Latency, Buffers, and Pops from Hell!!!

Defrag your audio drive. Turn off the virtual memory/paging file. Reboot. Delete the pagefile.sys file after the reboot. Defrag 2-3 times. Turn your virtual memory/paging file back on and set it for minimum 2 and maximum 1.5x the amount of ram you have. Reboot.

Make sure you profile your card any time you change the M-Audio buffer settings. If your getting pops, start increasing the M-Audio buffer settings, reprofile in Sonar after each change. Keep going up until they go away.

You can also tweak the buffers in Sonar for fine tuning. I find that once I get the popping out, I then lower the M-Audio drivers one setting. Reprofile and then I fine tune in Sonar and that's where I get the lowest latency without pops.

Disable the onboard sound card and make sure that Windows Media player is set to your M-Audio card for playback. This way you are monitoring your final MP3 or Wave results on the same card. Otherwise, you might find your final mixes sound dramatically different than what Sonar sounds like.

Make sure your picture cache under folder locations is pointing to its own seperate folder.

Do you have the latest drivers for video, audio and Sonar?

That's all I can think of, except buy another hard drive as suggested by others, keep Sonar and all of your audio work on this 2nd drive.
 
powderfinger said:
Well, I hope I can get it going without buying more stuff.
Click to expand...

While it *could* come down to needing a second hard drive, I think you have been given a bunch of *cost free* suggestions to try first.

For ex., have you tried switching to a different Delta driver yet? They just released a new one - version .46 - which I'm downloading as I type this. It addresses a couple of Sonar issues (although not the one you are facing).
 
dachay2tnr said:
For ex., have you tried switching to a different Delta driver yet?
Click to expand...

Yup. Downloaded that. It's what helped getting latency down, but still having the random crackle problem......I'm going to go ahead and try the PCI scheduling from the Cakewalk thread along with the defrag. I hope that helps.
 
powderfinger said:
I'm going to go ahead and try the PCI scheduling from the Cakewalk thread along with the defrag. I hope that helps.
Click to expand...

I'd really encourage you to drag out your motherboard manual and check out the page which shows the IRQ assignments for the various PCI slots on the board. Depending on which one/s of these you plug different cards into, you will get different IRQ assignments for the sound card, video card etc.

If it is a resource sharing sort of conflict - something grabbing priority of your PC when it shouldn't be - then swapping cards about should help.

Try and get it so that the sound card you are recording with is not sharing an interrupt (IRQ) with anything else and try and get it above the USB bridges in order of priority.

Also ensure you grab the utility listed in that other thread which allows you to change PCI latency timing settings. In a quest for good 3D gaming speed, a lot of video cards will have a stupidly high priority for the video card when it is just doing DAW work. Turning this down will help. It may be as simple as the video card grabbing too many resources when it attempts to scroll the screen and update the confidence waveform recording.

If none of that works, then I would go ahead and back everything up and re-partition the hard drive into an OS + Apps and an Audio Data partition. You can use something like Partition Magic to do this for you so you don't have to reformat and stuff about.

If you still have no joy, do a test install of a clean version of your OS and install only Sonar. Install all the latest drivers for sound/video etc. and re-test it.

Good luck!

Q.
 
powderfinger said:
Yup. Downloaded that. It's what helped getting latency down, but still having the random crackle problem......I'm going to go ahead and try the PCI scheduling from the Cakewalk thread along with the defrag. I hope that helps.
Click to expand...

Have you tried increasing your latency again - increasing the buffer size?

That could make it less pop-prone
 
Well....I'm still clueless....things I've tried.....

1. changing any and all latency settings in both the software and hardware
2. switched PCI slots so the card is on its own IRQ
3. downloaded the program that can chage PCI scheduling...tweaked as suggested
4. defragged the harddrive
5. tried the XP tweaks for audio
6. installed new drivers for both the soundcard and the video card

The only thing I can think of is to buy a new harddrive...which is gonna really piss me off if that doesn't work cause I don't actually 'need' the space

Thanks for the help guys...any suggestions that haven't been covered would be welcome....

Also, for clarifiaction...it's not a constant poping or skipping....it'll only happens once every 2-3 minutes, but enough to ruin the track..........anyhow...thanks again
 
- Did you install 2.2?
- Is the other sound card still enabled?
- Have you tried the different driver rev.'s as per Dachay?
- Have you repartitioned? Do this before springing for a new HD.
- Have you really cleared out everything? Try something like Ad-Aware and SpyBot-Search and Destroy to clean out any crap which may be interfering.
- Are you re-profiling the card and/or deleting the AUD.INI each time you make a change?
- It's also a longer shot, but it might be worthwhile seeing if there is a BIOS update for your motherboard - particularly anything that deals with PCI bus resource allocation.

Has this always happened? If not, what's changed?

Q.
 
Is instant messenger, AOL or some other type program active?

Is your network card sharing an IRQ, or your Mouse for that matter?

Are you using ACPI for bus management?

Screen savers, are they off?

Are background services selected as a priority?

Could be the cache in that older processor is small and dumps out on a regular basis, might have to go to a new MB and processor.

I'm grabbing at straws but just throwing out some ideas.

Did you turn off that other soundcard?
 
If you guys were to go with the new harddrive option...what kind of harddrive would you get?

I've read enough to believe that getting a new HD is worth doing, even if it doesn't solve the problem.
I'm looking to spend under $100.
 
Qwerty said:
I'd just get an ATA-100 IDE 7200 RPM drive.

Q.
Click to expand...
That's pretty much it. The only other thing I would consider is the quietness of the drive. Noisy drives can be a problem in recording.
 
Qwerty said:
How goes it, Mr Finger?

Q.
Click to expand...

Looks like I got things worked out.

I'm not sure what did it, but I went back and installed the .27 driver, I also installed a new audio only harddrive.

Had a weekend of glitch free recording!!!

Thanks for the help everyone!
 
powderfinger said:
I'm not sure what did it. . .
Click to expand...

Probably the HD. It's always the most costly thing. :D

Actually, I do suspect it was the disk being interupted by some OS activity that caused the pops.

Glad to hear you got it worked out.
 
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