I'm going berzerk trying to figure out where this jumpiness is coming from!!!

Whoopysnorp

Whoopysnorp

New member
I have an IBM PC that has a 700 Mhz Athlon in it (I upgraded from 500 Mhz), 352 MB of PC100 RAM (96 MB of it is the stuff that came in the machine, the other 256 is Micron), a TNT2 M64 video card, an SBLive, a Delta 66, a 17 GB 5400 rpm HD (apps), and a 40 GB 7200 rpm HD (audio). Motherboard is some bizarre brand (Anigma) with the old AMD 751 chipset, and the HD interface is UltraDMA/66. I've been gradually turning it into a machine that will record some audio. Trouble is, I'm having a horrendous problem with jumpy playback. I'm using n-Track with Delta's ASIO drivers, which has been problematic in the past, but which is supposed to work now. I've done all the tweaks: I've got my audio drive partitioned in 32k clusters, I've set the machine to 'network server', I've disabled read-ahead optimization, I close all programs but Explorer and Systray, I've got a separate hardware configuration for recording in which I disable the network card and the USB, and I tried reducing the graphics acceleration. None of that has eliminated my problem. It doesn't seem to matter how many tracks I play at once; 4 tracks of 24 bit 44.1 Khz audio does it. N-track's record VU meters jump every time the audio jumps, and the jumps seem more or less synchronized to the activity of the C: drive. I can't run a single plugin, as that makes the jumpiness many magnitudes worse. I've run a benchmarking test on my audio drive, and it claims to read data at an average rate of 30 MB/second. Is this enough? Does anybody have any idea what the problem is here?
 
4 tracks of 24/44.1? without plugins? Thats no good. This probably wont help, but defragment your drive.

Is there a way to increase n-track's processor usage? if so, maximimize it.

What version of the delta drivers are u using? .27 has been the most stable so far.
 
I haven't defragmented for about a week. I doubt that's it, but I'll give it a try.

I was using version .27. I just tried upgrading, and that made things worse. I'll be going back to the old drivers shortly.

There is a way to increase n-Track's processor usage; I'll give that a try. It doesn't seem like that's the problem, since the CPU meter stays around 3%, but you never know with this DAW stuff, I guess.
 
I had a wierd problem before - during playback, the tracks became about 1% shorter. Sort of like if a few frames every now and then were missing. When I defragged, it went away. When you're recording, you need to defrag very often. One week ago may very well be enough to cause problems.

/Ola
 
Hey Whoopy, how loaded is this drive? Do you have any drive analysis or cleanup tools installed? It almost sounds like the drive could have bad sectors or some other physical problem.

Unless you've got corrupted drivers, a bad ntrack install or a bad drive, I don't see what you're problem could be. The chipset or the memory shouldn't be an issue. I assume you're running '98?

I run a 1000 athalon, 512mb, 1 60gb 7200 drive with no partitions, delta66, no soundblaster and a cheesy video card. 3com ethernet card. No tweaks, no optimizations. I do run nortons utilities for scan disk and defrag. This system has worked without problems for over a year. 12 tracks with ntrack's menu of FX. No plugins.

Have you tried wiping the drive and starting over with fresh drivers? It's a pain in the ass but may be the answer. If you do, load one thing at a time so as to try and identify problem areas.

Guys, could he have an IDE issue between the two drives on this funky motherboard?
 
Yeah, I'm running 98 (I always forget to mention something!). Also, the C: drive is the master on the primary channel, and the D: drive is the master on the secondary channel. I also have a CD-RW drive as a slave on the primary and a DVD-ROM drive as a slave on the secondary. Just so the information is out there.

I actually reformatted my C drive and did a clean install of everything a few weeks ago. It was to correct a different problem, but it didn't affect this one.

The D drive isn't very loaded--I don't have any serious projects on it; just some test stuff. I think it has maybe 3 or 4 gigs on it. I don't have any drive analysis utililties except ScanDisk, which I haven't run yet. I'll give that a try. It's run on a reboot a few times, but I haven't done the whole surface scan thing. I do have HDTach, and that's what reported the 30 Mb/second usage spec.

I'll try some of this stuff and get back to you.
 
No changes. I did the thorough ScanDisk test, and it said all the sectors were fine (on both drives). I defragmented both drives, and no change. Increasing n-Track's processor usage didn't help either. I think I'm going to download a demo of some other multitrack prog and see if it does the same thing.

Can anybody think of any hardware that might interfere with a hard drive and cause these problems?
 
The torture never stops. Well, I tried in vain to find a demo of a program that supports ASIO. I couldn't figure out how to get Samplitude to install, Steinberg's server wasn't responding so I couldn't get Cubase, and Sonar didn't list my ASIO drivers. Finally I remembered the limited edition version of Logic that came with the Omni Studio. I installed that, selected the ASIO driver, and loaded up some tracks, and they played back fine. There was, however, a latency in the level meters, which doesn't happen in n-Track with ASIO drivers (one of the reasons I want to use them). So I don't know what the deal is. I guess I'll just use the MME drivers with larger buffers in n-Track until I can figure out what the fu*&%!@#cking problem is.

Man, and I was planning on composing some music today for my friend's movie. Instead I totally pissed it away trying to figure out this business.
 
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