well, I haven’t seen the “audio drop out” or “too many tracks” error messages for a few days, but the actual audible drop-outs have gotten much worse. I start playback on a project, it plays for 10 seconds or so, then starts cutting out every second or two. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling my ASIO driver. No change. Virus scan, nothing. I tried opening the same project in Cubase 6 (I never had this problem prior to 8.5). Nope, same thing happens.
I tried deleting all tracks I’m not using (an instance of Addictive Drums I decided not to use, and some muted tracks containing unused takes), and saving to a new filename. No joy.
I used DriverBlaster a few weeks ago to update all my drivers. That seemed to speed my computer up a little overall, and seemed to help this problem a little, but then it came back. Maybe one of the “old” drivers should have been left alone?
I also disabled every startup program I thought I could do without (though some I KNOW I don’t want keep reinstalling themselves, such as AdobeReaderUpdater). I wonder if I disabled something important?
LatencyMon shows the driver with the highest ISR times is my ASIO driver (M-Audio Delta 1010), but it still shows it well within safe parameters. Moreover, last time this happened LatencyMon gave me the “Your system seems to have difficulty handling real-time audio…” warning within a minute or two of running, now it continues to say “Your system appears to be suitable…”, even while I’m hearing the continuous dropouts.
LatencyMon DOES indicate a lot of “hard pagefaults” with high resolution times, almost entirely attributed to msmpeng (Microsoft Security Essentials). Turning off MSE’s “realtime protection” has no effect. I’ve long suspected this to be a source of occasional problems (it tends to hog system resources from time to time, especially on boot-up), but never like this. Maybe it’s time to switch to a different antivirus.
(… took a coffee break, came back a half-hour later…)
Suddenly now the dropouts only happen every 3 or 4 minutes or so. It’s almost functional like this. But not quite.
Any suggestions are appreciated.