Fast Track Pro high causing lag and distortion in Ableton

[Marsh Mal]

Ok, so this probably seems like your typical crackling distortion thread. But based on my research I don't think this is very typical. So here goes.

Basically I have about 15 tracks set up on Ableton each with tons of plugins for whatever effects/sounds I need. The issue is occurring not when I play a single track, but rather when I play the whole entire composed song. At points where multiple layers are playing all at once and cpu intensive plugins start to overlap I get a significant amount of crackling/distortion. Typically this happens around a 80% audio/engine cpu load in ableton. The interesting thing about this is if I pump up the buffer to 1024 the distortion still occurs, but only for a few (3-4 ) seconds when I hit play to play the song somewhere in the middle, and then it goes away. Then again if the song hits a part where the cpu load goes up to 90% then i get more crackling and distortion at which point id have to set the buffer to 2048 or higher. And then still I would get distortion and crackling for a few (3-4) seconds when I hit play somewhere in the middle of the song where many layers are playing. My issue with this is i originally bought the fast track pro as an external sound card supplement to my computers weak, native sound card. I was under the impression that it would be more powerful and able to keep up with the laptops audio processing needs (since the laptop is very powerful).

To test this theory. I basically turned the m-audio/asio driver off in Ableton and set up the MME/Directx audio driver which runs the audio through the lap top. And much to my surprise the crackling and distortion at the beginning of tracks when at a high ableton audio engine load of (80%-95%) was NON-EXISTENT. There was no crackling and distortion. And the buffer was set to 256. Much lower than my m-audio buffer needs to be set on average to run things smoothly in ableton.

What I'm wondering is why can my MME/Direct-x driver runs significantly faster and more smoothly than my m-audio sound card? What is causing this? Because I feel a little in dark here, as i bought the m-audio fast track pro to supplement my "assumingly weak" computer sound card. I'm very frustrated because theres a point in my music that I've come to were im running 5-10 different reverbs on send tracks which alone are cpu intensive and 5-10 different sythesizers in ableton, some of which tend to be cpu intensive along with tons of plugins for various effects. The issue with this is that my laptops actual cpu load when Ableton's 'audio engine' is at 80-100%, will typically hover around 40% cpu usage. So obviously my computers processor is powerful enough, so the only problem at this point logically seems to be the sound card.


Ableton Settings (Under Audio Tab of Preferences) when problem exists with M-audio Fast Track Pro

Driver Type: Asio
Audio Device: M-Audio USB Asio
Buffer Size: 2048 and lower when audio engine load is at 80% and up


Anyway, I hope this is enough information to get me some sort of solution or at least headed in the right direction. I've also installed the latest fast track drivers from the m-audio website, this did not fix anything. I even tried installing an older driver for the device, this just made it worse. Thanks in advance for your help!

[Disco Nutter]

Download asio4all and try with that! I think that card is more stable with these drivers than with its original ones.