What does "Detect Dropped Samples" detect?

[Mats235937670gng]

I wonder about the field down to the right in Edit View: "Detect Dropped Samples".

I experience dropped samples while recording in Edit View, however they are never reported by Audition in this field.

If i get dropped samples between the Audio interface (ASIO) and Audition, how do I detect them?

Mats

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

I'm afraid that you are going to have to be a lot clearer. For a start, can you produce a screen-grab of this field you are talking about? When does it occur? It's certainly not a feature of Audition on this machine, nor is it mentioned in any of the help files. In general, if a waveform has a dropped sample in it, it will show up as a red gap in the recorded field. Usually dropped samples happen as a result of clock misalignment - where the incoming device clock isn't running at exactly the same rate as the clock source Audition is using. After a while the drift will result in a sync error when the incoming signal gets a whole sample out of step, so there is effectively no window for the sample to be put in. This results in a large click or thump.

The other source of dropped samples is in Multitrack view, when there's sometimes too much information in a mix to stream it all at once from a HD. The solution to this has been mentioned many times before - pre-render all the tracks.

[Mats235937670gng]

In Edit View there is a field as in the above screengrab. The question is what sort of dropped samples is detected?

There is always dropouts in the recorded file if the ASIO buffer is too small, or the opertarating system is too distracted. Sometimes the dropouts repeats every four hours, so it is very time consuming to detect.

If Audition could detect if samples are dropped while recording, it would be great help.

Kind regards

Mats

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

You have to bear in mind also that when you record in Waveform (not Edit) View, the recording is being made to a temp file and not saved to the final file until you've stopped recording. And if anything about that fails during this process, there is no way to identify this whilst it's happening. This is because there is no read cycle in the system, and neither will there be; that would slow it down significantly to the point where it simply wouldn't work. And, of course, you have two potential failure points. Generally it's much safer to record in Multitrack view, because that's direct to the final file.

There are other threads about this - typically here. 

[Mats235937670gng]

Thank you for the information. I have read the other threads, but still don´t understand the use of the "Detect Dropped Samples" status bar. But I guess it shows information about errors between Audition and the writing procedure to disk, and not the samples coming in from the ASIO sound interface.

Mats

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

I'm reasonably sure that all it does is to indicate that there's at least one dropped sample in a file, when it's opened. It doesn't have anything to do with the interfacing at all.