NI/Traktor need to change their approach to the latency/ "crackling" issues

AudiFreq

There is a not a single traktor user out there who has not experienced at least once their mix come to either a halt of obnoxious "grinding" sounds or a series of pops and crackles like you are listening to a badly ripped Napster MP3. It's the most common help request on this page and it has been for over a decade.

But it's not a bug in Traktor, or Traktor doing anything wrong, it's not even unique to traktor over other audio software.
I want to preface this with a little background. I'm a A+ certified computer tech for 20 years, used to be a competitive overclocker (some relevance here) and I have DJ'ed well over 200 club gigs using traktor.

I have a list of things I do every time I get a new laptop or re-install windows to make sure this issue doesn't happen, it's a long list of bios settings, power settings, disabling integrated devices, assigning priorities and processor allocations all in the hopes of preventing these issue on stage. And I have shared those tips in 50+ different threads on this page over the last 10+ years.

The average user is not going to or going to know how to do all that. And they shouldn't be expected to know that either, other than maybe making sure their system is in a high performance mode, asking more than that is unreasonable of the average user.

The main factors are things out of their control, most often hardware and software interrupts from background tasks like power management (dynamic tuning) or network adapters going to sleep and waking themselves up.
This is why someone who buys a basic system, may rarely or never encounter this, but someone who bought a 32 core gaming machine just for Traktor might experience this every time, too many variables to manage. And there is no way for NI to tackle the drivers of every network card out there or work with microsoft to give their software a higher UAC level by default, will never happen.


td;dr
So what can be done? Sorry for this long winded post that offers no real answers, but will hopefully strike a discussion. I have 3 things I would like to see though.


1. Detection, this is already somewhat built into traktor, you can see processor/program latency (calling it "cpu" is misleading), but that little bar doesn't convey any real info to the user until it's too late. Programs like latencymon will tell you what is causing the splikes. A flag needs to go off in traktor when spikes pass a threshold, unless it's possible to detect when audio is piping, but that would add a lot of latency and processing as well.

2. Better support for mitigating these issues aimed at the average user built into Traktor, a simple tool tip popup that layout what settings need to change to prevent this from happening again after it's detected.

3. A soft/hard audio system reset button, It's the only way to get things back on track, even if it causes a momentary gap in the music.