Hello everyone, it’s been a busy summer for me! This is basically an “informative” post (as none of these issues are really any more than an annoyance).
I just updated to GP 2.4.0, so I tried the new audio engine restart feature (double click on panic) and I experienced a couple odd things:
#1 - I got a bunch of “static” noise with the output. Not totally garbled, (I can still hear the synth sounds) just very “static” like. I double clicked it again, and it went back to normal. This doesn’t happen every time, it seems to be random.
#2 - I lost all Widget functionality. My pedals, buttons, mod wheel, etc. stop working. I can still play notes, and the sustain pedal still works, and the Global MIDI assignments still work, but no widgets. Reloading the Rackspace by switching to another Rackspace, and back again, brings the Widget functionality back.
I’m running Win 7 64 bit, with Intel Quad core, 8GB ram, and using ASIO4ALL. My audio settings are 44100, 512 samples, 11.6ms.
I’ve also been experiencing totally garbled audio, randomly, on initial system startup. (This is NOT new to my recent update to 2.4.0) This can happen when I exit and restart GP, or starting GP after a cold boot. Again, randomly, and never twice in a row (I think). It can happen after loading a large Gig file, OR after just importing a single Rackspace (with just a Kontakt piano) into an empty Gig file.
Does anyone else experience this? Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks much.
This shouldn’t be happening. You don’t mention what audio interface you’re using. I’m wondering if there’s a problem with that interface or with its drivers. I’m completely baffled as to why your widgets would stop responding to MIDI as well. This feels much more like an underlying problem with your windows system, possibly even hardware related.
I’m using system board sound from an ASRock H170 motherboard (Intel CPU), into a DI. Also, I remember the widget problem happening in the past (before 2.4.0) whenever I would change the audio settings. I might be using an older version of ASIO4ALL, so I’ll check that. I have one of my rehearsal systems (Biostar system board with AMD CPU) currently at home, so I’ll experiment with that one today and see if it does the same thing.
These occurrences have NEVER happened during a performance. So they’re NOT really problematic for me at all. I’m just always interested in figuring out what’s going on, and gain a better understanding of GP.
Thanks David.
Ah, you might want to try using an external audio interface designed for Pro applications. The drivers for system board audio cards are very unlikely to be optimized nor particularly solid and are generally only useful for Skype calls and playing MP3 files
I was using an Allen & Heath ZEDi-10FX (with their drivers), but it was causing my CPU usage to go too high (another mystery).
Also, as a side note, I found ASIO4ALL to actually work BETTER with the ZEDi mixer, than the A&H drivers. I think I got better latency and less crackling, using ASIO4ALL with the ZEDi interface.
(and I think I WAS using the A&H drivers with the ZEDi, when I first experienced the widget “oddity”)
I tested for the “widgets (temporarily) loosing MIDI assignment” issue on a backup computer (Biostar/AMD) running GP 2.3.0, and confirmed that the widgets do loose their MIDI assignments, whenever an audio reset is done, until the rack is reloaded (by moving to another rackspace, or just reloading the file).
I also made it happen again on the GP 2.4.0 system. This time I confirmed that MIDI CCs where getting through to GP, using the MIDI monitor screen. Also, the new widget assignment screen showed there were no assigned widgets after an audio reset (the widgets were listed again on that screen again AFTER reloading a rackspace). The global MIDI assignments are unaffected, and always show on the new screen.
So, it’s not a big problem, because the work around is to just reload the rackspace, but I do believe the bug is in GP.
Also, I do believe the random garbled audio problem is NOT caused by GP. I think you’re right David, in that it’s a problem with the system board audio. Even though that’s not really a big problem either, I’ll continue to look for a solution.
Thanks for all your attention and suggestions.
@mrbeverage - thanks for the report. The widgets not reacting after the audio reset is indeed a bug. We’ll definitely fix that as soon as we can.