Mix Thread Count & other tweaks for Apolo x6?

[Traveler]

13 hours ago, HOOK said:

Reggie...I abandoned the x6.  I was getting blue screens every other time I changed buffer or sampling rate.

Hey my friend, I've been back in the US since last week!

That's too bad the Apollo x6 isn't behaving with Cakewalk. My Apollo-Duo is a Silverface rack-mount version with a Thunderbolt 3 option card installed. Cakewalk and Windows 11 have been stable with no hiccups since switching off the MMCSS options. (I did find that I have a bad SoundToys VST3 plug-in that I need to investigate... I figure this is because SoundToys is having VST3 growing pains)

Yesterday I was switching between 44.1k and 48k sample rate projects. Cakewalk didn't have any trouble switching between the projects (thank goodness). There was only a slight delay in the projects opening while the Apollo swapped sample rates.

[HOOK]

I'm glad you're not having issues.  I was getting a blue screen and an auto reboot, then another blue screen when the OS came back up.  Two in a row was the pattern...then it would boot properly.  But it's not Cakewalk.  I downloaded a Cubase trial and got blue screens immediately.  Buggy Universal Audio driver for Windows, I guess.  Now that I've seen it, I'm finding this to be an issue all over the internet.  I just didn't pick up on that problem before I bought it.

This Lynx Aurora isn't having that issue.  And I'll be checking out the RME UFX II (USB) this weekend, just out of curiosity.  I'm reading fantastic things about the RME Windows USB drivers.  I'm really curious to see if USB can compete with the Thunderbolt low latency.

[Noel Borthwick]

I've had the RME UFX for a long time and have had no issues with their ASIO drivers. The only thing is the device doesn't work well in WASAPI mode and in ASIO it doesn't support changing latency from the host side - you have to do it via the driver panel. Relatively minor issues.

[Traveler]

1 hour ago, HOOK said:

I'm glad you're not having issues.  I was getting a blue screen and an auto reboot, then another blue screen when the OS came back up.  Two in a row was the pattern...then it would boot properly.  But it's not Cakewalk.  I downloaded a Cubase trial and got blue screens immediately.  Buggy Universal Audio driver for Windows, I guess.  Now that I've seen it, I'm finding this to be an issue all over the internet.  I just didn't pick up on that problem before I bought it.

This Lynx Aurora isn't having that issue.  And I'll be checking out the RME UFX II (USB) this weekend, just out of curiosity.  I'm reading fantastic things about the RME Windows USB drivers.  I'm really curious to see if USB can compete with the Thunderbolt low latency.

Glad to hear you're able to move to a new Thunderbolt interface and not get the dreaded BSOD. I also had the BSOD a few times in Cakewalk before I turned off MMCSS. Luckily everything seems to be behaving like it should.

Both of our PC's should have enough horsepower to run USB or Thunderbolt audio. Now that MMCSS isn't a factor, I'm happy with the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero. I'm using the stripped down driver for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and my system is stable - whew!

I don't know what MMCSS is supposed to do between Cakewalk and the audio interface, but leaving it turned off doesn't seem affect anything related to mixing.

[Noel Borthwick]

MMCSS is just a mechanism to let all realtime threads run at a very high priority so that other tasks on the PC don't interfere with audio processing as far as possible.
Have you turned off MMCSS altogether in Cakewalk or just MMCSS for ASIO?
If your system has enough bandwidth MMCSS won't help that much.

[Traveler]

8 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

MMCSS is just a mechanism to let all realtime threads run at a very high priority so that other tasks on the PC don't interfere with audio processing as far as possible.
Have you turned off MMCSS altogether in Cakewalk or just MMCSS for ASIO?
If your system has enough bandwidth MMCSS won't help that much.

Hi Noel,

I turned MMCSS off altogether. I tried just turning off MMCSS for ASIO but it didn't help. Universal Audio support said to leave MMCSS turned off and they'll look into it... sadly, how long it'll take for them to update their driver is unknown.

Thanks for explaining what MMCSS does. My system is a i9-12900K new build with 64GB DDR5 5600MHz RAM, so hopefully I'm ok for the foreseeable future. I'm running sessions just shy of 100 tracks and the system is solid with plenty of headroom. No complaints at this time. 👍

[HOOK]

I'm gonna go with never.  Universal Audio will never change that Windows driver.

[HOOK]

On 11/30/2022 at 9:35 AM, Noel Borthwick said:

I've had the RME UFX for a long time and have had no issues with their ASIO drivers. The only thing is the device doesn't work well in WASAPI mode and in ASIO it doesn't support changing latency from the host side - you have to do it via the driver panel. Relatively minor issues.

I got a chance to setup the RME UFX II USB this weekend and compare it to the Lynx Aurora (n) Thunderbolt.  Good lord....that was a hard decision.  The RME USB driver is pretty shockingly great!  I ended up choosing the Lynx because I thought it sounded slightly better.  But that RME UFX II brings a lot to the table and the converters sound great, although I thought the higher frequencies were sweeter, and the low end was a little tighter on the Lynx.  I wasn't in love with the tiny screen for input and output meters on the RME.  I found that the RME was turning the meter to red to indicate clipping when things actually weren't.  That was annoying.

The RME was good enough that I almost kept it.