64 bit Reaper, Win 7, and Driver issue?

[riggler]

I had a pretty important session yesterday. Luckily it wasn't a live event. I've got Windows 7 64-bit with 5, count 'em 5 DAL Card Deluxe cards, and Reaper 64-bit. Now I gotta tell you so far I really love Reaper. It loads UBER-FAST, seems very efficient, isn't too bad to learn, etc...

But I had the worst instability / hangups ever yesterday. I was lucky that my client was very cool about it, and also lucky that I was able to finish tracking.

I would randomly lose all audio output, get a random pop every now and then IN THE AUDIO, then sometimes I'd get crazy repeating noise.

I then pulled out 3 of the cards, and moved the remaining 2 so that IRQs would get reassigned. I also did my best to make none of the Card Deluxes Analog Inputs or Outputs (what I was using) a Windows Default Device or Default Communication Device. (I set those to the Digital IO on the cards, but could not figure out how to have NO default device,etc).

Doing those things did help with stability, but I still had some problems after that, of output getting weird distortion out of nowhere, and loss of metering in Reaper. Restarting Reaper would clear it up for a while. No longer did I have to restart the WHOLE MACHINE!!

Need to rebuild it I think. Any ideas? I need a stable rig!!!

[steveo42]

5 DAL cards?
What kind of motherboard did you find that has enough slots to run them all?

I would sell the DAL cards and purchase a card that has all the inputs and outputs you require.

I'm amazed it works at all, to be honest!

[mtsproductions]

You are just asking for problems with that set up honestly, on another note though I just noticed this morning that win7 64 bit was doing that default device for audio was not available and i had to enable the onboard soundcard.
i used my tc interface in reaper with no problems but as soon as i tried playing an audio file outside of Reaper it came up with an error of no audio device being available?? I dunno might be a Microsoft update that did this?

[riggler]

I have a Gigabyte board that has Core 2 Quad support, a PCIe slot, and 5 PCI slots.

The Card Deluxes all chain together, and you set one of the cards to be the WavSync Master, which locks them all to one clock. It sounds very good, and believe it or not, I ran under XP with 4 cards for a while.

I am betting on this is a driver or IRQ issue though. Maybe I will consider selling these cards. BUT PLEASE NOTE, I removed 3 cards, reinstalled the 2 that were left, and still have problems!

So I'm not so sure it's the quantity of cards that is the problem here.