Hardware debugging..pops and clicks... you know the deal

Lucian · 11-28-2008, 09:58 PM

Well I bought a cheap quad core with 4 gig ram and a 72000 sata for music.
I am usinig a big old IDE drive for the OS. Anyway, I had this same problem with a dual 800 mhz ancient dell, I use ez-drummer, multi-out and slap rocket compression on bass,snare and toms, record maybe 2-3 audio tracks of guitar or bass, a track of SF2 with yanello's dark close piano and that's about it, I forget how many tracks ezdrummer is but all-in-all, under 20 tracks total.

On my old dell, I would have to render most of everything to continue and now with the new quadcore, I have to do the same thing.

dpclat has me in the green forever. I think the trouble maybe I am using a delta-66 PCI card. I tried the new updated driver and no dice, no sound, what a horrible horrible driver. I had to system restore back to the driver that I got with the card. ASIO4all gives me no sound. I use ASIO4all on my old crappy single 1.2 CPU notebook with AC97 audio and get amazing latency.

I just don't understand, is it the delta-66? even on like 8 tracks of ezdrummer and 2 audio tracks I start to get the dreaded red flash and have to boost the buffer to like 2048 to be pop free which sux.

If you are still reading this hehe, here is a long hw report:

https://stash.reaper.fm/oldsb/309227/Report.txt

This whole ordeal leaves me musically uninspired as I might as well stay on my dell dual 800 mhz box. Help me Obi-wan, you're my only hope.

Billoon · 11-28-2008, 10:31 PM

Hmm, im using a Delta44 with the latest drivers(on xp sp2 and vista, which are different drivers) without any probs. I think its the same drivers for the Delta66 as well.

Just some ideas...

Recently got a new computer too that came with a sata drive. I found i got better performance using the sata drive for the os and my old ide for recording to.

In the past, i had a problem with pops/clicks using the motherboards onboard graphics. A pci graphics card fixed that.

dub3000 · 11-28-2008, 10:46 PM

the delta pci series are great cards.

i would guess it's a problem with your drive. is it running in DMA or PIO mode? info here: http://forums.vso-software.fr/how-to...-xp-t2796.html

dub3000 · 11-28-2008, 10:51 PM

actually, i take that back - that report says it's in dma mode. most of that looks like your machine is pretty decent.

have you considered doing a totally clean XP install? you might have some weird old cruft on there that's making everything suck. i'm thinking things like antivirus programs, torrent programs, stuff like that.

Lucian · 11-29-2008, 12:57 AM

Hi Dubb,
It was a clean install so we can rule that out.

The video card is a higher end PCI-E so onboard video is a non issue.
It does have onboard audio that I also use for normal computer stuff like playing mp3s,etc...It has this IDT app in the sys tray that runs audio and is supposed to be asio compatible but when I set it and pick it in reaper, I get no audio from reaper...

So basically, the delta-66 is only seen by reaper and works...all other audio programs use the idt app an access onboard audio...just more info

dub3000 · 11-29-2008, 05:14 PM

okay, we're getting into 'weird voodoo' territory here. you have the most up to date video drivers, right?

also, does it freak out with a session w/ loads of audio tracks but no plugins? if it works fine at low latencies on an empty session, it might be plugin related.

have you tried clearing your reaper prefs and starting again from defaults?

try going into video card options and turning "video card acceleration" down a notch or two, also turn off write combining and seeing if that fixes anything.

roygbiv · 11-29-2008, 05:42 PM

I vote with the SATA drive as being the culprit.

Can't give you the details (as I don't remember them), but basically I tracked down the problem with getting my Aardvark Aark24 cards to work on my new system as being due to problems with the SATA drives.

I think the problem is that some of the older PCI cards have drivers that are trying to write data directly to the disk. Since these drivers were written before the SATA technology was implemented, weird stuff happens.. Just my theory.

Anyway, I Never could resolve the issue. So, what I do is just use my two Aark 24's in my old Dell for tracking, then save the files to an external eSATA drive, then import that into my fancy new computer for mixing.

Works fine. This process has the added benefit of ensuring I have several backups of my material!

Finnish · 12-02-2008, 11:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dub3000

okay, we're getting into 'weird voodoo' territory here. you have the most up to date video drivers, right?

also, does it freak out with a session w/ loads of audio tracks but no plugins? if it works fine at low latencies on an empty session, it might be plugin related.

have you tried clearing your reaper prefs and starting again from defaults?

try going into video card options and turning "video card acceleration" down a notch or two, also turn off write combining and seeing if that fixes anything.

My laptop seems to be in the weird voodoo/black horrormagic-area, also. Everything in the system seems to be tuned in the right way, concerning audio rec&play. But still, some clicks/pops here and there that take away the musical hard-on in a second.

I've been thinking about my internal SATA-drive and SATA-drivers? Can it be the **cker that messes my audio somehow?

I'm in the stage where ATI Radeon HD3450 is the one to blame, I'm messing ATM with reducing video card accel. Is write combining a major factor? What does it do? I'm also checking out solutions/apps to underclock my ATI to see if it helps, or not.. Well, anyway, I want this nightmare to end, someway or another.