Operation Under Asio; General; Performance - RME Audio DIGIFACE User Manual

13. Operation under ASIO 2.0

13.1 General

We will use Steinberg's Cubase VST as an example throughout this chapter. All information
provided can easily be adopted to other programs.
Start the ASIO software and
select 'System' from the
Audio menu. Select 'ASIO
Hammerfall DSP' as the
audio I/O device. The 'ASIO
system control' button opens
the HDSP's Settings dialog
(see chapter 9,
Configuration).
Hammerfall DSP also allows
simultaneous record and
playback of SPDIF audio
data together with record and
playback in ADAT format.
Please note that the external
SPDIF devices have to be
running in sync, otherwise
recordings will be corrupted.
Hammerfall DSP supports 'ASIO Direct Monitoring' (ADM). Please note that at this time
Cubase, Nuendo and Logic do not support ADM correctly. Bugfixes should be available soon.
For an operation at 88.2 and 96 kHz sample rate the device 'ASIO Hammerfall DSP 96 kHz'
has to be chosen. When the sample frequency is set to 88.2 or 96 kHz, this driver operates all
the ADAT optical inputs and outputs in Sample Split mode, so the number of available
channels is reduced from 24 to 12.

13.2 Performance

The 'Audio Performance' settings are especially important. Firstly, the number of channels
should be changed from 8 to 26 so that all the Hammerfall DSP's inputs can be accessed.
A very common problem is insufficient hard disk perfor-
mance. If the first track is missing while recording multiple
tracks, or the error message 'Audio: Record Error' appears,
the disk sub-system is too slow i.e. it is unable to write the
audio data to the disk quickly enough. The problem can
almost always be remedied by changing 'Disk Block Buffer
Size' from the default 64kB to 256kB.
This is especially true if you want to record more than 12
tracks at the same time. 26 tracks are only possible after
changing 'Disk Block Buffer Size' to 256kB (depending on your computer). Please note that
these parameters are only updated after clicking on 'Apply'.
User's Guide HDSP System Digiface © RME
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