On Buffers & Latency

[Johnbee58]

Once again, I think I've learned something I didn't know before about recording on computers.  I've always thought that a buffer could never be too big but I guess I was wrong. 

My Scarlett 6i6 has been acting up since I updated the drivers in January. It was the first update of it's kind since I bought the unit in April of 2016. I had no issues with it before the update so I blamed the updated drivers and sent a support ticket to Focusrite because I was getting BSODs for different things like Bad Pool Header and other issues.    They suggested I download a set of Beta drivers they have on their Beta Testing page, which I did.  The default buffer on the new drivers was set to 512.  I began hearing clicking like when memory is depleting.  When I upped the buffer to 1024 the clicking got even worse,  so I fired off another complaint to Focusrite.  But I tried something.  I turned the buffers down to 192 and the clicking reduced but still gave me a few.  I tried going down to 128 and the clicking stopped altogether.  I turned on my mic and tried a test vocal track which worked fine and, of course, there was very little latency in the recording.

I upgraded my PCs memory from 8 to 16gb last October.  It never occurred to me before that I could possibly run the buffers this small with this amount of memory.

Am I correct in assuming this or will I run into memory issues if I continue to record this way?

?John B

[David Baay]

The amount of RAM in the system should have no bearing on the performance at different buffer sizes. Usually the only time an ASIO buffer setting can be too high is if you're streaming a lot of recorded audio tracks/files on playback (or maybe recording many inputs simultaneously), and your Disk I/O buffer size is too low to keep up.

But I can imagine some interface hardware/firmware/drivers might not be optimized to handle very larger buffers.

[haydn12]

If you are running a bunch of VST's and run out of physical memory, then Windows will start using virtual memory.  Virtual memory is paged out from your hard drive.   This can cause clicks if the samples are pulled from virtual memory.  Upping the memory to 16GB will fix this issue. 

Jim