Please help, Buffer size / pops & clicks question!

S

Squashboy

New member
I've read what I could about pops/clicks/jumps here in the forum, but I still have a problem. I'm running the Gadgetlabs Wave 8/24, nTrack studio, with a 700 Mhz Pentium III, and a 7200 rpm 40 GB hard drive, and I'm getting pops and clicks. The nTrack manual says to increase the buffer size/number, which I did. I tried doubling the buffer size/number which seemed to help a little, though not completely, and now my computer does weird things like NOT record when I tell it to, and totally FREEZE up, jumping to a STRANGE BLUE SCREEN that won't go away until I reboot.

It took me six hours today to record four tracks because I had to re-record over the pops and clicks. There's got to be an easier way to do this. I don't think I'm recording too loud, and my computer is on it's own circuit.

I'm hoping some good soul out there can tell me what I'm doing wrong. Life is so good when this stuff works, but I feel like I'm at a dead end.

Squashboy.
 
Well a few things to check that have worked in the past:

- check to see that DMA is enabled on your hard drive (you are using win98 i assume). Right click My Computer, select device manager, select disk drives, double click on the drive, select settings. Is DMA enabled?

- Make sure your running the latest driver version for your devices, video, sound. Also try updating your version of Direct X to the most current. 7 at least.

- Before you start recording, end task everything but Explorer and Systray. Do this by hitting control Alt Delete, select the item and then end task. Rule out any other program that may be conflicting.

- Go to start>run type in msconfig. Look at startup Items. Uncheck anything you think you don't need in there. If your running a virus scanner disable it or better yet, uninstall it.

Last resort, but usually my first cause it's fast if you know what your doing. Reformat your drive, and bring your system up from scratch. Perhaps even physically remove hardware you don't need to narrow the problem down even more. If your system has not been reinstalled from scratch in quite some time , I would start here. Windows corrupts itself over time, and if you have a lot of junk installed on it, it makes troubleshooting that much harder.


The blue screen your getting can indicate all sorts of things. Next time it happens write it down and post it. It could be software related, but more often I've found it to be defective hardware - usually memory. If your memory is not a single DIMM try using 1 or the other DIMM's.

Good luck, these problems are frustrating, but not impossible to fix.



[Edited by Emeric on 10-29-2000 at 06:25]
 
Go to the Winmag site and run the Wintune diagnostic to see what the transfer rate of your hard drive is. I got clicks and pops when I first started with Cakewalk and Gadgetlabs because my transfer rate was too low. I put another driver in for the hard drive which increased the transfer rate drastically. No more clicks or pops.
 
I'll give it a try

Emeric and Monty, thanks for your help. I'll try all your suggestions and then check back. I hope it works. Thanks again,

Squashboy.
 
Pops and clicks can come from the video board.
I had that problem. Try moving around the mouse a lot both during playback and recording, and opening and closing windows, and moving around in the menues.
 
the blue screen of death. check win 98 system info in tools and see if your gadget lab card is shareing IRQ, goto gadget web site support tip and see which IRQ the card is suppose to share with. you might have to put the card own its own IRQ.
 
Squashboy I have a very similar hardware rig to yours although I am using Cakewalk 9. All the above suggestions are good stuff to check out. You didn't say how much RAM you had. My old music PC (Celeron 333 w/128 meg RAM) worked and sounded great when I recorded a few tracks, but would have a heart attack if I tried to record 8 tracks at once. I upgraded to a P3EB-553 and 256 megs RAM and its been perfect since. If you are using 128 meg or less, get more (its cheap).

Next suggestion (as stupid as it sounds) is to read the Gadget Labs manual carefully. It has some valuable program-specific configuration suggestions. It saved me a HUGE amount of time in tweaking Cakewalk to a good hardware fit. They also have a good website, email your exact problem to their tech support and let them offer suggestions.

I am also curious - is your OS a "clean" install? Or did you add the hardware to a PC with a lot of stuff on it? I did a fresh install on the PC and use it almost exclusively to Cakewalk (I have 4 other PCs so I can afford to do this). I also set a hardware config just for recording which disables the LAN card in the machine (again at Gadget Labs suggestion).

Let us know how things are going....
 
Things so far . . .

With a full time job, I haven't had too much of a chance yet to try out all of your suggestions. However, I did try to find out if DMA was enabled or not. I followed all the steps to get there, but DMA wasn't even an option! This is very strange to me because I have two computers (one much smaller, used for school/internet stuff), and the other computer had the same screen described on "settings" with DMA and a little box I could check or uncheck. But on my recording computer there wasn't even the box there. So what does this mean?

Also, I ran the wintune diagnostic, and it gave me a bunch of numbers, not much of which I understood. There was one curious thing though. It said my CPU was clocking in at 466 Mhz--significantly lower than I thought it would be. As far as hard drive transfer rate goes, I'm not sure which numbers to look at, and what counts as a "low" tranfer rate.

As far as RAM goes, I may very well be deficient. I will check that out too.

Everybody, I can't thank you enough for all your suggestions. Sometime this week I'll try everything out, and hopefully one of you is right on the money.
 
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