For you Tascam Folks

  • Thread starter Thread starter rustyfingers
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An inch of success! I got the 1884 physical controls to work with the Sonar . Now if I could just get some decent sound out of it, I'd be ready to get started. The audio sounds like some weird feedback loop....ringy...distorted. Played back really well at first but then died. Can't get a midi sound out of it at all. I've tried every setting I can think of so far...changed the latency...on and on... I'll get it soon. I feel it. I think the 1884's going to be a really nice board. It has a pretty solid feel to it. Just waiting for those $300 FE-8s.
 
FW-1884.. finally got some sound out of it. It will only work on one latency setting. I had to set the 1884 to 64 and the Sonar's buffers at 64 with latency slider at 63.9 to get it to sound right. Trial and error. Wasting time. Any movement from that...ringing distortion. The Sonar freezes up frequently. The 1884 loses communication with Sonar regularly. I did actually get a little 6 track demo done yesterday. Drums, 3 guitar parts, bass. It sounds very very good. But then I decided to try the system performance tweak in XP to optimize for performance, background services, write to cache ( something like that ) and blam - XP crashed yet again. Fifth time. At least I know exactly what I did before it erased the system files this time. I'm gonna track down the problem before I even start fooling with the music system again. I had a computer tech at the house yesterday who'd never seen the error messages I have. < WINDOWS: Delay Write Failed. Unable to save all the data for the file E:\$Mft. Data has been lost. > Same for a bunch of other files and system folders. Anybody ever seen this? I love the sound and the concept of the Tascam/Sonar but I'm already getting sick of being forced to learn computer junk instead of making music. About ready to toss it all and get an Akai DSP 24 and a big SCSI drive.
 
Hmmm.

Done some searches on Google for the error message your getting and I've found a few different explanations.

Found this from Maxtor (what is your hard drive ?)

Event ID 50 and 51 are generic errors that may occur anytime paging information is requested from a drive. Similar Event IDs are 9, 11 and 15. A paging operation is defined as anytime the operating system writes or reads data from memory to drive, or reads from the hard drive and writes to memory. These errors are not caused by the external storage device. The error may be related to problems in either the USB / ATA / SCSI / 1394 controller sub system or another storage device

Another google page suggests that it is related to ATI drivers ??

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/atiproblem.htm


Two things I would check. I know that you've already installed SP1, but there are a few hotfixes available for USB and I think Firewire. Double check that there are no updates left for your system.

I would also make sure that you set your PC to "always on" in the power options under control panel.

Sorry to hear your having so many issues getting it running. I was lucky enough that I was able to borrow an 1884 from the local music shop so that I could make sure I wasn't going to have any of these issues. I think if I was running into your problems I'd be banging my head on the wall by now, causing way more brain damage than I already have..
 
Thanks! I'll have my internet (finally) hooked up by tomorrow night so I'm gonna spend this weekend searching my brains out till I get to the root of this abomination. There's probably a patch or something out there somewhere that I'm missing. But it's only crashing on the XP that I'm tweaking. The other one's fine. This one was fine for over a week until I was possessed once again to try the tweak. Well, it wasn't working well with the Sonar/1884, but I mean it was booting up pretty good. Maybe I should have just left well enough alone. There's just something very unstable in there somewhere. I'm sure I'll find it someday. I'm really pleased about the sound I was able to get out of the 1884. I know I'm really going to enjoy it once it's settled in and working right.

I have 2 Seagate 120 gb Barracudas running on the SATA connections. Come to think of it, I've found it weird that, at times during playback, the Sonar shows 0 CPU usage and 7-10% disk drive time useage. That's one reason I wanted to get this tweak done. With a gig of RAM there's really no reason for the system to be using the paging file at all with as little as I'm doing. This is somehow causing some conflict with the latency settings too I'll bet. ARGH. :D Oh well, I try to look at it as an opportunity for learning. Just sure getting tired of formatting this partition over and over. Surely there's a way to just restore those files without all that?! Guess I'd better go get an XP book. Of course, there's no documentation on PC components these days. Well, it had a nice little Gigabyte manual but it's been irrelevant so far.
 
StevenLindsey said:
hmm I have the ATI Radeon 9600 XT.
Click to expand...

Cool - maybe that's the issue. Kinda seems weird to me though that a graphics card would cause a disk error ???

Anyone else maybe have that issue ?
 
vestast said:
Cool - maybe that's the issue. Kinda seems weird to me though that a graphics card would cause a disk error ???

Anyone else maybe have that issue ?
Click to expand...

Well the tweak is to set the APPEARANCE for best performance. Maybe this card just will not take that tweak. May be something to look at!
 
StevenLindsey said:
Well the tweak is to set the APPEARANCE for best performance. Maybe this card just will not take that tweak. May be something to look at!
Click to expand...

From the link that I posted:


I recently purchased a ATI 9500 Pro video card. Upon installation of the card I immediately began getting Delayed Write Errors

Makes sense to try the registry tweak that they mention.

Let me know how it works.
 
OK. Gotta get the OS back up and running first. I'm going to try to find a way to restore it without formatting, etc. The installation has a "repair" option, but I couldn't get to it because it wanted an administrative password of all things. I'm the administrator and my user password wouldn't work! What a battle! I'll let you know when I get going again. Thanks for all the help.
 
Well, I was able to get the Sonar partition back up by restoring to the last known good point. F8 option. But when it came back up it was acting even more strangely than before. It is forcing a disk check on the second disk on every bootup now. The log in is different from before. I did a check on the disks..no problems. The partitions are all "healthy." The defrag program said that the Sonar partition needed defragging so I did that. It wiped out some of the files in my 1884 setup so that Sonar no longer sees the midi ins/outs. Apparently the xp/ATI/whatever bug has corrupted the whole system. I'm abandoning the dual boot idea ( which apparently many have done in earlier, less fancy versions with no problems ) and will reformat everything and reload everything this weekend. If it doesn't work after that, the PC is going home to its maker. I can't even play music any more. Disgusting. This thing is taking over my life. Anyway, life is good, even without PCs and music recording.
 
Yikes.

You've got way more paitence than I do. I was going to say maybe abandon the dual boot system and just try to get a basic setup working. Hopefully a fresh install with the latest patches and the ATI fix will get you going.

I keep waiting for someone else with an 1884 to step in here cause I know that there is at least one other member using the 1884 with Sonar, and he seems to be o.k.

Maybe you should start another thread with 1884 and Sonar ?
 
I haven't found a whole lot of activity out there with the 1884. Even this new Tascam forum left it out. Seems it either just works or it doesn't. I believe mine will work if I can ever get a viable system to hook it to. I found quite a bit of talk yesterday on this Delayed Write Error. Needless to say, I will not be fooling with the Large System Cache settings anymore, at least until somebody comes up with a fix. But somehow, I don't think that's all there is to my problem. We'll see. Have a great weekend!
 
Started from scratch this weekend and reinstalled everything. Stuck with only one OS ....rats. I surely did like that idea (dual boot). Seems to be working so far as I can tell. I think the whole problem was coming from the cache/XP/ATI thing. The dual boot was working fine until I tried the tweak. Needless to say, I won't be doing that again, at least until I see that there's a definite fix for it. Seems a bit ridiculous though to have it available and not be able to use it.

The 1884, I believe, is working like it's supposed to. I haven't done a whole lot with it yet, but it seems to be following Sonar perfectly. What little recording I've done sounds very good. Latency - I've been able to use the lowest settings with the WMD drivers with no problem. I've got a lot to learn though. I would like to find a forum full of people using this thing. One will evolve eventually. I've come across several people having trouble with it in scattered places. The Tascam tech support guy advised me to go to MusicXP.net. He said they'd had good luck with those tweaks and the 1884. They still haven't sent me an install CD. Don't really need it but it's the principle of the thing. They sent me a bum deal. Anyway...I'm up and running! So far, when I'm sitting in front of the PC/Tascam picking the guitar or bass, it's easier to use the mouse rather than the 1884 to arm tracks. You pretty much have to use two hands to arm tracks on the Tascam. That's the first thing I've noticed that seems a bit of a bummer. But it's fun to watch the faders mover with the envelopes. :D
 
Awesome news !

I'm hoping to post my first completed song on the 1884 in the next week for feedback in the mp3 forum. I'm just waiting for the guy I work with to get it copywrited. I agree with you on the sound. To me it was very noticeable when I upgraded from my m-audio setup.
 
Well, I saw on the Sonar forum that the 1884/Sonar worked best with the ASIO drivers. When am I going to learn? I tried switching to the ASIO's last night. Zappo. It spit it out like a rotten prune. I got it set back to WMD, but the Sonar is locking up. Locks up to the point where I have to power down to get it going again. I tried disabling the graphics accelerator. The 1884 is doing what it was doing before the last install. Reset it and it works good for a few minutes, then it loses some communication with Sonar or something. Some of the buttons will work..mute, solo, etc., but won't light up. the CPU time went way up. Some of the faders will talk to Sonar, follow an envelope, some won't. I've got some serious bugs in there somewhere ( probably in my thinking process.) I'm thinking about getting rid of the ATI graphics card..I don't really need a card that powerful, plus, it has a noisy little fan. Back to the drawing board. I'll probably uninstall and reinstall again. At least I'm not having to reformat and fool with XP again. That's an improvement. I was able to record some drums last night before the disaster. Sounded pretty good. I'm trying to do all my homework before I actually get on here and some other forums to start asking questions. I'm beginning to feel like an idiot. I thought I was fairly computer literate but nooooo. :D Oh well, keeps me out of trouble fooling with this junk. Plus, if I weren't doing this, I'd have to be out working in the yard. Later.
 
If any of you have the heart to help a dying man, please see the new thread I've created here...Trouble installing FW1884... :D

Vestast...I just can't get it to work. I've narrowed it down to the Tascam software. All my other programs, including Sonar, are working perfectly as far as I can tell. The Tascam may be going away very soon. I did a little test song with it last night and it sounded great. I just can't get it to talk right to Sonar. There's a nasty little rat in the woodpile somewhere and I just ain't smart enough to find it.
 
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