I continue to have sound artifacts. The do not have to do with cubase or my moxf8 keyboard, since the glitches present themselves even when the aforemetioned are turned off (i.e. during simple playback). I hear sound “pops” every few seconds. When I play moxf at the cubase (using kontakt) the are even note drop outs, while playing just a few notes.
In Cubase, CPU and disk do not display strange readings when the artifacts appear.
Τhis problem appeared after a recent pc format.
Also, every a few hours or less, the sound gets completely blury and I have to de-select ur-rt2 and re-select it in order for the sound to return to normal.
It sounds like something running in the background may be interfering or interrupting the driver which causes it to need to be reset (by unplugging the UR and plugging it back in.)
Try turning off any Anti-Virus (just for troubleshooting). Look for programs that run in the background. There are many that check for updates (such as Acrobat, but these functions can be turned off). Some “pre-load” to start up quicker. Some watch for devices to be plugged in. If it’s every few hours, it could be an auto file backup feature or e-mail check.
Also, since the reformat, have you adjusted the latency settings for the UR?
Latency is set to 128 samples (in cubase), but the problem happens even when cubase (and the midi keyboard) are turned off. I tried turning off the antivirus but didn’t help. Apart from the need to restart the ur, a more persistent problem is the sound pops I get every few second, again, even at a simple playback (e.g. at media player). To my knowledge, there is no difference to my windows configuration now and before the format. I have the same programs, configured in the same way (with as few programs running in the background as possible). Only difference is I now have Norton antivirus. Before I had none (silly me).
Personally, I would be looking pretty hard at Norton. It is the one thing that changed and we know AV programs are constantly scanning. I know you said you turned it off but was it REALLY turned off? For example, maybe the Firewall was disabled but AV was still scanning. If nothing improves, try completely uninstalling Norton just to see if it helps.
Found it! It was not the antivirus but AMD external event and user experience modules. I had installed a helper/monitor program of AMD. It seems it was overworking itself… Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!