Maschine SW: Audio Dropouts, crackling, popping regardless of project size or buffer settings

if you have all those basic areas ticked off(covered in video).... and still having issues, consider looking at a program called snappy driver installer..
i dont know if you are familiar with it or not... but essentially it allows you both to back up your drivers... but more importantly install specific drivers for testing purposes... and it will allow you to choose and install drivers that relate to the vendor id... etc etc

i realise you update regularly, and you would naturally assume that when updates occur they will improve your system performance.... or fix a vulnerability, and as such we trust a updating process to be flawless...
the reality of course is quite different...

i usually take the approach... if it aint broke, dont try fix it.....
however in this particular instance its broke...
seriously though take a look at snappy driver installer, the drivers are categorised so you dont have to download a multitude of video library drivers... when all you may want to test is the internal audio driver... or whatever driver type you need to look at....
also be mindful of driver changes as it can sometimes result in BSOD's and other problem.. so be cautious and mindful of how many things you install and uninstall during the process.. all the while testing to see if the issue is resolved or not, before doing another change.

 

btw did you know Dell .... is facing a class action lawsuit? according to "gamers nexus" channel on youtube this is the case.... think the issue surrounds the same laptop you have?? *shrugs

 

Yeah, that has nothing to do with perf, it has to do with Dell promising upgradability in these laptops, which is turning out that they aren't because the tech has changed with video cards to the point where it's not cost affective to manufacture versions that will fit into the A51 motherboard.

 

I just got into Maschine (starting with the M+ and then using it in controller mode with the software) about 6 or so months ago. The Maschine software has had issues the whole time (on both of my systems). Narrowing down here, it's just when I add Arturia plugins, and only in Maschine. Cakewalk performs without flaw.

 

I appreciate the advice, already gone through all of this as said before and I am very mindful about what I choose to update and when. I'm done messing around with this. Someday I'll get around to flattening and reinstalling Windows and everything to see if that makes a difference, but for now I just can't use Arturia plugins in Maschine, because Maschine can't deal with something that is going on across all those plugins. Like I said, NI plugins and even Omnisphere don't have this issue and ALL plugins work without flaw in Cakewalk..... So.... Maschine + Arturia on my systems = no bueno.

 

are you using the same ASIO drivers for both Cakewalk and Maschine?

 

Yes, and I have tried all combinations of drivers (ASIO native, WASAPI, ASIO4All, etc.) and buffer, bit rates.

 

Hm ... I had similar behavior in the past where the Audio would crackle
But since I had another issue where if I turned my Maschine MK3 off windows would crash
So I disabled the Audio Interface of my Maschine MK3 (Both Outputs and input) in the windows configuration
this coincidentally also solved the Crackling issue

Might be some issue within windows when having multiple audio interfaces active
At least it's the only thing I can think off that might help you resolve the issue

 

hey, just curious, did you manage to identify the issue with this one?

 

Nope. There are a few consistent behaviors that seem to cause this. I have projects that started as M+ standalone projects and when I start adding other synths in the Maschine desktop software, it crumbles. Also, more recently I had a project that consisted of a few Arturia plugins, was working fine, virtually no CPU load, then I added a "group" (i.e. NI sampled drumkit), and it started in with the dropouts. If I mute that group, everything back to normal.

I upgraded my main studio machine to an 11th gen i9 CPU, 64gb Ram and M.2 NVMe drive (single 2tb drive) and reinstalled everything on this new drive (system drive, default install locations), and on the projects that would previously dropout/CPU spike, they still have the issue but the CPU can deal with it better, meaning, you'll see it spike but it never goes over that threshold where it just drops out.

Honestly, I chalk all of this up to poor optimization within the Maschine software, what else could it be at this point? As said a few times before, Ableton and Cakewalk have zero issues with TONs and TONs of plugins all at once (I have some projects with 40+ plugins, and CPU usage never goes above ~60%), where Machine will sometimes fall over with just a few.

 

Totally agree with your last comment - I also think it's all about a poor software design. I've been experiencing this kind of issues with Maschine from day one (btw, no Arturia plugins here.).

Other DAWs (Pro Tools, Reason, Live) don't show *any* of these.

I love Maschine, but it's useless in a live situation and a pain in the studio.

I'm just sitting here waiting for NI to restart the whole thing from scratch. In the meanwhile, I stopped buying anything from them because, what would be the point?

 

Yep, I am surprised more people don't complain about this. I guess it's just that most people just deal with it and don't reach out for help.

I still use all the NI software (there's a lot of great stuff in K13), I've managed to get more consistent performance by upgrading to the fastest Win10 system you can get (12th gen i9, 64gb ram, NVME M.2 drives, etc, etc.) Although I still do get some popping from time to time in Maschine even with the CPU not maxing out. It really seems to just be a conditional mix of certain plugins, but not consistently.

I typically will start an idea in Maschine and once it gets to the arrangement stage (song mode), if not having any issues I will open the project in the Maschine VST plugin in Cakewalk and continue from there. Or if having dropout issues, I will dump all the stems and bring them into Cakewalk to finish. But it's certainly a pain when you hit that lethal combination. I too would not use Machine for live applications...

I love the Maschine workflow for composing a lot of my music, they just really need to work on performance and stability. You'd think after all these years they would have addressed this, but they still don't actually admit there are performance issues.

It's a shame, as I have invested thousands into NI at this point.