@terrybritton
Terry… needing some guidance on how to troubleshoot a Cantable/VST - Voicemeeter issue.
Here’s the background from an earlier post…
Due to a family issue, I hadn’t used my keyboard studio for several months. Just got back to using it this week, but I’m noticing an odd problem and need some help to troubleshoot the cause.
When using Cantabile3 Solo on a Win7 PC 64-bit, all my VST’s are making a faint but noticeable “bip” sound about every 1.5 sec. As an example, for the GSI VB3 VST, I hear the “bip” no matter what key I press, but If I get out of Cantabile and run the standalone .exe version of VB3, there is no “bip”. I checked other VSt’s I use in Cantabile (Kontact5, Z3TA synth, Sampletank3) and get the same “bip” sound. Oddly, although most any key pressed will make a tone and have the “bip” sound, for some reason the F key on my iRig mini keyboard does not make the “bip”.
I thought it might be related to the metronome, so made sure that was shut off.
I use ASIO4ALL as the Audio Engine, and Voicemeeter Banana to enable use of Sonar Platinum and Band-In-A-Box to all run with Cantabile. Audio set at 44,100.
I have narrowed the problem down to some issue using Voicemeeter, which has been a great solution for running both Sonar and Band-in-the-Box with the same Cantabile setup. Here is a screen print of the VMeeter setup (not sure how to embed the screenprint).
I’m not certain at all. I will say that I do not know why you use ASIO4ALL as the audio engine with Voicemeeter, since Voicemeeter itself contains its own ASIO drivers. ASIO4ALL, like Voicemeeter, is actually only an ASIO “Front-End” for Windows’ WDM audio system. (Which is a compliment to Windows WDM, but is not on the same par as an ASIO driver written expressly for a piece of hardware.)
288 as a buffer size is quite low for such a WDM-based setup. I do fine every single day with 512. Give that a try and play with your fingers more than with your ears if the latency is bothering you.
Even a cheap Focusrite 2i2 would give you a better ASIO driver for Voicemeeter to latch onto as its A1 device than ASIO4ALL ever will or could. So, you may have to do some bit of upgrading there. That said, Voicemeeter’s own ASIO drivers are pretty stable even if sometimes you have to click Cantabile’s green “power switch” a couple times once in a while to establish a solid sync.
The April Windows 10 update also did include an important fix to a longstanding issue that affected Windows’ ability to do realtime audio processing without glitching every so often, so if you haven’t done that update, it might help.
Once in a while, changing the engine mode from Normal to Swift clears up some matters - it is worth a try. But my first impression is that the double-ganging of two ASIO-to-WDM interfaces is perhaps asking for some trouble.
Thanks Terry… I will take some time later this week to play around with some changes.
Your comment about using ASIO4ALL with VMeeter… What should I use as the Audio engine within Cantabile if not ASIO4All? Should (or can) I set the Cantabile audio option to a VMeeter ASIO option, for which, if I recall, provides three VMeeter ASIO options to use.
Also in one of your past posts, you suggested that when starting up several music applications on the PC, to start Cantabile as the last application. Since I typically open Sonar, Band-in-a-Box, and Cantabile… is opening Cantabile last using Voicemeeter the best approach?
Yes, only use Voicemeeter’s ASIO-to-WDM feature if you are using Voicemeeter. There is no benefit to be had using both, as they perform the same task. (That is, they both present the Windows WDM audio subsystem as ASIO to programs that can use or require ASIO.)
If you do purchase a hardware USB ASIO interface, then set the A1 setting in Voicemeeter to point to that and its driver will control the buffer size of Voicemeeter. You can still use Voicemeeter’s ASIO and ASIO Inserts features even with that use-case.
The reason I open Cantabile last is for reasons of sync. Cantabile has that nice “power switch” with which one can toggle the audio engine on and off again if the sync is not immediate (which you’d know because it would be terribly garbled and distorted). This is true especially when using Voicemeeter on my computers, as the sync sometimes does not “grab” the first time.
