So far these are all symptoms of the computer not being able to keep up.
Koz
No and yes but, it shouldn’t matter. Cloud Sync, Plex Servers, AutoHotKeys, Abelton (Midi controller) and all that have been in place for TENm years without issue. I’ve recorded and published HUNDREDS of overdubbed covers for the past 10 years. Yes, I have tried disabling all of them … to no avail.
The only thing that has changed is that the FocusRite Saffire Pro FireWire interface has been replaced by the M-Audio air 192|4 USB interface.
Is there some advanced debugging we can proceed with? I’m happy to be a guinea pig if you have debug exes lying around for this sort of troubleshooting. I think I lost one of the suggestions someone made about some sort of Audio monitor that kind of works like Windows Process monitor. Is there such a thing?
I think this is where we fall back on the forum format. This isn’t a help desk. This is a forum with users helping each other. We can wait for someone else that has an M-Audio air 192|4 to post comments or a solution.
Koz
Agreed. Of course, instead of waiting for someone else maybe I could be that 1st person!
Thinking this to be a USB issue. I moved the MIDI controller USB cable to the front panel of my PC as I believe that is a different bus (just a guess). In the past 10 minutes or so, I am noticing no crackle from Audacity during playback unless I hit a key on the midi keyboard.
Further, if I use WMP for audio playback I also get crackling when I hit a key on the keyboard. The bottom line is that Audacity may now be out of the picture.
Now I can call M-Audio. Their Midi controller never conflicted with the old device because it was on FireWire. Now that I have a USB interface, there must be contention.
I’ll continue to post here in case someone down the road has the same issues.
Good detective work.
Good luck with M-Audio.
Ha 
what did you mean by that? Still waiting for them to contact me. You can’t call them without a ticket number and you can’t get a ticket number without submitting a form and then waiting “for a while”.
When purchasing this M-AUDIO air 192|4 from Amazon, I ignored the critical reviews because they seemed rare as the unit overall got a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5. The critical reviews ALL talk about crackling and weeks of fruitless troubleshooting. None of them mention solutions.
Anyway, I just put in my own 1-star review of this product:
CRACKLES, SLOW SPEED, STUTTERING, NO SUPPORT
Been wrestling with crackling, stuttering, and slowing audio for weeks with no support in sight. I’ve tried every combination of Host (WASAPI, MME, Windows Direct), Sample Rate (41,000, 48,000), Sample Format (16-bit, 32-bit), Buffer Size (256, 512, 0, 10000), USB cables (2.0, 3.0, C), USB busses (back panel, front panel, separate PCIe card) … TO NO AVAIL!!!You can’t call M-Audio and they won’t call you when you submit a ticket.
If they don’t want to support this thing, I’m going to keep swapping them out from Amazon (at no cost to me) until I get one that works or until they run out of hardware.
A place that I used to work (some years ago) had a load of m-audio USB devices (an older model). They were also prone to crackling or cutting out altogether. The workaround for those devices was:
- “Safely remove this device” (from the Sys Tray)
- Turn off the device
- Wait 30 seconds
- Turn on the device
- Wait 30 seconds.
The device would then work correctly until the next reboot.
Perhaps worth trying that.
I ignored the critical reviews
I only pay attention to the critical reviews. Particularly if they’re sometimes in shaky English and sometimes don’t know what they’re talking about. Occasionally, they hit a serious shortcoming and it’s a real red bell if two or more complain about the same thing, even obliquely.
Good reviews are nice, but I’m not so sure the product will cure cancer and insure world peace. There’s no shortage of programs for hire which will post good reviews for you. We have occasional postings show up on the forum.
I’m going to keep swapping them out from Amazon (at no cost to me) until I get one that works
So you’ll be using your FocusRite Saffire Pro 14 until you settle this? I’d be tempted to return the M-Audio forever and get something else. What’s your time limit if they never work?
Koz
If you’d ever heard my music you’d realize singing is not by any means a source of income. So, there’s no hurry now that I have a wider Amazon refund/exchange window. I’ll try one more unit but, if that doesn’t work, I’m open to suggestions for what to try next. FocusRite Saffire Pro is now out of the picture.
I’m open to suggestions for what to try next.
Sure. What are you doing? Why are we here? In three forum chapters you never once said what the job was, just that it didn’t work.
Describe the job and pretend I want to buy the stuff you have. So far all we know is you have two audio interfaces and neither of them works.
That’s it. Rough to make recommendations under those conditions. Fill in the blanks.
Koz
It’s all in this thread but I’m sure you have a million threads you’re following. So, I’ll try to summarize.
PC SPECS: Why so many sound devices?
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz
Microsoft Windows 10 Home Build 19041 Servicepack 0.0
Available Physical Memory: 23213 Mb Total Physical Memory: 32689 Mb
Total space on : C:\ (Boot) = 464.76 Gb Free space on : C:\ (Boot) = 339.55 Gb
Total space on : G:\ (GD) = 3726.01 Gb Free space on : G:\ (GD) = 2189.07 Gb
Total space on : J:\ (HD) = 3726.01 Gb Free space on : J:\ (HD) = 3482.21 Gb
Opticaldrives : E:\ L:\
[i][u]Sound device: M-Audio AIR 192 4[/u][/i]
Sound device: USB Audio Device
Sound device: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
Sound device: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
Sound device: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
Sound device: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
Sound device: Realtek High Definition Audio
Sound device: NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM)
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 730
Mouse : USB Input Device
Mouse : HID-compliant mouse
Monitor : Dell S2715H (HDMI)
2013-2021: I’ve been recording multitrack vocal covers of all Beatle songs since 2013 using Audacity, a FocusRite Saffire Pro 14 FireWire interface, and an AKG mic. The Saffire Pro would work fine but, every day, additional latency would creep in and I would have to (a) crawl under my desk (b) unplug the firewire cable (c) plug it back in (d) start the FocusRite mixer app (e) change the buffer size to anything (f) change the buffer size back to 256. PHEW! Latency gone … for that day only. I tried several different FireWire cables and even swapped out the FireWire PCiE card twice, to no avail. I spent hours on the phone with FocusRite support, to no avail. Saffire FireWire = creeping latency.
2021: I’ve tried replacing my Saffire FireWire with various USB interfaces (Roland, Shure), most recently, the M-AUDIO air 192|4. Unfortunately, while the latency issue was solved, the switch from FireWire to USB introduced the age-old crackling issue in all USB interfaces.
TROUBLESHOOTING:
- The crackling comes and goes but I can make crackling on demand if I play my MIDI keyboard while audio is playing from any source (Audacity, WMP, etc…).
- I’ve tried every possible combination of buffer size, rate, format, host, etc… Currently, I have:
- Audacity set to 48,000, WASAPI, Line 1/2 M-Audio, mono, Speakers M-Audio.
- Win10 control panel sound set to 16-bit 48,000 and the recording is set to 2-channel 16-bit 48,000.
- M-Audio air control panel set to 48,000 with a buffer size at 256.
- Ableton (used for midi keyboard only) set to 48,000 with a buffer size at 256.
- In Help=>Diagnostics=>Audio Device, I get way too many devices. As far as I knew, I had only one, M-Audio.
- I am NOT getting dropouts.
- I’ve disabled all possible background apps (Ableton, Google Drive Sync, Norton, AHK, PLEX, etc…) with no noticeable difference.
- The crackling occurs when recording but does not get captured. If the crackling is light, I can ignore it but eventually, the crackling starts to slow down the tempo.
- When monitoring PC performance, I notice no real problem areas in terms of I/O and CPU load.
- Using MME as host reduces crackling considerably but there is over 300ms latency.
- I’ve tried different USB cables, buses and PCiE cards, to no avail.
- M-AUDIO was engaged but they have been dodging my emails and calls for over a week.
- There are others complaining of crackling with M-AUDIO but there are also folks complaining about crackling from all the other USB interfaces as well. I’d like to be the 1st person to tackle this.
As you can see, we’ve proven in this thread that the issue is not with Audacity per se. However, the crackling is much worse when playing multiple tracks within Audacity. For example, suppose I have a backing track and three vocals tracks all playing back at the same time, the crackling is worse.
Still, there are many experts on this forum who may have ideas I haven’t thought about. For example, if the issue is CPU/USB contention, how would I go about monitoring that?
All of those “NVIDIA High Definition Audio” devices are likely to be HDMI. They use a chip that supports a lot of channels so that it can be used in “home cinema” (even though many of those input / output “devices” may not actually be wired to anything). Audacity sees what the audio device driver says that it supports, not what is actually implemented in the hardware.
Just a thought - NVidia tend to update their drivers quite regularly - have you checked that your video card drivers are fully updated?
(If your computer is a branded model, then it’s best to use the latest drivers from the computer manufacturer. If the NVidia card is an after-market upgrade, use the latest drivers from NVidia.)
It’s not possible. I tried Nvidia’s website but it says I need the latest version of Java. I installed the latest version but, each time I revisit their site, it says I need the latest version of Java.
I tried installing GEForvce to keep my drivers up to date but, no matter how I try to sign in (Google, Facebook) I get the same error:
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>92B4DD0ACA8F4925</RequestId>
<HostId>
srih4GekbtkwVdr69VQuEQ6ncyTSPtIrl7O8LYp3vVX3HflQKQAd41O9D9uqfP4VKXVQEFZA3lU=
</HostId>
</Error>
When I try to create a new account, I get “Unable to register you in at this time. Try again later”.
Nvidia says:
- Go to run → Services.msc → Nvidia Telemetry Container → Right click → Properties → Log on → Click on Local System Account → Apply Then start the Telemetry container service if it is not already running. Now try to open Geforce Experience. If the issue persists, then try the following steps. 2. Go to run → Services.msc → Nvidia Display Container → Right click → Properties → General → Startup Type → Click on automatic
I say:
#^&* THAT
There are a couple of suggestions for this issue here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/236423/geforce-keeps-telling-me-java-is-required/
I hope this helps.
My NV drivers are up to date.
Super 
(I assumed that you rebooted at the end)
Any difference with the crackling?
The drivers were up-to-date but I’m still rebooting this PC 5 times a day each time I try a new “idea”.
The crackling is still there. Perhaps they are echos from The Big Bang.