Download the latencymon utility and see what you can find. Usually it's drivers need updating or BIOS settings need tweaking (definitely update your BIOS too). Also check power saving settings. Plenty of info about that is you search for it

For my Dell laptop (specs below) there was no solution, in the end the workaround was to stop Studio One running on the first core. Don't do that until you've exhausted all other possibilities.(Latencymon should also indicate whether or not other cores don't have issues).

Thanks for the response. I'll run latencymon tonight and report back. For reference, here was my complete install process:

1. Updated BIOS to latest version
2. Disabled camera and onboard audio in the BIOS
3. Change battery usage in the BIOS to “Primarily AC Use”
4. In the BIOS, set the internal drive to AHCI/NVMe mode rather than RAID On
5. Did a Windows 11 Home clean install from a USB drive
6. Changed the power plan to “High Performance” (and chose “Turn off display” to “Never” when plugged in).
7. Disabled USB selective suspend setting and PCI Express Link State Power Management
8. Set Background image to solid color and turned off screensaver
9. Turned speech recognition off
10. Disabled transparency effects and animation effects
11. Disabled snap windows
12. Installed newest RME Drivers
13. Installed newest PreSonus Studio One version
14. Turned off Wi-Fi

Looks pretty comprehensive.

May need to look at CPU power savings and core performance settings/behaviour in BIOS, and disable power management for various devices in Windows device manager.

Also disable unneeded windows apps in startup and Windows services.

Any realtime antivirus get it to bypass studio one and project folders.

There's a load of windows apps that can be disabled that run in the background. You can also remove unneeded apps in the store that won't uninstall via powershell.

Hmmm…

“Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops. One or more DPC routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long. One problem may be related to power management, disable CPU throttling settings in Control Panel and BIOS setup. Check for BIOS updates.”

My BIOS is current. So now what? Have poked around a bit in BIOS. Things that look suspect… “Intel Speed Shift Technology” and “Intel SpeedStep Technology” are both on. I’m thinking maybe turn those off? What about C-State control? “Turbo Boost”? “Hyper-Threading”? “GNA Accelerator”?

Thanks for your help, by the way. I feel like I’m getting closer!

Yup try turning them on/off. Experiment. Start with off.

Have you run the dell driver update utility.or whatever it is called nowadays?

In latencymon check the drivers tab for high DPC processes. You can sort the columns.

Latencymon will show performance per core too.

PreAl wroteYup try turning them on/off. Experiment. Start with off.

Will do.

Have you run the dell driver update utility.or whatever it is called nowadays?

After the clean install, I basically have nothing Dell on this computer anymore.

In latencymon check the drivers tab for high DPC processes. You can sort the columns.

Latencymon will show performance per core too.

Highest DPC by far is Wdf01000.sys, followed by latencymon itself. Other than latencymon, it’s all O/S stuff.

CPU0 seems to be doing the most work. Highest interrupt cycle time, highest ISR count and execution by a mile, highest DPC count and execution as well.

I may have solved it! Turning off C-States seems to make latencymon very happy. Running Studio One used to throw everything into the red. Now, nothing moves. DPC count in the “CPU” tab is 0.219127 for CPU0 and zero for the rest. And that doesn’t seem to change no matter how long I play back a session.

Huge thanks!!

jordanslator wroteI have a recent Dell XPS 13 9305 running a clean install of Windows 11 Home. Using an RME Fireface UFX II interface and Studio One v. 6.5. This same setup works 100% fine on my (rather old) desktop. But on the laptop I get a weird issue when recording (and only when recording)…. Studio One frequently staggers. It briefly pauses for a second or two and then continues recording. No pops or crackles. Just this weird hiccup which makes it impossible to record anything. Disabling Windows Defender makes it happen less frequently (like once every minute or two instead of every 20 seconds or so) but it still happens.

Any ideas?

Sounds like you may be experiencing issues due to your sample rate settings in Windows. You haven't said much about audio. It seems more likely you are experiencing issues due to some audio problem rather than due to your laptop. For sure you would want to have the right drivers but those are auto installed off the internet by Windows in 2024.

I looked up that c-states thing. Sounds like real trouble. Real PITA stuff. Says with C States off you can expect more battery drain. All about cores waking up and things like that. Wouldn't want to have to deal with that. Sounds like an Intel thing. Should always choose Ryzen they make better cores. Intel has been playing catch-up and feign since they came along.

I noticed your laptop says it comes with i5 (4 core?) or i7 6 core. I also see a lot of chatter about ridiculous 4K graphics. If you have anything like that or have 120 fps you should go into your desktop with a right click, and change down to 60fps for your graphics since you are doing anyways, music. You shouldn't expect much from any laptop that isn't plugged into the wall. Battery will always cause problems with any recording or anything at all that you do. Personally stay away from laptops for my setup because of battery blowouts I had in both the ASUS and RAZER because they have no charging throttling on their system (or had, 6 years ago when they were newer and have never gotten any). The Lenovo has the charging throttling for extended battery life and it still has a useable battery despite being older than either the Razer or ASUS with the Ryzen.

Anyways you said you have it fixed now so I don't have any idea what was wrong with it. Sounds like a fun one to try and fix though. I have a few laptops and have no problems running Studio One on them. Ryzen, Asus, Razer, Lenovo. Even used to use an Alienware back in the Pro Tools days. Never had the issues you spoke of. Certainly never had to jump thru such hoops as you mentioned in the several posts here. Have fun though.

jordanslator wroteI may have solved it! Turning off C-States seems to make latencymon very happy. Running Studio One used to throw everything into the red. Now, nothing moves. DPC count in the “CPU” tab is 0.219127 for CPU0 and zero for the rest. And that doesn’t seem to change no matter how long I play back a session.

Huge thanks!!

Makes sense. Wish my Dell laptop did that.

You should now visit Dell driver update site and install any Dell drivers you need or that will improve performance.

Lo and behold! I didn’t find this when I was trying to solve the issue, but now that it’s solved, I googled “c-states presonus” and found a Knowledgebase article telling me to do what I did (it speaks to Windows 10, but the issue apparently still exists in Windows 11)…

https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/a ... 0-computer

“In course of our testing, we found that the Dell XPS-13 (9360) Laptop that has the ability to turn off the C-States in the system BIOS, not all systems have this feature, if you have a Dell XPS Laptop then you can use this option as an alternative method of disabling / enabling C-States.”

Again, huge thanks for the help in sorting this out!

Aw, man...

Thought I had this solved. Now I have a different issue. Did two days of sessions over the weekend and three times over the two days, while recording, Studio One started randomly "looping". It looked like it was looping roughly a 1-second-long segment, but looping wasn't engaged and it wasn't recording separate takes. It just looked like it was looping. When I played back the audio it was fine until the point it had started "looping" and at that point the audio became a bizarre hash of jumbled, stuttering, sped-up garbage. I rebooted, fired it up again and it was fine for hours. Then did it again. I managed to get through the weekend, but what a pain!

The nature of this new issue seems more like a software glitch than a hardware/driver problem, but who knows. My drivers and software are all current to about a month ago. I'm going to try updating everything to be 100% current to see if that solves it. The good and bad thing about this new glitch is that it's infrequent. So I may not know whether I've solved it until I do another full-day session,

Ugh!!

jordanslator wroteThe good and bad thing about this new glitch is that it's infrequent. So I may not know whether I've solved it until I do another full-day session,

Ugh!!

Such is the nature of fault-finding

I'm seriously considering giving the Dell to one of my kids for school and getting a Mac Mini M2. I could get the mini, a keyboard and a portable monitor all for well under $1,000. Should be the perfect tracking rig. From everything I've read, the Mini M2 should work well with Studio One and with my RME Fireface UFX II. I just can't handle this non-stop trouble-shooting anymore.

Updated BIOS, chipset drivers, video driver, storage drivers, audio interface drivers (and firmware) and Studio One, all to the latest versions as of yesterday. Still having major issues with the laptop. Tried recording 8 tracks for about 10 minutes straight yesterday. When I stopped, Studio One froze for a bit. I could see the rendered waveforms as they were recording, but when I hit "stop" they vanished. They were in the pool, but had vanished from the mix screen. When I hit "record" again nothing moved. Wouldn't record. Hit "play"... wouldn't play. Saved the project, shut down Studio One, relaunched Studio One and loaded the project. Same issues... can't play or record. Rebooted the computer and reloaded everything and it was all fine.

Something seriously messed up here. This isn't just glitches and dropouts anymore. If I was coming to this as my first experience with Studio One, I'd think it was just lousy software, but it runs absolutely flawlessly on my desktop with the same OS and recording interface. The only variable is the laptop.

Anyone want to buy a Dell XPS 13 laptop?

Try running studio one so it ignores the first core. You can do it quickly in task manager/set affinity. You may need to ignore more cores at the beginning of its set in bios (I've forgotten what it is called, the setting gives duplicate or more virtual cores for each real core, so your machine look like it has more cores than it actually has).

PreAl wroteTry running studio one so it ignores the first core. You can do it quickly in task manager/set affinity. You may need to ignore more cores at the beginning of its set in bios (I've forgotten what it is called, the setting gives duplicate or more virtual cores for each real core, so your machine look like it has more cores than it actually has).

A faint hope! I'll try this tonight (and postpone my computer shopping until tomorrow).

Thanks!

PreAl wroteTry running studio one so it ignores the first core. You can do it quickly in task manager/set affinity.

This seems to have fixed it! Granted, I thought disabling C-states had fixed it too, but I think this is the real thing. I’ll report back, but so far it’s running smooth and steady as long as it avoids core 0.

jordanslator wrote

PreAl wroteTry running studio one so it ignores the first core. You can do it quickly in task manager/set affinity.

This seems to have fixed it! Granted, I thought disabling C-states had fixed it too, but I think this is the real thing. I’ll report back, but so far it’s running smooth and steady as long as it avoids core 0.

Yah, not fixed. Struggling through another long session right now. Have had to reboot a half dozen times so far. As with all the prior tweaks, it made it better. But I’m still getting weird glitches. I think selling this laptop is the best overall solution.