I recently purchased an Alesis Multimix 16 USB 2.0 mixer, while this is quite an old and outdated mixer it has the benefit that it can send all 16 channels separately over USB to your PC (rather than just the mix like most modern mixers). In Ableton if you select ASIO as the audio driver type then you can only select 1 device, which is used for both input and output (as far as I know). But this isn't what I want - I want 16 channels in from the mixer, then audio out to my speakers, not back to the mixer.
So to get round this limitation I use ASIO4All. In ASIO4All I select the multimix as an input device, and my speakers as the output. In Ableton I then select ASIO4All as the ASIO device to use.
I was testing the multimix with a microphone input, and found that when I was talking into it there would be occasional crackling. Plugging headphones into the multimix there was no crackling. If I set ableton to use the multimix as the ASIO device, then there was no crackling (but getting the multimix to output only the signal received via USB is a right pain and latency was terrible).
I messed around with the buffer settings quite a bit, but it didn't seem to make any difference at all. Eventually I tried a different USB cable and USB port (one of the recommendations online was making sure you don't have it plugged in a USB hub, but straight into your PC). Amazingly this actually fixed the problem. The original USB cable works fine, but it seems the issue only occurs when plugged into the rear USB ports on my PC. Plugged into a USB (3) hub I get no issues at all.
What's especially strange about this is that whenever I have had issues with USB devices before, it has always been that they need to be plugged into a rear USB port, and that plugging into a front port or hub is the problem. But with the multimix it seems the issue is reversed.
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