Bug? Axe FX II XL+ : USB Audio Playback from PC Stopping until Axe Reset

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doombringer316

New Member
I've had the Axe FX II XL+ for a few years now with no issue, but recently I have been experiencing audio from my PC completely stopping after a few minutes. As an example, Youtube videos will play normally for a while after the Axe is powered on (not consistent on timing, generally somewhere between 5-20 minutes). After this period, the video will continue to play, but the audio has gone silent.

A few notes on this behavior:

1. The Axe will still play audio coming in from the instrument input without issue. It seems isolated to USB audio.

2. Resetting the Axe unit will solve it every time. I've had some success with other methods as well: sending audio from a guitar into the instrument input will sometimes solve the USB audio loss. Playing audio from a different program will occasionally solve it as well, though this is not consistent (if audio loss is experienced from Youtube, playing a .wav or .mp3 from my computer may recover it).

3. I wasn't on the newest firmware when I started noticing this issue (I had been putting off the Ares update because I was in the middle of recording for an album). I recently did update to the latest firmware, but the issue still persists.

4. I've noticed this behavior is not specific to any one program - Youtube audio from Chrome and Firefox, Guitar Pro 7, and Windows media player all experience sound loss after some amount of time.

5. If I put the Vu meters up on the Axe screen, I can see that once the audio stops coming out of the speakers, the output Vu meters stop registering any reading as well.

I see a few threads on this related to Axe III, but hadn't found anything for the II generation of units (apologies if I've missed it). I've tried a few suggestions from those threads with no luck: Re-installing USB drivers, updating to latest firmware, restarting PC, changing USB buffer sizing, and ensuring that the USB output level is at an acceptable level (-6dB).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
I wanted to update this thread with some new findings. I used the USBAudio Spy Tool that is installed with the drivers for FAS Axe FX II and noticed some error flags popping up (IsoBufferTooLate)... does anyone here know what they mean or why they would occur? Google has failed me, and the company that made the spy tool hasn't responded yet.

FAS Support responded saying they are aware of the issue and may put out a fix, though the product is legacy now so it may not be patched. For now, I'm looking for anyway to debug this on my end rather than waiting for patching.

Full email that I sent to FAS Support with my findings below:

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Hello,

I've been having an issue with my Axe-FX II XL+ where USB audio cuts out and requires either a manual reset of the device, or a 'wait' period of which the device seems to restart USB communications on its own (more on this below).

For the past few weeks, I've simply been dealing with this by resetting the device manually. However, I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into what was happening here, and I noticed that the USB Audio Driver installs a tool called 'TUSBAudio Spy Tool'.

I started monitoring the device data using this and noticed some behavior that may give a clue as to why this is happening - I was hoping you could give me some more details on the following:

When using TUSBAudio Spy Tool, and looking at the Device 'ISO Streams' Statistics, I noticed that when the Axe FX is first powered on and operating normally, there are no ERR messages. Eventually, it starts to write a few IsoBufferTooLate errors in the Out column - but no audio loss yet. The audio DOES cut out when an IsoBufferTooLate is written into the IN column.

I also see how simply waiting sometimes solves the problem - after some wait time, I see this tool writes into the ERR: RestartInitiated stat for the Out column. This then restores audio until the next IsoBufferTooLate in the IN column.

So the question is - what is this error really telling me? Have you seen it before, and is it possible to fix?
 
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