Drivers, crackling problem... what am I missing?!

  • Thread starter Thread starter carlosguardia
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carlosguardia

carlosguardia

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First off I want to say hello to all my fellow Sonar afficionados!!! I had been absent from recording for a while, trying to work (day job) and make some money so I would update a few things in my studio. I had been reluctant to change my OS and Sonar 3 but a few circumstances forced me to upgrade. For one, my house/studio was broken into and some of my stuff got stolen, including my spanish made nylon string acoustic/electric that I treasured and played so much!!! Anyways... Another reason for the upgrade was that my PC was full of spyware and viruses and my HD's were so full of crap that I just decided to backup the necesary stuff, format and reinstall...

Now, to make the story short, I spent some top dollar and practically redid my whole system. I bought new studio monitors (including the video monitor that went from a 17" to a 21" trinitron), I bought a new video card, a new motherboard new RAM and in the Software department I upgraded to Sonar 4.0 Producer and the OS went from my old reliable W2K to XP.
I've spent hours installing everything and making sure I put everything in folders, keep my HD's and my desktop much cleaner than before, and do things in a way that I can have everything well organized.
Now, to my question/problem ...
I installed my Audiocards (Delta 1010LT and SBLive 5.1 Platinum (I know what you all might think but I still like the interface, the fact that I can plug my monitors using the optical out, and not to mention my addiction to sound fonts and the vienna sf editor)). So, I then installed Sonar, my plugins, and decided to do some testing. Here's where it all begins... cracklings and pops, not to mention some unusual and obnoxious tempo changes!!!!!! I'm using both cards WDM drivers the driver bit depth to 16, 10msec latency (Which MIGHT be the issue) and the Maudio latency to 512.
Before continuing to fool around with the settings I decided to come to you gurus of the DAW world and see if any of you might think of something I might have missed in my excitement to retake my recordings.... Thank you SO much in advance for your SUPERvaluable input.
Saludos,
Carlos
 
By the way, these are the specs of my system just in case:
CPU PIV 2.80 GHZ
Intel D865G Motherboard
1.024 GB of RAM
Nvidia 128MB Video Card
Creative Sound Blaster Live Platinum 5.1
Delta 1010LT
HD "C" 40GB at 7200 RPM (OS and Software)
HD "F" 40GB at 7200 RPM (Audio Data Folder)
HD "G" 80GB USB Drive (Where I keep mp3's, pictures, videos, et al)
Sony DVD burner
TEAC SCSI CD Burner
Seagate SCSI DAT Drive
 
If the SBLive is disabled, do you still get clicks and pops?

Try changing the I/O Buffer Size under OPTIONS - AUDIO - ADVANCED to something bigger than the default 64. I had similar clicks and pops after moving to v4 which were sorted out by using a value of 512.

Ciao,

Q.
 
Thanks for your input Q. I tried setting the Delta's DMA Buffer size to 512, the i/o Buffer size to 512 inside Sonar, the mixing latency to 60Msecs and I still get clicks pops and crackles (It's almost a breakfast cereal what's coming from my monitors when I play back a couple of simple guitar tracks!)... I must admit to my ignorance of XP and how to optimize it's settings for optimal performance (audiowise that is, of course). Any other ideas guys?!

Carlos
 
Is the M-audio card sitting on its own IRQ? Does the problem go away if you remove the other card from the box altogether?

Q.
 
No, unfortunately the MAUDIO Delta 1010LT is sharing IRQ 17 with:
CNet PRO200WL PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (LAN Card)
Intel (R) ICH5/ICH5-M SMBus Controller 24D3 (Intel Smbus 2.0 Driver)

About uninstalling the Creative, it doesnt affect the snaps crackles and pops.

I have no idea how to modify the IRQ settings... my only thoght would be to uninstall everything and only install the SoundCard so that XP will assing it a unique IRQ... but what will keep XP from sharing the IRQ later when I reinstall the rest of my hardware?!?

Carlos
 
First step, get the SBLive outta the box.

When I had mine installed, I suffered from cracks and pops. The moment I removed it and got rid of the damn drivers, all was well.

And you really need to clean the registry of the drivers. As I recall, a simple uninstall was not sufficient.

(This was a while ago, but I believe it still holds true).
 
brzilian said:
Place the 1010 in a different PCI slot.
Click to expand...

Do this first and then see what happens.

If it doesn't work, then do the registry clean-up process as per Fraser.

Good luck!

Q.
 
I used to have a similar problem and I admit I had less than spectacular results when i tried all of the above. An old engineer told me to save my projects files as bundles and then try to run a bundled project to see if I still got the cracks/pops. I'm sure there's some long explanation about defragmentation and all but if you work from a bundle then there is no fragmentation to contend with and lo and behold no more pops.

Worked for me. Might be a better more permanent fix but bundles works fine for me.

If this doesn't work then disregard. Good luck
 
The situation you describe is not factually correct and even if it was, it should not be an issue with modern hard drives and their access speeds unless you had thousands of tracks.

The postulation that just because a file is saved as a bundle it won't be subject to file fragmentation is wrong. If the file is being written through the Windows file system - either FAT or NTFS - then it will be laid down on the hard drive according to the rules of the operating system itself.

The operating system has no way of knowing whether it is a bundle or a normal project file - it just receives the instruction to write the file and goes and plonks it in the first available space it finds.

The only way I can see this having any effect is with old hard drives or those that are incorrectly set up for operation in Windows, Sonar or both.

Q.
 
carlosguardia, I caught this site from another thread. (musicxp.net) seemed to have some good info on tuning you computer. Hope it helps.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I've been tweaking and testing and now the cracks and pops are much less than before, however, the system is far from what it was when I was using win2k with sonar 3.0. There are some timing issues as I feel that the metronome slows down and I get some delay on the monitoring of the tracks (of course this might be due to the mixing latency that I chose). I'll give that site musicxp.net a try and see if I can find handy info. Thanks again.

Carlos
 
another issue

disregarding the cracks and pops I get, I just noticed another BIG problem while recording with the delta 1010lt!!! Here's what I did, I armed a track in a brand new project, I configured the input to be channel 6 from my 1010 which is connected to the output of my tube preamp; I plugged a mic into the preamp, configured the metronome for recording and playback every beat on a midi note (a closed hihat) and then as I recorded, I clapped into the mic on every hit of the HH (every beat of the metronome) as it recorded, I saw that the wave of my clapping formed almost exactly where it should but when I hit the spacebar (stop) Sonar "redid" my waves and now, as I play them, they start to speed to the point of being a full beat ahead by around the 9th measure!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WTF?!?! What am I not reading/doing right?!?!
As always, thanks for all your help guys.
Carlos
 
OK, all this crap that is going on is related to the fact that your M-Audio sound card is sharing an IRQ and doesn't have one to itself.

The easiest way to change what IRQs different things are using is to open the case and change the slot that the M-Audio card is using. Different PCI slots on your motherboard will use different IRQs.

Swap the slots, reboot, check Device Manager for the IRQ listing. Repeat process until you get a configuration where the sound card is alone on an IRQ.

It also wouldn't hurt to ensure that your motherboard's drivers, (particularly the PCI bridge device), are updated with the latest release applicable to your board. Check the mfg's website.

Relax - you are nearly there!

Ciao,

Q.
 
Thank you Q, I've been reluctant to open the box and fool around with the card itself because I remember that a few years back, I did this and not only did Win2k (mind you, a different OS than the one I'm using now) not recognize the card (had to reinstall drivers and all) but I also had some other problems (video card malfunctions et al). But I guess that if I do it carefully, it'll work. I should mention this though:
1. My Motherboard is brand new, and it does have 6 PCI slots of which only 4 are being used and in this order:
slot 1: empty
slot 2: SCSI card
slot 3: LAN card
slot 4: Creative SB card
slot 5: empty
slot 6: Maudio Delta 1010lt

2. I have disabled stuff that I don't need or use (ie the Com port, built in sound card etc)

3. I still see in the device manager that there are many IRQ's that are "NOT?" being used and many are being shared... here's the exact list:
(ISA) 0 System Timer
(ISA) 1 Standard 101/102 ps/2 Keyboard
(ISA) 6 Standard Floppy Disk Controller
(ISA) 8 System CMOS/real time clock
(ISA) 9 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System
(ISA) 13 Numeric Data Processor
(ISA) 14 Primary IDE Channel
(ISA) 15 Secondary IDE Channel
(PCI) 16 Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D2
(PCI) 16 Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24DE
(PCI) 17 CNet PRO200WL PCI Fas Ethernet Adapter
(PCI) 17 Intel(R) ICH5/ICH5-M SMBus Controller -24D3 (Intel 2.0 Smbus driver)
(PCI) 17 M-Audio Delta 1010LT
(PCI) 18 Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
(PCI) 18 Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controller - 24D7
(PCI) 19 Creative SB Live! Series
(PCI) 19 Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D4
(PCI) 22 Adaptec AIC-7850 PCI SCSI Controller
(PCI) 23 Intel(R) 82801EB USB2 Enhanced Host Controller -24DD

One quick (and maybe stupid) question, should I uninstall (and/or remove) the device/s that I'm going to unplug and switch before I do so?!

Thanks so much,
Carlos
 
Nope - just swap the cards around. Note the original order so you can always return to "ground zero".

And do check out musicxp.net - it's good!

Also - don't stress if you can't get the card on its own - while it is the best option, I have had PC's sharing IRQs happily before - it seems to be more related to the exact combination rather than a "Yes, it works" or "No, it doesn't" type of equation.

Good luck!

Q.
 
One thing that I found that works best for me when moving cards around....
A little more time consuming but, when you remove a card leave it out. restart your computer, then turn your comp. off again. reinstall the card and turn your comp. on again. Also, remember before you touch the card when your computer is off. Hold the back of the case for a few seconds, this should help to ground you. Try not to move your feet around to much while working on removing and reinstalling also.
 
ive heard of some people recommending a fresh install and then install one card per boot (itsometimes helps windows assign things)? but this is always a last resort.

the reason your card was not recognzed when you swapped it before was a conflict, my current computer took 4 or 5 different arrangements of cards to have a correct working order.

good luck
 
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