Audiophile 2496 / Win XP / Cakewalk biting my ass....

  • Thread starter Thread starter RWhite
  • Start date Start date
R

RWhite

Well-known member
I am really, really getting annoyed with this combination....

I put up several earlier posts about how I cannot get the Audiophile to function at all in Sonar if WDM drivers are selected. If the option to use MME regardless is checked, it runs OK.

EXCEPT....

Really stupid of me not to notice this earlier, but it will also not function if the "driver bit depth" is selected as 24 rather than 16. I had not checked this earlier because everything I've been recording with it has been destined straight for CDR, so I wanted it at 16 anyways.

Now that I've started working with my own pre-existing original 24 bit music files, I went back to make adjustments. I can set "file bit depth" at 24. However the card apparently plays back and records at 16 bit regardless unless "driver bit depth" is at 24. What's worse, according to the Sonar docs this setting will automaticly dither down 24 bit data files to 16 if they are re-saved.

I've made test recording in every functioning combo and verified they are 16 bit. If 24 bit is selected, all options to use Delta disappear, and the software will simply not play.

And this behavior is true in both Pro Audio 9 and Sonar 2.1.

I have tried removing and re-installing drivers; using the delta un-installer software then re-installing; using the latest Beta drivers; and removing a Creative Audigy card that was the sharing the machine. The only remaining issue I can think of is the system also has an ATI All-In-Wonder card, which is another audio recording device. The last thing to try will be to remove that.

Is anyone else out there experiancing these sorts of issues? If what I read on this board is true, I can expect to never receive an answer from M-Audio Tech Support.
 
I presume you've already tried disabling the ATI WDM driver in device manager? I cannot get either the 2496 or Audigy WDM drivers to work unless I disable the ATI WDM. (I have ATI radeon + 2496 + Audigy.)
 
The All-in-Wonder shouldn't have anything to do with it. My older system had the AIW 128, my Audiophile and a SB Live and I never ran into WDM issues in Sonar.

Are you using an AMD system?
 
Thanks for the replys.

No, I have not yet tried disableing the ATI WDM driver, but I'm about ready to. Since I use that card all the time (TV and video capture functions), it was to be the last resort. I figured that when I ran out of other things to try I would just remove the card completely and see if that fixed it. I'll try it in a day or two.

Yes, I'm using an AMD system. To be precise:

Gigabyte GA-7VRX motherboard
VIA KT-333 chipset
AMD Thunderbird XP 1900 CPU
256 Megs DDR RAM
WD 120 gig HD
Maxtor 40 gig HD
ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder video
3COM 3C905B-TX network card
External USR 56K modem
External USB HP scanner, San Disk compact flash rader

I installed the motherboard just before buying the Audiophile, so the sound card has not been tried on any other PCs (yet)

The motherboard on-board audio / MIDI / Joystick is disabled in the BIOS.

I'm using VIAs 4in1 driver version # 443v
 
I would look to blame the motherboard chipset before considering it is the AIW's fault. I am tired of reading posts how the VIA chipsets don't get along with Delta series soundcards.
 
While I think the bad rep VIA has is an exaggeration, I did check out that theory. The only problem M-Audio mentions with relation to VIA chipsets is static & crackling, which is not a part of my problem.
 
You don't need to disable the whole card (by the way mine is an AIW too) just the ATI WDM Theatre Rage Audio in device manager (you don't need it anyway). I can use mine for video capture and TV still. I have used three motherboards ( 2 Asus, 1 gigabyte) and they have all exibited the same problem with these 3 cards. They had different chipsets so I doubt whether its just solely down to the usual AMD chipsets argument . But that's just my penny's worth!
 
Cool John, that's very encouraging! I will try that out tonight.
 
I still fail to see the association of the WDM audio driver from your ATI with your problems with the Audiophile. At one point, I had 3 devices making use of WDM drivers at the same time (Audiophile, ATI AIW and SB Live).

IMO your problems lie elsewhere.

Just because a device makes use of WDM drivers doesn't mean it will interfere with other WDM driver devices in your system.

If it works - hey - more power to ya....
 
There is a section of documentation in Sonar that says that if you don't have working WDM drivers for all Soundcards in the computer, you must disable WDM drivers for ALL soundcards within Sonar. This why I removed the Audigy from my system, because Creative's WDM driver for the Audigy is known to have issues.

If ATI's WDM driver for the All-In-Wonder is buggy, this could be causing a problem with that.

However I'm still at a total loss to explain why Sonar / Cakewalk refuses to recognise the Audiophile as a 24 bit card even under the older MME drivers.
 
Johnhoe, that was a great tip. Thanks. I did what you suggested, disabled the ATI WDM Theatre Rage Audio, and it partially solved my problem. Where before if I had WDM drivers selected in SONAR the Audiophile would not even be listed as a playback / recording device, now it is recognised.

I can now also select "24 bit driver" for the card and I don't get an instant error message. However the card still refuses to function at 24 bit - if you try to record or playback SONAR (or Caewalk) just sits there and nothing happens. It's totally non-functional until I switch it back to 16 bit.

So is there anyone out there using Cakewalk or SONAR with an Audiophile 2496 card, with "24 bit driver" selected, and having it really work? I'm begining to think my card just may be defective. But before I give up on it I'll put it into another computer.
 
I'm glad it worked. I don't really understand why it should, but it does! I suppose WDM drivers might try to compete for similar resources but I can't justify why it works. Have u also noticed that if u play a dxi softsynth (say Fm7) via the audigy midi ins and audigy audio out, the latency is much lower now than without the 2496 in place. Is this just my mistake?? My Audigy used to have a latency of around 30mS This was a noticeable lag. Now with the 2496 added the lag is almost imperceptible! Perhaps WDM drivers ineract with each other. I apologise if this is a mistake on my part! Perhaps I should have expected it.
 
As of yet I'm not doing any MIDI on that computer, just digital audio, and I banished the Audigy to another computer.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top