Cubase LE4 choppy sound [SOLVED]

Cubase
1

Hi everyone,

I am new to this forum and I have a big problem with my Cubase LE4.
I have a bass pedal Zoom B2.1u and use it via an USB interface with my laptop. I have installed the newest ASIO drivers for my bass pedal. The problem starts when I try to play the recorded sound of my bass guitar. After some time of playback (say 30-45 sec.) the sound gets sort of choked up. I can hear some clicks/chops/noises and after few seconds it disappears. It comes back periodically after the same time (30-45s again). Sometimes the problem appears even during the recording and it suddenly turns off the recording with only the playback still going.

The problem is, that if I try to put the original song on top of my recording (to make a song cover) the timing of my playing is changed because of that sound interferences and I am not able to fix the synchronisation. The beginning of the song is ok, but only till the first interference, then it’s all messed up.

I tried changing the buffer sizes from 64 up to 2048, setting different sample rates, installing different ASIO drivers (ASIO4ALL) but none of these helped. I ran out of ideas what might be causing this irritating problem.
If anyone has any clues what else I could do, please help me.

This is all my hardware that I use:

Dell Inspiron N5110
CPU: i5-2410M 2.30 GHz (turbo boost up to 2.8 GHz)
RAM: 4 GB
GPU: Nvidia GT 525M + Intel HD Graphics 3000
HDD: 500 GB 5400 RPM

Everything runs on Windows 7 x64 (Home Premium)
I set the latency of the ASIO driver to 20ms (max), since I do not need the recording to be perfectly aligned (I always do it manually).
Also, trying to record in different audio software (Audacity) I have the same exact problem.

2

If you haven’t yet, I would suggest running this utility …

http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml

It might give you some clues about possible background activity causing interruptions.

Laptops are known to be somewhat finicky if certain things aren’t disabled. Wi-Fi, automatic Windows/antivirus updates, system sounds, etc.

3

Thank you for your reply.
I did run this program before, but it turns out that for too short period of time since at first it showed that my machine is ok for real time audio streaming.
I ran this program once again but for a little bit longer, and surprisingly it showed some spikes of latency and an information, that some other devices might be causing the interference. I used the device manager to disable the Wi-Fi and checked again. This time there were no spikes and it turns out my Wi-Fi card was the cause of problem.

You really helped me. I could not solve this problem for the past few years.
Thanks a lot for that!

4

Good deal! :sunglasses: