Numerous dropouts during MIDI playback
It took me the better part of a day to manage the installation and the configuration of Jack to enable the playback of music via midi to my keyboard. After finally getting everything up and running, I am now faced with numerous dropouts in musescore. I am at the end of my wits. I am on Win 7 and I use the latest version of Jack (1.9.10) and Musescore (2.0.2). I invoke the server using the following command:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Jack\jackd.exe -R -S -X winmme -d portaudio -d "ASIO::ASIO4ALL v2"
The first attachment shows the output from Jack. Next I start Jack Control with the setup shown in second attachment.
Then I start Musescore and start playing the music. Lot's of dropouts. Fiddling with the settings in Jack Control didn't really get me anywhere. My IO settings in Musescore are shown in the third attachment.
Note that my system can hardly be the problem as I am using one of the latest I7 setups. I also tried it on a small I3-based notebook using Win 8 with similar results (dropouts).
Any hints what I can do to get a perfect playback? Your help is greatly appreciated.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Server Start.png | 26.01 KB |
| Jack Control Settings.png | 338.34 KB |
| musescore IO.png | 45.2 KB |
Comments
Oh, and in case someone is wondering: I use the m-audio midisport 2x2 anniversary edition as my MIDI hub and I have zero problems playing back from Finale.
You have probably ended up with two instances of the JACK server running - one invoked from the command line and the other from Jack Control.
It is far better to forget the JAck commandline altogether and run JACK from QJackControl.
The sequence should be this...
Run Jack Control then start the JACK server by pressing the Start button.
Jack should start if it doesn't check the Setup window and see if it matches the one I use.....
![JackSetup.PNG]( "JackSetup.PNG")
Please note that I currently have an issue with the Realtek HD input driver which emerged after upgrading to Windows 10 which is why my Audio is set to Playback only.
HTH
Michael
In reply to You have probably ended up by ChurchOrganist
Hey Michael, thanks a lot for the quick reply. In the beginning I tried to just use qJackControl but always saw JACK crashing. Now based on your suggestion, here's what I'm observing:
Note that I am not using the command line invocation anymore.
The second attachment shows the drivers that I am using for audio. Nothing special here as far as I can tell.
I should also note that it happened twice (out of maybe 50 attempts) that I had perfect playback. But I couldn't reproduce it. As soon as I played the piece a second time without making any changes, the dropouts would start again.
I use a self-built system based on the following motherboard: P6X58D Premium (ASUSTeK). Does it matter that my system is overclocked?
In reply to Hey Michael, thanks a lot for by analogsynth
I fiddled more with the settings and now it is working more or less flawlessly. I made sure the output device is set to "ASIO::ASIO4All v2":
Only at the first start of the playback, there's a bit of a timing problem in the first second or so but after that the playback is clean. Subsequent playbacks have no more timing problems. I need to experiment more to confirm there's really no problem anymore.
I've tried to optimize the settings but other sampling rates or frames/period lead to dropouts. I thought setting the sample rate to 32k should suffice because that's also the speed across MIDI but that didn't work. Setting it to 192k also leads to dropouts.
In reply to I fiddled more with the by analogsynth
I'm surprised that you have got it running with a 1 second start delay.
Jack takes quite a while to sort itself out, and on another of my computers It was flatly refusing to start at all without crashing until I upped the Start Delay to 10 seconds - I was motivated to do this by a comment in this post in the JACK Audo forum.....
http://jack-audio.10948.n7.nabble.com/Jack-Devel-New-build-of-QJackCtl-…
Sample rate should always match that of the soundcard - it is audio related and nothing to do with the MIDI side of things, although if you set it to something weird like 32k then it could be responsible for MIDI dropouts due to the extra processing JACK is having to do to convert the audio samples back to the soundcard sample rate. MIDI sends data at 32Kbit/sec which used to be the standard serial bus speed back in the dark ages of computing :) It is quite different from the sample rate used in audio data transmission.