continuous dropouts using Presonus Audiobox USB 96

I want some help troubleshooting my audio input system.

I am using Chrome OS version 93.0.4577.107 (official build) (64-bit).
I have Audacity 3.0.5 installed in Debian GNU/LInux 10 (buster)

I have a Heil PR-22 microphone connecting to a Presonus Audiobox USB96. That connects directly to my chromebook through the USB port.

I was able to record some audio, but all of it has very frequent dropouts. I tried following some advice I think was intended for PC/MAC recording–reducing the bit-rate, turning off scrolling and software playthrough–that did not solve the problem.

I’m pretty new at using Audacity to record–and I wanted the flexibility of using chromebook instead of a big combersome and not-very fast computer.

Can somebody please help me solve this problem? I’d be most grateful.
Thank you in advance,
Ellen

I doubt that we will be able to help very much unless someone that has personal experience of running audio apps in Debian on Chrome OS happens to come along.

As I understand it, Debian runs in a sandboxed virtual machine on Chrome OS. While the KVM container is said to provide “nearly” the same performance as the host hardware, there will always be some performance hit. From my experience with virtual machines, the performance hit tends to be most noticeable when using virtual devices, such as virtual sound cards.

I would certainly recommend that you search on Google, and any Chrome OS forums, to see if there are any optimizations that you can make to the sound system.

Re. Audacity, one thing to try is tweaking the buffer settings.
“Edit menu > Preferences > Devices → Buffer Length: 100ms”
The default buffer length is a ballpark figure, but making it smaller or larger may improve performance and reduce dropouts. (It’s rather counter-intuitive that smaller audio buffers can sometimes reduce dropouts, but in some cases it can).

It may also be worth trying Audacity 2.2.2 (available from the Debian Buster repository). You may find that you get better performance with that version, but note that Audacity 2.x cannot open projects that were created with the newer Audacity 3.x versions.

(Ensure that you have only Audacity 3.0.5 OR Audacity 2.2.2 installed. You may run into problems if you have both installed).

I often use the Scarlet 2i2 on Debian 10 with no problems,
have recorded audio as long as 30 minutes at a time.
(The Mackie Onyx also works well).
However, never used Chrome OS, so as Steve wrote, there may be a performance hit.

Audacity version 2.2.2