Slackmaster2K
Gone
Your trusty guinnea pig here
A long time ago I tried the June 1st Delta Win2k WDM drivers and posted that they were very poor performers. Well, last night I decided to make another go at it.
It turns out that although the drivers are indeed dated 6/1/01 on the website, they've been in almost constant update. The version history dates go into late August. Pretty poor on the part of m-Audio to do updates like that.
The latest drivers do seem to work ok on Windows 2000 in applications that do WDM, DS, or MME. However, I *think* that they broke ASIO. I have two ASIO applications, n-Track and Buzz Tracker, and both crash immediately when I try to do ASIO playback. I've reinstalled n-Track and even upgraded to the new 3.0 last night. No luck. Both applications report memory read errors at the SAME address, so I'm guessing the drivers are goofy.
I tried using the new WDM support in n-Track with the latest results, and had some success. With a latency of 0.05 seconds I could mix with only subtle crackle when adjusting certain parameters (EQ, effects). It seems a little more noticable than what I was doing with the ASIO drivers though, for which I also used a latency of 0.05 seconds. I'm not sure I understand the new Delta control panel at all. There is a single setting for "DMA latency" which replaces the seperate controls for Wave and ASIO buffers. When I crank this setting to its maximum, not matter what I set the buffers in n-Track to, playback stutters like crazy. However, if I set the DMA value to its LOWEST setting of 2ms and set the n-Track buffers for 0.05 seconds of playback latency, everything is fine. Goofy eh?
Anyone else with the Delta on Win2k with any news to report? I'd sure like to use the new drivers because:
a) They're multiclient. It would be nice to be able to play from both a wave editor and multitracker without having to close one or the other.
b) They allow the selection of individual pairs of inputs and outputs from any windows application.
c) Better low latency WDM support.
FYI, to install new Delta drivers, you should also download and run the Delta Driver Uninstaller from the m-Audio website to remove your existing driver. I found this procedure to be kinda goofy on my system though:
- Like an idiot I ran the uninstaller like an idiot before manually uninstalling the delta from the device manager. This caused a hard stop (blue screen).
- I brought my system back up and verified that the Delta was still working and that nothing had been uninstalled. I went to the device manager and chose to remove the delta, and again I got a hard stop.
- I booted into safe mode, then disabled the delta, and then uninstalled the delta. This worked, so I ran the delta uninstaller and it finished without any errors.
Slackmaster 2000
A long time ago I tried the June 1st Delta Win2k WDM drivers and posted that they were very poor performers. Well, last night I decided to make another go at it.
It turns out that although the drivers are indeed dated 6/1/01 on the website, they've been in almost constant update. The version history dates go into late August. Pretty poor on the part of m-Audio to do updates like that.
The latest drivers do seem to work ok on Windows 2000 in applications that do WDM, DS, or MME. However, I *think* that they broke ASIO. I have two ASIO applications, n-Track and Buzz Tracker, and both crash immediately when I try to do ASIO playback. I've reinstalled n-Track and even upgraded to the new 3.0 last night. No luck. Both applications report memory read errors at the SAME address, so I'm guessing the drivers are goofy.
I tried using the new WDM support in n-Track with the latest results, and had some success. With a latency of 0.05 seconds I could mix with only subtle crackle when adjusting certain parameters (EQ, effects). It seems a little more noticable than what I was doing with the ASIO drivers though, for which I also used a latency of 0.05 seconds. I'm not sure I understand the new Delta control panel at all. There is a single setting for "DMA latency" which replaces the seperate controls for Wave and ASIO buffers. When I crank this setting to its maximum, not matter what I set the buffers in n-Track to, playback stutters like crazy. However, if I set the DMA value to its LOWEST setting of 2ms and set the n-Track buffers for 0.05 seconds of playback latency, everything is fine. Goofy eh?
Anyone else with the Delta on Win2k with any news to report? I'd sure like to use the new drivers because:
a) They're multiclient. It would be nice to be able to play from both a wave editor and multitracker without having to close one or the other.
b) They allow the selection of individual pairs of inputs and outputs from any windows application.
c) Better low latency WDM support.
FYI, to install new Delta drivers, you should also download and run the Delta Driver Uninstaller from the m-Audio website to remove your existing driver. I found this procedure to be kinda goofy on my system though:
- Like an idiot I ran the uninstaller like an idiot before manually uninstalling the delta from the device manager. This caused a hard stop (blue screen).
- I brought my system back up and verified that the Delta was still working and that nothing had been uninstalled. I went to the device manager and chose to remove the delta, and again I got a hard stop.
- I booted into safe mode, then disabled the delta, and then uninstalled the delta. This worked, so I ran the delta uninstaller and it finished without any errors.
Slackmaster 2000