latency into acceptable ranges.
I later found out that real low latency applications rather require the Dante hardware solutions (i.e. Dante AVIO).
However, as I said, this was a few years ago and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.
Greetings, Volker
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Hi Volker, thanks for the reply. I hope I don’t have to go the AVIO route as it looks like it has a 2-channel limit. Still curious if anyone has experienced the stuttery metronome sounds like I described.
Thanks!
James
Hi James,
First of all, please keep in mind that what I wrote was not directly about the metronome. It was just that instabilities occurred, which I could imagine to cause such an effect. In addition, the metronome effect described by you has never occurred with me, which is why I would rather assign this to the Dante solution.
The Dante AVIO interfaces are actually quite expensive compared to the number of channels they provide. However, there are also much more powerful interfaces, e.g.: https://rme-audio.de/digiface-dante.html. You also have to take into account that this interface may achieve lower latencies than other Dante interfaces because of the special implementation of the USB interface based on FPGAs. Unfortunately, the small box costs about 1,300€, which is cheap compared to the number of channels provided. Nevertheless, the costs were the reason for me to choose a “classic” solution in the end.
Regards, Volker