Audition 2 and ASIO - problems

After getting through the little hiccup of installation, I find the way in which Audition re-assigns its audio drivers based on session parameters to be a bit "counterintuitive."

I will explain.

Audition boots up to its sample Audition Theme - the audio outputs are not correctly setup for my situation, and Audition is using a directx asio driver "Audition Windows Sound" rather than my Layla 3G's ASIO drivers (I assume for default hardware compatibility)

Not a problem - I can switch to my "ASIO Echo PCI" driver in the audio hardware tab, assign my inputs and outputs to what I want, and now everything works fine...that is, until I reload the audition theme session, which in turn switches the drivers back to the "Audition Windows Sound", which means I will have to setup the drivers all over again to play back the session.

My feeling is that the audio driver settings should be global (I believe they were in 1.5, which, of course, does not utilise ASIO), and not session based, like they seem to be in 2.0.

My feeling is that the audio driver settings should be global (I believe they were in 1.5, which, of course, does not utilise ASIO), and not session based, like they seem to be in 2.0.

It's true - but the fix is easy. Just resave the session with the ASIO drivers selected. You'll get a warning telling you that the change will be saved in the ses file.

The theme is set up to use whatever the Windows default is on your PC - this is the only thing you can do to ensure that it will play on all machines without an individual setting up procedure at the outset.

Whether this method of setting up the hardware actually has any options as far as the developers are concerned, I'm not sure - but personally I don't have any difficulties with this once whatever session it is has been saved correctly.

It is definitely only minor - but since the Audition theme is read-only, it is a bit of a hassle, and Audition uses whatever drivers from the last session as its default drivers too.

So if I load the Audition theme as it is, then create a new session, ill again have to change the drivers back.  (it is simple enough to save my own session with my ASIO setup, then load that whenever I want to create a new session, I am just pointing out what I see Audition doing)

I too have no idea why they would do session-based driver selection, because loading a session made on a different hardware setup will most likely need to have its outputs and/or inputs rerouted anyway to suit a current setup.  

It seems that session-based driver selection is an unnecessary second step.


Audition 2 also hates my sessions that I have created with 1.5.  I open up a 1.5 multitrack session, and playback is garbled horribly (sounding distorted and odd, i suspect it is playing at a wrong sample rate), but each track plays perfectly fine in edit view.  Ill have to troubleshoot to see whats going on there.

While we're talking drivers, I'll throw in that here the Asio4All drivers give me better metering (smoother) than the Echo Mia Midi drivers did.

Nice thing is that it's pretty quick to chop and change according to circumstances.

that is very odd - i havent had good run-ins with asio4all before (although I havent tried it on my Layla 3G).  AFAIK asio4all is an ASIO wrapper for hardware that only supports WDM, so i'd think that it would introduce more latency than using a direct ASIO hardware driver.

I have had no latency problems monitoring or recording using Sonar 4, and am figuring out how to monitor my inputs realtime in audition.  If someone can assist me where the option to change the Audition Mix Monitoring outputs, that would surely help.  I am too stubborn to read the manual  

It is definitely only minor - but since the Audition theme is read-only, it is a bit of a hassle, and Audition uses whatever drivers from the last session as its default drivers too.

It's onl read-only because it's come from the CD, presumably? If you have the session on your HD now, you should be able to alter this.

So if I load the Audition theme as it is, then create a new session, ill again have to change the drivers back.

Not if you've done what I suggested to the files...

I too have no idea why they would do session-based driver selection, because loading a session made on a different hardware setup will most likely need to have its outputs and/or inputs rerouted anyway to suit a current setup.

That's not actually an argument one way or another, really...

Audition 2 also hates my sessions that I have created with 1.5.  I open up a 1.5 multitrack session, and playback is garbled horribly (sounding distorted and odd, i suspect it is playing at a wrong sample rate), but each track plays perfectly fine in edit view.  Ill have to troubleshoot to see whats going on there.

If you are not too stubborn to read it(!), have a look at the sticky about importing 1.5 sessions - the fix for the distortion is to do what I suggest in that thread. Why a session would play at the wrong sample rate I have no idea - I've never had that happen, and I've imported quite a few sessions now.

Not if you've done what I suggested to the files...

(it is simple enough to save my own session with my ASIO setup, then load that whenever I want to create a new session, I am just pointing out what I see Audition doing)

Yes, I do know that I can make a default session as a workaround (I use my own sessions anyway, I am just commenting that I believe Audition should let the user set default audio drivers, instead of reading from the sessions themselves)

I too have no idea why they would do session-based driver selection, because loading a session made on a different hardware setup will most likely need to have its outputs and/or inputs rerouted anyway to suit a current setup.

That's not actually an argument one way or another, really...

I think it is.  

In Audition 1.5, when opening a session that had different hardware settings, Audition routed the channels to the current defined global audio inputs/outputs.  If it didn't do it correctly for my setup, Id change the inputs or outputs in the session.

In Audition 2.0, when opening a session that has different hardware settings, Audition switches the audio driver, then goes about routing the channels to the defined inputs and outputs in the driver saved by the session.  So not only do I have to change the inputs and outputs of the session, I would have to first switch drivers and remap the inputs/outputs of the driver itself.

Audition 2 also hates my sessions that I have created with 1.5.  I open up a 1.5 multitrack session, and playback is garbled horribly (sounding distorted and odd, i suspect it is playing at a wrong sample rate), but each track plays perfectly fine in edit view.  Ill have to troubleshoot to see whats going on there.

If you are not too stubborn to read it(!), have a look at the sticky about importing 1.5 sessions - the fix for the distortion is to do what I suggest in that thread. Why a session would play at the wrong sample rate I have no idea - I've never had that happen, and I've imported quite a few sessions now.

Well, the distortion is the least of my problems, its the stretchy and weird sounds that I will be troubleshooting first, when i get around to it.  

At the moment I am having way too much fun playing with realtime monitoring and effects  

Have you sorted out the monitoring routing and options?  It's pretty intuitive I'd say but I guess we could try to find a different way of explaining it from the manual if you like!  

Have you sorted out the monitoring routing and options?  It's pretty intuitive I'd say but I guess we could try to find a different way of explaining it from the manual if you like!  

I figured out the monitor routing pretty easily, just took me a couple minutes  

Now if I could get my ASIO latency lower than 256 samples without tiny pops.   Maybe ill need to try that ASIO4ALL software..

I too have no idea why they would do session-based driver selection, because loading a session made on a different hardware setup will most likely need to have its outputs and/or inputs rerouted anyway to suit a current setup.  

It seems that session-based driver selection is an unnecessary second step.

This strikes me as a possible cause of serious problems for users where complete sessions might be recorded in, say, a studio, then moved to a laptop or editing suite with totally different hardware.

But under those circumstances, you're going to have to reconfigure the i/o anyway.

Currently I've not got an installation on my laptop to check exactly what happens though.

If the session doesn't have the driver selection within it, it might not be able to make any sense of the i/o settings of the tracks at all.  No good specifying that the master output should be to such-and-such a device port if you haven't said which device the port is found on.

I've now managed to try this and it behaves as I expected.

1. Make a simple session up on the desktop using the asio drivers on my Echo card as normal.
2. Copy whole directory, audio and ses files to laptop (eg for producer to listen and make slight changes). The laptop soundcard doesn't do asio, so AA gives a warning and changes the assignments to Audition Windows sounds.
3. Copy whole lot back to the desktop. No warning, but, of course the drivers are now set to the non-asio ones.  On this machine these give occasional record glitches, whereas the asio ones don't.

Just another pothole on the road of life I suppose!

At last I understand why I've had unexplained alterations to the driver settings on the desktop.  

I think I found out the problem with my session in AA 2.0.

The session was recorded @96khz, has an average of 13 tracks playing at one time, and I have many effects on the tracks:

4x Heavy Dynamics Processing
5x Graphics EQ
3x Glaceverb
3x Delay
1x Echo Chamber

8 tracks goto Bus A which has a studio reverb and hard limiter on it.
5 tracks goto Bus B which has a hard limiter.

       All of the effects are realtime (not frozen) and the session plays back without hitch in Audition 1.5.  The reason the session sounded horrible in 2.0 was because of my low ASIO latency being unable to cope with the amount of effects.  I can get AA2.0 to play this session, as is, without stuttering - but only with my ASIO buffer size at its maximum of 16,384 samples.  Of course, having a buffer that large rules out any ability to have real-time monitoring.
 
         So I have come to the conclusion that If I want to be able to use realtime monitoring, I will have to freeze practically all the effects, and only apply a few, small, simple realtime effects to keep from skipping.  

         I think I have overestimated ASIO. It just doesn't seem right to me that AA2.0 can't even run 3x Dynamics Processing and 2x Graphics EQ realtime @96khz w/ a 512 sample buffer size without popping or glitches on my machine.  

Or maybe (hopefully) I am just doing something wrong...

Anyone have thoughts on this?

What's the hardware?  AA2.0 does require more grunt than AA1.5, depending on what you are doing.

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2 (Dual Core running @ 2.4Ghz)
ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe motherboard
2 GB Ram
2 SATA Harddrives (Temp folders on secondary drive)
Gforce 7800 GT PCI-E videocard
Echo Layla 3G Soundcard, Driver version 6.13
Windows XP SP2

Edit: And when playing back the session in 2.0, although the audio crackles and pops horribly at low ASIO latencies, cpu usage doesn't go above 64%