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Old 11-15-2007, 11:41 AM   #31
gumboots3
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 5
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Thanks Stratman for your diligence on this issue. I am having the same problem, and unfortunately, your good suggestion to disable windows sounds did not work for me.

I am working with Vista Home Premium on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz, 3 Gig RAM - plenty of power (I assumed) to handle a few tracks of audio/midi.

I was originally working with an M-Audio Firewire 410 which I could never get working with Sonar, but worked with Reaper, except that performing basic functions like moving the scroll bar, zooming in/out, copy/paste, etc. would cause the transport to get stuck (but say "playing") or, more often, cause all in/out audio to sound staticy and garbled. I could temporarily fix this by opening the audio>devise options, doing nothing, and clicking OK. This would "kick start" the drivers (as others have experienced) and everything would work again for 30 seconds.

After much troubleshooting, I concluded that the M-audio drivers were simply inferior, or just didn't "agree" with my system. I swapped it for a Presonus Firebox which is now experiencing the "lock-up" symptom, which I can kick-start by opening the Presonus control panel and toggling the sample rate back and forth. No garbled audio as of yet, but I simply can't get anything accomplished having to kick these drivers every 30 seconds.

So, since I have tried 2 soundcards with similar results, this leads me to only a few possible sources for the issue:

1. Vista. I am considering installing a clean version of XP to see what happens, though I am concerned since other XP users are reporting the same problem. Does anyone know if I could restore Vista from the HP partition after overwriting the main operating system with XP? The CPU didn't come with an installation disc, so I assume Vista recovery is on the partition. Also, will this void any HP warranties on the OS/CPU?

2. My firewire ports. I've been reading that TI firewire ports are better for audio, and that other brands don't work well. This would be unfortunate and frustrating, since I just bought this powerful and expensive desktop specifically for audio production. Should I get a PCI interface instead? What about USB? People on this forum seem to do well with USB, though I assumed the slower interface would cause latency issues?

3. Reaper itself. This would be a bummer, since I love the program. The way to rule this out would be to try the Firebox with some other audio software and see if the issue persists. Since I can't get my Sonar Demo to even recognize the Presonus drivers (they show up as not functioning), are there any other trial versions of software I could download that are comparable to Reaper? I will try Audacity tonight and post the results.


Any other suggestions are always welcome, and good luck to all who are fighting with this issue! I just want to get to work already!
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