MOTU M4 - clicks and glitches, my solution

[OrderOdonata]

I recently bought a MOTU M4 interface for use on a Windows PC but had a real problem with glitches, pops and clicks. The Focusrite interface it replaced was working fine.

I tried everything: different buffer sizes, different cables, different ports, power settings on USB hubs, different software, and firmware updates, all to no effect. Latency monitoring apps gave my PC a clean bill of health, but the problems persisted. This effected VSTs and audio files in my DAW and also general audio playback through Spotify and AIMP.

My PC is an old (but still fine) home built i7, 64gb ram, NVME drive, running Windows 10 Pro. As it happened, I needed to build a new PC not long after getting the M4, and I was confident my audio issues would be resolved by getting a new machine.
I switched to an AMD Ryzen 7950x and Windows 11 Pro, the only component I reused was an Nvidia GTX1080 video card. Testing revealed that sure enough my audio was all working beautifully, just as I expected it would.

My PC isn’t a dedicated DAW, so as I installed all my other software, I kept a close eye (ear?) on things and tested audio constantly, and lo and behold, my audio problems resurfaced! I pinned this down to the management software I had installed for my NVME drives - I turned on the drive accelerator cache and that started glitching the audio. I uninstalled it, and audio is perfect once again.

My old build used a Samsung drive with Samsung Drive Magician software; my new system uses a Crucial NVME and Crucial Storage Executive management software with a ‘Momentum Cache’ feature. Two completely different systems, with the same M4 interface, and the same audio issues.

In my experience at least, my M4 doesn’t sit well with NVME drive caching turned on, so if you have similar glitching issues, it might be worth looking at your NVME cache settings.

[HCMarkus]

Great stuff, OrderOdonata. Thanks for sharing with us here, and welcome!