MIDI controller problem

S

sugarpie

New member
Hi all,

This may have been covered so forgive me if I am going over old ground. If there is a relevant thread someone can point me to it, cheers
OK so basically the problem is varying degrees of clicking when I use my MIDI controller for VSTIs. Now I'll list my gear -
Computer is a bitzer - basic specs are
HP Compaq 8000 Elite CMT PC
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8600 @ 3.33GHz, 3333 Mhz, 2 Core(s)
16gb RAM
M-Audio Profire 2626 sound card(firewire)

I mainly use Reaper as a DAW but I use others too - Mixcraft, Reason, FL Studio, Sequoia - but the same problem exists in all of them. I use a Roland D50 keyboard as a MIDI controller and for most VSTIs it works fine. But certain ones have an annoying "click" when playing notes, the worst one I think is Nexus but also some Arturia plugins do it too. I did a lot of research about this and tried different things and the end result is that there seems to be something happening between the D50 and the sound card on certain VSTIs. I managed to get rid of the clicks in FL Studio because I use their ASIO drivers so I thought it was that but I tried the FL Studio ASIO drivers in Reaper and the problem persisted. Then I tried an old Nano pad for drums and voila!! No clicks!! But of course I can't use a Nano pad for keyboard parts(it was bad enough for drums). So I tried a different MIDI to USB cable with the D50 but the same problem exists. I tried different MIDI settings on both the D50 and the computer - no joy there either. It's frustrating because I like my studio the way it is and everything works well except for this annoying glitch. I thought it could be fixed with some settings tweaks but I've done all I can think of there. I can't afford to try new controllers and cables and things so I'm hoping there might be a magical fix for my system. Any ideas would be greatly received, thanks
 
You can try lowering the buffer time in LMMS to as low as you can manage and see if that helps. This should decrease latency at the cost of increased CPU Kodi nox demand.
 
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I think it would be the other way around?
If the clicking is coming from the computer struggling to keep up then you'd want to increase the buffer settings in your DAW.
This would result in lowering the load on CPU, but with the cost of increasing latency.

It's less common to need to, these days, but with older hardware it was pretty common to record with a low buffer setting, for low latency, and mix with a high buffer setting for performance.
When you were really hitting the limits and low-buffer recording wasn't possible anymore, the next step was to start bouncing and/or freezing tracks, to let you get the recording with low latency, then undo all that stuff for mixing again.

An E8600 is getting on a bit, these days. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the issue, but you should be able to pull up a CPU usage monitor to confirm.
 
You need to not worry about the D50 - it's not the cause. MIDI doesn't have any capability in what happens after the data is in the computer. MIDI errors can of course happen - but they're notes stuck on, random quietly played ones being full blast, or even bizarre timing with fast runs slowing down. Jerky pitchbend, weird modulation jumps. It's after the DAW in your chain, not before. Always worth looking at the performance monitor - just in case some crazy process is running sapping the processors ability to move audio around. Your processor isn't really a spec problem and you have plenty of RAM, so one question - has it always been this way, or has it just started. I was always a lover of firewire - still am, to be honest, but every windows upgrade ignores it, so I'd def check with M-Audio for driver tweaks.

Updating your audio drivers is always a good move.
 
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