Since I updated my PC to Windows 10 (possibly not the best decision I ever made), I’ve been getting strange audio pops and stutters when I play my XF7 into Cubase 8.5 Pro. The problem is intermittent and difficult to reproduce, but I have the impression that it may be related to my use of the sustain pedal.

I have a Yamaha FC3 sustain pedal, and I use it with “half damper” enabled on the XF7. I’ve noticed that when I’m “riding the pedal,” it generates a ton of MIDI control messages. I’m wondering if somehow the amount of control data is overloading the FW channel to/from Cubase.

In particular, I’m wondering if there’s a way to tell the XF7 to “throttle” the control data and send (for example) no more than 10 sustain control messages per second down the FW connection to Cubase.

I downloaded Resplendence LatencyMon. It shows no problem except for occasional page faults. But on one of my test runs, I was getting the clicks and pops before LatencyMon showed any page faults, so that may not be the source of my problem.

My guess about the sustain pedal aside, if anyone has had similar problems with Windows 10 and figured out how to fix them, I’d love to hear about it.

It sounds much more like an audio or sample streaming/buffer size problem to me.

Can you tell us a bit more about the set up and aim?

Are you playing only stock XF voices back through the FW16E? 

It might well be some kind of audio buffer settings or a problem with the disk the samples are stored on.

If you’ve recently had a new install, it could well be that some hardware settings may have changed.

Hard to tell at the moment.

Michael Trigoboff - 08 January 2016 11:19 PM

Since I updated my PC to Windows 10 (possibly not the best decision I ever made),[...]

The only OS I’m aware of that hasn’t had birth pangs is one that was stillborn.

Anyone having trouble with Windows 9?

Click thumbnail to see full-size image

philwoodmusic - 09 January 2016 01:18 PM

It sounds much more like an audio or sample streaming/buffer size problem to me.

Can you tell us a bit more about the set up and aim?

Are you playing only stock XF voices back through the FW16E?

My PC, now running Windows 10, has an Intel Core i7 3GHz CPU and 16 GB of RAM. The C: drive (the only drive on the machine) is an Intel 480 GB SSD. It’s a fast machine.

You can see a picture of my XF7 setup here.

I am now running Cubase 8.5 Pro. The project has 2 tracks: a MIDI track set to a stock voice, Full Tine (PR1 52 (D-04)), and an audio track containing the original Grateful Dead song. The point of this all is to help me learn how to play the song.

The song, Estimated Prophet, is in 7/4 time. I have the project set up so that I can play along with the song at any tempo I choose. I have used very slow tempos to figure out some tricky parts of the song, and I’m currently learning to play along with it at about 2/3 of the original tempo.

I get the audio glitches while I’m playing along. I usually have the XF VST Editor set to MIDI “Rec on PC” and FW Monitor set to “With PC” while I’m doing this. Occasionally I record what I’ve played in the MIDI track so I can listen and see how I did.

I’ve uploaded a zip file of the project folder in case anyone would like to take a look. It’s possible that I have some tweaky little setting that I don’t understand yet set the wrong way. It would be wonderful if that were the case and someone could point it out to me.

You can download the zip file from here.

Thanks for providing all that info, that’s great.

Using the sustain pedal WAS the classic choke point back in day when the first big multi sampled libraries came out and computer systems weren’t anywhere near as fast as they are now. Sustained samples are longer and bigger in file size and often involved additional samples which would put strain on the various systems at the time, especially if you’ve got some wide and fully flavored chords going on, but this is NOW and you’re only using stock voices on the Motif XF!

Also, I really can’t see it being sustain pedal data. 

I don’t have Cubase installed (ever), so I can’t look at your project, but there are a couple of things that you could look at which may or may not help.  This is all from my hazy memory of Cubase, too.

First off, there’s a meter you can pull up in Cubase and the terminology may have changed for it over time, but it was always called something very similar to a ‘VST performance meter’.

If you can pull that up and monitor it whilst you are recreating the problem, it might possibly point you towards the editor being the evil knot of an issue you’ve found. 

What you’re looking for in a ‘healthy set up’ with your particular project, is the meter sitting very low and not doing a whole lot (providing that the editor is your only VSTi running at the time).  But, If the meter does seem to be high or spiking abnormally, then your problem could well be editor related.

Some settings you could look at:

Go to ‘Yamaha Steinberg FW’ in control panel on your PC.

Pull that up, make sure you are looking at the ‘General’ tab. 

Make a note of your current buffer size settings, then experiment with something higher or lower.  See if that helps.  I would also imagine that 256 is the default setting there.

Then in Cubase go to Devices > Device Setup.

You will see “Yamaha Steinberg FW ASIO” under ‘VST Audio System’.  Adjacent to that you will see ‘Advanced options’ with ‘set to defaults’.  Press that to make sure you are set on the defaults.

You will also see a reset button further down, try pressing it, too.

If none of that helps, then you may well have discovered a new stability issue.

Even though I would not suggest Windows 10’s use for any audio intensive tasks (yet), Win10 may not be the problem… or better said I would suggest looking at any services running in the background of your CPU.  If even blue tooth is just enabled, it’s service polling might be just enough to make your CPU glitch during audio playback.  This might be common knowledge to you already, but my 2 cents says “make sure you are running a ‘bleached-white’ bare-bones system to eliminate any possibility of a system being overtaxed and producing audible glitches.  Screen-savers, programs that are constantly asking their home planet if they are “up-to-date”, even spyware and anti-fungal programs make playing audio back fluently not very easy.  Hope that helps.

philwoodmusic - 10 January 2016 01:50 PM

If none of that helps, then you may well have discovered a new stability issue.

Very good suggestions. Thanks!

I tried all of them, but none of them helped. In particular, that performance monitor you mentioned showed consistent very low load levels.

But then, searching around the Internet, I got really lucky and ran into this. And it turns out that my motherboard has the problematic VIA FireWire chipset.

So I ordered the FireWire PCI board the author mentioned. It’s arriving tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

Michael Trigoboff - 11 January 2016 06:26 PM

But then, searching around the Internet, I got really lucky and ran into this. And it turns out that my motherboard has the problematic VIA FireWire chipset.

So I ordered the FireWire PCI board the author mentioned. It’s arriving tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

We’ve been suggesting FW ports that use a TI chipset for a long time.

http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/454
Chipset:  Texas Instruments XIO2213

However, I don’t know if this is still applicable…
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/460158/
...but using the YSFW UTILITY as suggested by Bad_Mister apparently solved FW audio glitches in some cases.

5pinDIN - 11 January 2016 08:46 PM

However, I don’t know if this is still applicable…
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/460158/
...but using the YSFW UTILITY as suggested by Bad_Mister apparently solved FW audio glitches in some cases.

I used the YSFW Utility and set the FW buffer to maximum size, and it may have solved the problem. No glitches have occurred so far since I did this. Since it’s an intermittent problem, I’ll give it about a week, and if the problem stays gone, I’ll return the FW card to Amazon unopened.

Thanks for pointing me to that thread.

Michael Trigoboff - 12 January 2016 04:18 AM

I used tha YSFW Utility and set the FW buffer to maximum size, and it may have solved the problem. No glitches have occurred so far since I did this. Since it’s an intermittent problem, I’ll give it about a week, and if the problem stays gone, I’ll return the FW card to Amazon unopened.

Thanks for pointing me to that thread.

You’re welcome, I hope that did the trick. Please keep us posted.

What’s the tradeoff with regard to the IEEE1394 buffer size setting that the utility sets? I’ve got 16 GB of RAM in my PC, so presumably memory usage is not a problem. Are there any disadvantages to having a large buffer?

It’s possible for latency to become an issue if buffers are excessively large. It’s good practice for buffer size to be just large enough to eliminate glitches, and no larger. Run the latency monitor if you’re concerned, although if it’s not audible it shouldn’t matter.