Hard Drive Test!

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Goodrat

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If you are using an IDE HD try this:

Record a smoothe 20 second "ooohh" with a mike on channel one. (makes a nice sine wav)

Record the same on channel two while listening to channel one.

Listen back to channel two in solo.

If most people do not get a pop or two at about 10 seconds in, I'll eat my mouse!
 
Sorry to say - well actually I am NOT sorry to say - I get no such pops.

I record on three different systems, different cards, but all using IDE drives.

I have been following your problem with your SoundBlaster PC128 card. Is there any way you can find another sound card to try? It may be as simple as your soundcard is %$#%$@ed up.

One more question - is anything sharing your IDE controller with your hard drive? If you only have one hard drive and one CD-ROM, make sure they are on seperate controllers.

Wish I could of more help but I know you've tried most eveything else I could think of.
 
I tried a SB16, same exact thing. I tried recording to my main drive, same thing. Tried a cheap isa video card, same thing. Almost exactly 20 seconds in...pop.....pop/pop.

My primary has a 5.1GB drive (WD) and a CDRW as a slave. My secondary has a second 18GB WD drive with a CD as a slave.
I have tried the drives alone with one on primary, one on secondary, same thing.
Tried all the tweaks, reformat, same thing. 20 seconds.
It must be this VIA chip set. (MPV3).
I even tried running on 64MB ram. (have 128).

I even looked under the desk to see if the dog wags his tail every time I record.....But I don't have a dog.

Tried a clean re-format of 98SE with only my AGP card (matrox G200), the two drives and the sound card installed.

Different frequency record, Buffers, virtual mem, auto cd notify, write caching, vcache, double buffer, accelerations, media control, dxdiag (sound acceleration), nothing else running but explorer. The only thing that works, is Cubase (but that crashes sometimes).

It shoud be the sound card, since it only happens on full duplex, but not two different ones with different drivers.

My MB is an FIC VA-503+. And I played with Bios also.

No pop if I record silence. I'm an electronic Eng. tech, and I don't see any analog possibilities either.
 
What makes you think this is a hard-drive problem? There are a lot of things that can cause pops. Some video cards are notorious for hogging the PCI bus. Some combinations of hardware just don't play well together at times. You could be clipping the master outputs when you combine the volumes of the two tracks, for all I know. It seems a bit premature to be blaming the drive from what you've described.
 
I do wonder about the video, but is is an agp, which should help. But I also tried another video card on the pci bus.
I would assume that the master outputs in cakewalk would indicate the signal being too hot, also why 20 seconds all the time? I'm feeding a stead sine wave with a generator through a small mixer. The pops may be random, but always around 20 seconds in.
Also remember that I only have a problem in full duplex, which points to the sound card driver. I'm going to play with sound card settings and drivers tonight (but I also tried a SB16 PCI and had the same problem).
SB had some problems in the past with direct X and also mixer problems. Something about muting the aux input, which I always do because it has some hiss.
I downloaded the pci128 driver last night and I think the pop shifted out to 30 seconds. Maybe with this driver and directx 8 and some tweeking I might find something that works.
 
Yeah, it sound like you've narrowed it down. This is only with Cakewalk (you mentioned Cubase doesn't do it)? It sounds like Cake and your sound card drivers aren't playing well together (my Gadget 8/24 doesn't like Cakewalk either).
 
So we may conclude that a Soundblaster 16 PCI or PCI128 do not work well with Cakewalk even with the latest drivers.
Shouldn't this be more well known?

Anyone using these cards should perform a constant 45 second record as I have described. Unless cpu speed or ram makes a difference, you will have clicks and pops within 30 seconds, most of the time.
I wonder if creative or the cakewalk people can fix this?

I wonder what 8-track cassett studios are going for these days?
 
Nah... I doubt Cakewalk could stay in business if it didn't work with any of those cards. I thought it might be a specific driver problem. You should contact Cakewalk tech-support. They should have something on record if this is a common problem.
 
I hate to be a spoil sport, but the system I am using for most of my recording is the following:

Cakewalk Pro 9
Gadget Labs Wave 824
SoundBlaster 16 ISA w/Roland daughtercard
ASUS P3V4X motherboard, using VIA Apollo 133a chipset
PIII 553EB chip, 256 meg RAM
WD 8 gig IDE (system) Maxtor 40 gig IDE (recording)
Generic IDE CD, TDK 12x CDR

... and I am not getting any pops. I don't use the SB16 for recording, its just for MIDI playback and the occasional game. The Gadget Labs manual came with 2 pages of custom setting for Cakewalk which I am sure make it run much, much better.

I just thought of somehting else - on some motherboards (like mine above) certain combinations of the PCI slots and the AGP slot share resources. The ASUS manual lays this out quite nicely so you can locate your cards to minimize conflicts. Perhaps your sound card is sharing with another card - have you looked in Device Manager sorting by IRQ to see if anything is in conflict?

Also are you using DirectX 7 or 8? Some people have gripped about 8, but its working for me. No way to uninstall it though.
 
Yes, my first pci slot shares an irq with the agp slot. I have my network card on that first pci slot, which doesn't seem to care. Anyway I had tried a reformat with only the soundcard installed.
I have a VIA chip set (MVP3) on my MB, wich can sometimes be trouble.
My SB PCI128 is PCI and will not be quite like your SB16.
The SB16 I tried was also the PCI version, which is pretty much the same as my PCI128. Both had pops.
My clicks now start happening at 30 seconds with the lattest PCI128 driver that I finnaly got to install.
If I write short enough music, I can be fine!

I was wondering if I should not use wave-out in cakewalk, and instead try the dma settings I found on their site for the ensonic PCI. But I believe this will only come into play if I'm using MIDI, is that correct?
 
SUCCESS! --I HOPE

I reformated again, which I am an expert at now, I may add,
and I still had my pops at 30 seconds this morning. Even though I used only directX 7.0a.
But, this evening I was recording clean! Why? why?
I left out most of the drastic windows tweeks to try to keep the experiment controled.
But this time, instead of repeatedly recording my second track and listening to my results, I was starting over with recording the first track, then the second track after I tried a tweak.
Well it turns out, if I record my first track at 48KHz and then the second track also at 48KHz, all is OK!

In the past I had recorded the first at 44.1KHz, then experimented with diferent things with the second track. No mater what I did, I would get the pops.

So, with a soundblaster, stay whith that 48KHz always!

I hope tomorrow, I don't retract my theory!
 
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