In the last couple of weeks I discovered a degradation of my rig's latency. Even at 128 samples buffer with additional safety buffer (it is a Focusrite interface which has three modes: Recording, Balanced, and Mixing) I got drop outs at nearly no load at all.
First I thought it is a driver or some additional software - stuff like that. I tweaked around for a week, then I did a complete Roll-back of my machine with no result.
Ok, it seemed not to be a software issue. I invested another evening figuring out, what I changed at the hardware setup in the last weeks. The only thing was, that I connected a synth via USB-MIDI. In the past, it was connected via the MPC-MIDI Out port - essentially just another USB-MIDI (from the computer's perspective). So there should be no difference in audio performance of an extra audio interface...
I switched back to the old connection and voila: No Drop-outs anymore!
 
Conclusion: So, if you have to deal with strange latency issues, sometimes it is not your audio interface.
Question: Anybody made experiences like that? Or even better: Knows, what the root such problems could be?
 
 
 
 
 
 

This is a little confusing. Audio Latency and dropouts are two different things. Audio latency is not a function of a MIDI interface, it is a byproduct of the audio interface and plug-ins in a project. Dropouts happen when the DAW is data starved. This seems more like a DPC latency issue. It might be useful to run latencymon to check DPC latency (this is not the same as audio latency) in the configuration generating dropouts.
 
 

scook
Dropouts happen when the DAW is data starved. This seems more like a DPC latency issue. It might be useful to run latencymon to check DPC latency (this is not the same as audio latency) in the configuration generating dropouts.

The last weeks I was looking into the topic of DPC. After checking the DPC with some tools, I figured out, that there is a storage problem. I was a little bit confused, because I use a high-end SSD. It seems that the DVD is one of the reasons. After disabling DMA the DPC latency was dropped by 80%.
 
Thank you!