new user: audio troubles

[garyg]

hi, new to cakewalk and stumbling at the first hurdle...

tried the sonar demo and loved it; best interface i've come across. thought carefully about what i wanted to do and bought a new card (maudio audiophile) so i could record at 24bit and a copy of homestudio 2002 (more than enough facilities for my minimal recordings)

the problem: audio just doesn't work, i get dropouts constantly after only a few seconds of playback (audio tracks and virtual instruments). i've tried it with win98se and win2000pro, both installed on clean 'audio only' os partitions but it still drops out in exactly the same point in my test file. i've tried increasing the latency obviously (around 5secs at the moment! ), using different drivers, applied all the usual system optimizations... in case it's important, i don't get any glitching or cracks/pops; audio just stops with the dropout indicator lit.

i must be missing something fundamental but i don't know what. is there something i need to know about HS or sonar? i've had numerous 'other' midi+audio seqs running fine (cubasis with a tiny latency...)

any thoughts, gratefully received...

.gary

[dachay2tnr]

Couple of thoughts - How full is your hard drive(s)? When was the last time you defragged? What is your swapfile set at?

Also you didn't say anything about your system. Can we assume it's not a 200 MHz PII? How much memory? How many HDD's? What speed HDD's?

[garyg]

sorry, i assumed my system should handle HS so didn't bother mentioning it...

it's a self-built 1ghz p3 on an asus csusl-2 mobo, 512mb crucial ram, matrox g200 vid (oldie but goodie...) audiophile card and 2 maxtor 7200 drives (one 30gb dedicated audio partition).

swapfile set at twice physical ram (so 1024), all other tweaks as the pro-rec sites recommendations. also disabled all irrelevant services (from a list posted on the sound-on-sound forum)

also installed win2k as a standard pc so no ACPI (APCI? i forget... )

it's just such a major and 'non-standard' problem: affects virtual instruments and audio streamed from HD, doesn't affect other apps... the usual glitches and stuff i can deal with...

oh, tried moving the audiophile to a different slot too just in case it was some weird irq thing.

thanks for replying,
gary.

[dachay2tnr]

Yeah, your system should handle everything OK. However I wanted to avoid spending a lot of time trying to diagnose the problem, only to find it's a 486 system with 1MB of RAM.

Sounds like you've been around the block, and done most of the recommended tweaks. My suspicion is some problem with the hard drives. Have you enabled DMA? Defragged?

Lastly could be some physical problem with the drives. Have you tried swapping them (OS and Audio)? Or swapping cables. Could be a bad hard drive or cable - unfortunately it happens. Do you have any software that you can test their performance with?

[wfaraoni]

Hi Im also a newbie , but I was wondering what the audio record bit depth and rate is set at. If its too high you will get dropouts. Try setting it at a lower depth/rate and see if that helps.

[bamboo]

1. Make sure SP2 for Win2k is installed.
2. You can stop Sonar from dropping out by editing an ini file (don't remember which, search help for "dropouts")
3. Make sure you reprofile your card after each tweak.
4. Make sure you have the latest drivers and previous ones have been properly uninstalled.
5. 5 ms latency may be a bit too low. Mine is somewhere at 8 or 10.
6. Did you try to play with buffer size?
7. If it's the only file that gives you troble, try copying all tracks and pasting them into a new file.

just my 0.02

[dachay2tnr]

5 ms latency may be a bit too low

Hmmmm... your original post said 5 secs, not 5 ms. If it is, in fact, 5 ms, then bamboo is correct. You won't get much in the way of playback with 5 ms latency. You will want to increase it. On the other hand, 5 sec is outrageously high. Normally something around 100 ms should be fine, unless you are trying to use input monitoring.

[garyg]

that was me just clutching at straws... dragged everything as far to the right as I could just so I knew it wasn't that.

you find 5 secs too high for mixing then?

bamboo, what do you mean by drivers being "properly uninstalled"? I've installed hundreds of drivers over the years but never really un-installed anything before... do you mean checking there are no lingering entries in the registry and stuff?

thanks for all the suggestions, I'll clear time to have a real good session and sort this out once and for all.

.gary

[Jim Y]

A 5 second dropout interval sounds to me like you have auto insert notification active for a cd/dvd drive which it is by default in all versions of Windows. Every 5secs or so, Windows check to see if you have changed the CD, bizarre but true.
As you have the use of Win2000pro, I would use it in preferance to 98. The only way to disable auto insert notification in Win2000 is to download a prog called TweakUI from microsoft.
Doesn't this site have a tutorial somewhere on optimising Win2000 for audio?
In short you...
Disable any power management and any ports you dont need in the bios.
Format hard drive at FAT32.
Install win2000
Install Service pack 2 (3 coming soon?)
Install DirectX 8.1 for Win2000.
Install motherboard drivers.
Ensure in hardware properties that all drives use "DMA if available"
Use TweakUI (for Win2000) to disable Auto insert notification.
Turn off screen savers, system sounds etc...
Install the latest drivers for all your sound and video cards.
Set display properties to the size you want but don't use more than 16bit color.
Install your apps.
Defragment the drive.
Phew! And that's just the basics!