condenser crackles

[stupidfatnugly]

The 1394 should be the firewire port. The big phone looking one is ethernet / networking. Using it over firewire should be better, but if it's a slow system to start with, you might not be any better off. Probably not an issue on 2GHz boxes and better, but if you're near 800MHz, possibly problematic. But part of it depends on what's enabled / disabled on the system. Windows enables pretty much everything by default. Which is problematic by itself.

I have the option of firewire or USB with my external hard drive, which cost $250 so I think it's 2GHz or more( I'll have to check). My interface is just USB, so should I use the firewire port for the hard drive, considering that?

I should disable ACPI and wireless networking in windows; anything else?
I do use the wireless internet on the same computer.

 

[Shadow_7]

disabling the network while recording is good. Disabling ACPI is bad. ACPI controls the fan (cooling system), cpu scaling, and other management things that are done in software instead of hardware. Granted that with the right hardware / configuration you don't really need to disable the network completely. At least not in linux with a low latency kernel and realtime priority to the audio application / driver(s).

 

[stupidfatnugly]

My interface is just USB, so should I use the firewire port for the hard drive, considering that?

.

mbox2 = USB

hard drive = firewire

it's good?

 

[stupidfatnugly]

my hard drive has firewire 800 ports and I can't find a cable for that anywhere. I can keep looking but I wonder if I should even try

it's either USB or firewire and my interface is on a USB port.
I'm not sure if you guys are telling me to use the firewire option or not.

 

[Shadow_7]

Use the firewire option given a choice. It's a bit of a relic these days with express54 cards and SATA adapters. But it should still be an option. Otherwise upgrade your main drive to a higher capacity so you don't have certain issues. Recording video or audio implies a lot of things, like room to breathe in terms of storage space. 1GB per hour is getting off cheap in the recording biz.

 

[stupidfatnugly]

my external hard drive has usb and firewire ports. can i use a SATA adapter on it somehow?

what's the best way to rig this? I've got several other ports on the back of my computer(which I've no clue what they're for) but the hard drive has just the two firewire800's(9 pin I believe) and one USB port. my puter has a 4pin 1394 port.

can I adapt something? take my hard drive to a computer store and have them turn it into SATA?

 

[Shadow_7]

I think you're over thinking it. If you have some space left on your main harddrive (~1GB) then see if recording to there prevents your crackle. Otherwise we may be barking up the wrong tree to start with.

Try recording with audacity and see if it exhibits the same issues as protools. AFAIK, it does what it does in RAM first and only saves out when you tell it, and maybe if you run out of RAM. I prefer Ardour because it records to harddrive so if the app crashes, you're not left with nothing. But that may not be an option for you. And may not be a reasonable test for current needs. I don't think we've even identified the pop/crackle issue yet. We might have identified that it's inconsistent which would indicate some sort of hardware issue IMO. Limited bus, bad cables, bad mic, bad environment. Or it could be software related, realtime priority, slow cpu, trying to do too much at once.

Too many variables to pin it directly on the harddrive just yet. We need to take it out of the picture per say. By either using it on a different bus, or finding some other alternative. Being a USB enclosure, it's probably and older and slower IDE harddrive. So connecting that to sata would be difficult. Not that we need a super fast drive for audio only recording. We just need to isolate the audio device to it's own bus so we can rule out the mic and interface as the source of your issue.

Given that you're running the usb drive and usb audio interface on the same bus is problematic, but we can't definitively say that it's your issue. Although even if the audio interface and harddrive were both firewire, you could run into the same issues. Putting each on separate buses will help rule out bus / hardware issues relative to the machine in question.

One other option, if you have a second computer, is to setup the harddrive on it, and network to that machine to use that device over the network. It effectively does the same thing, but if it's the network that's the issue, we haven't ruled anything out. It's not completely rocket science, it just looks a lot like it some of the time. It could just be that you're clipping and that's the noise you're hearing. Without a sound sample of the issue, it's hard to tell.

 

[stupidfatnugly]

shadow youre the man I appreciate your help. you are like thiscool

I don't know if this matters but I have 2 USB ports on the side of my laptop and 4 USB ports on the back; and I have been plugging in, both the mbox2 and my ext. hard drive, to the USB ports in the back. would it make any difference if I put one into one of the ports on the side or is it all the same bus anyway? what does "the same bus" mean anyway? is that just all USB ports are the same USB bus?

I've tried some of dgatwood's suggestions and my laptop sound card was on the same PCI as one of my USB ports. I moved the soundcard so it's on it's own PCI but now I do have a "Standard Universal PCI to USB host controller" and a "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB host controller" on the same PCI. you know for the IRQ stuff?

what's AFAIK?

I do have cheapo USB cables(I don't even know where I got them from) I saw some $30 ones at best buy. should I get them or does it matter much?

It's a Storcase Rhino Jr. Firewire 800 hard drivehttp://www.storcase.com/support/pdf/FJR110_FW_a04.pdfI think this is the exact one. It's 232 GB I don't know if that is old or slow

I'll work on posting a sound sample

 

[Shadow_7]

shadow youre the man I appreciate your help. you are like thiscool

I don't know if this matters but I have 2 USB ports on the side of my laptop and 4 USB ports on the back; and I have been plugging in, both the mbox2 and my ext. hard drive, to the USB ports in the back. would it make any difference if I put one into one of the ports on the side or is it all the same bus anyway? what does "the same bus" mean anyway? is that just all USB ports are the same USB bus?

I've tried some of dgatwood's suggestions and my laptop sound card was on the same PCI as one of my USB ports. I moved the soundcard so it's on it's own PCI but now I do have a "Standard Universal PCI to USB host controller" and a "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB host controller" on the same PCI. you know for the IRQ stuff?

UHCI == usb 1.1 (1.0 compatible) aka Universal Host Controller.
EHCI == usb 2.0 aka Enhanced Host Controller.

You might try putting one on the back and one on the side. It might help, but I'd guess it's all tied to the same bus / interface internally so probably not. But they might be powered from different circuits which might help. Assuming this is your problem to start with. I still think you need to take the USB HDD out of the picture to identify or rule it out as the culprit.

 

[stupidfatnugly]

UHCI == usb 1.1 (1.0 compatible) aka Universal Host Controller.
EHCI == usb 2.0 aka Enhanced Host Controller.

so some of my ports are USB 1.1 and one is USB 2.0?

I'll try recording to my internal hard drive.

should I clean and defrag my external hard drive? don't know if I've ever done it before but I've used so little of it's capacity so far.

 

[Shadow_7]

so some of my ports are USB 1.1 and one is USB 2.0?

It's more like different faces of the same device. The difference is that USB 2.0 has a much faster bus speed. Otherwise it's the same hardware, connection, device. Although some of the older machines did have usb 1.1 plugs and usb 2.0 plugs. These days they're all one in the same. Unless you have a 5+ year (maybe 10+) old computer, I would suspect that all of your plugs are 2.0. It's more of a dual functionality thing to maintain compatibility to older devices.

Defragging the drive probably wouldn't help much. The USB bus speed is slow enough that a fragmented filesystem and an optimized one would probably run at about the same transfer rates over a USB bus.