It happened again!!!!!!!!!!!

E

estring

New member
A while ago I was recording all fine and dandy. Then one day I went to playback and I had this awful screeching with stuttered playback. After much trail and error, and MusicXP.net suggestions. and the many suggestions from you guys , I decided to reload the OS.. yet saving some of my files.
Everything was fine again, recording, playback, effects the whole setup was working great.
About 3 weeks in...bam it all happens again. So this time I do a completely clean install of XP, nothing left behind.
I did not reload my saved files. I just started with some new never recorded ideas.
Again everything works great and I'm hoping this is the last of that problem.

Well that was about 3 weeks ago and today I hit play and there is that awful screeching again. I have tried all of the "obvious" tweaks.
Heres the thing, not only does my recording sound like shit, but the Windows melody that plays when you start your PC,also has crackles in it, as well as any cd that I play through WMP 10.

FYI...
P4 3.0ghz
512ram
samsung 80gig HD
Audiophile 2496

Sonar 4.03

I'm starting to lose hope. Should I get another HD of better quality?
I dont think memory is the issue.

WTF!!!!!!!!
 
estring said:
A while ago I was recording all fine and dandy. Then one day I went to playback and I had this awful screeching with stuttered playback. After much trail and error, and MusicXP.net suggestions. and the many suggestions from you guys , I decided to reload the OS.. yet saving some of my files.
Everything was fine again, recording, playback, effects the whole setup was working great.
About 3 weeks in...bam it all happens again. So this time I do a completely clean install of XP, nothing left behind.
I did not reload my saved files. I just started with some new never recorded ideas.
Again everything works great and I'm hoping this is the last of that problem.

Well that was about 3 weeks ago and today I hit play and there is that awful screeching again. I have tried all of the "obvious" tweaks.
Heres the thing, not only does my recording sound like shit, but the Windows melody that plays when you start your PC,also has crackles in it, as well as any cd that I play through WMP 10.

FYI...
P4 3.0ghz
512ram
samsung 80gig HD
Audiophile 2496

Sonar 4.03

I'm starting to lose hope. Should I get another HD of better quality?
I dont think memory is the issue.

WTF!!!!!!!!
Click to expand...
You might have some glitchy drivers for your soundcard....since the small wav file windows uses at startup is not sounding so hot. Do a Windows update, if you already haven't, then try and get the latest drivers for your soundcard if you can. Defrag, and re-start, but you may have slready tried these. HD shouldn't cause the issues thqat you describe, unless it is going bad.
Ed
 
What make/model is your motherboard and your ram? Be as specific as you can. Also, are you overclocking, or using any nonstandard settings in your bios? Oh, and what about your video card?

Also, tracing your steps back, have you made any changes at all recently right before this problem happens? like installing a new driver or software.

And are there any other symptoms, like weird pauses, or anything you notice that seems unusual, either right before or after the problem occurs?

After this problem occurs, have you looked in your Hardware Device Manager to see if there's any issues? It should show up as an exclamation mark next to the specific piece of hardware, iirc.

Sorry for the interrogation. :D There's actually more than one problem that can cause this behaviour. Maybe a hardware incompatibility, or bug in a driver. It'll work for a while, and then at some seemingly random point in time, it pops up. it could also be a defective piece of hardware. You say you don't think it's a memory issue, but it could be. You should definitely get a memory tester program, like docmem, and let it run. It doesn't take that long on these newer systems to see if you have a bad spot somewhere in your ram.

Oh and one last question: How good is your system being cooled?
 
MrBoogie said:
What make/model is your motherboard and your ram? Be as specific as you can. Also, are you overclocking, or using any nonstandard settings in your bios? Oh, and what about your video card?

Also, tracing your steps back, have you made any changes at all recently right before this problem happens? like installing a new driver or software.

And are there any other symptoms, like weird pauses, or anything you notice that seems unusual, either right before or after the problem occurs?

After this problem occurs, have you looked in your Hardware Device Manager to see if there's any issues? It should show up as an exclamation mark next to the specific piece of hardware, iirc.

Sorry for the interrogation. :D There's actually more than one problem that can cause this behaviour. Maybe a hardware incompatibility, or bug in a driver. It'll work for a while, and then at some seemingly random point in time, it pops up. it could also be a defective piece of hardware. You say you don't think it's a memory issue, but it could be. You should definitely get a memory tester program, like docmem, and let it run. It doesn't take that long on these newer systems to see if you have a bad spot somewhere in your ram.

Oh and one last question: How good is your system being cooled?
Click to expand...

Heres what I know...
The motherboard just says Dell Dimension 3000, the RAM is Nanya.(2x256)
The chipset is Intel Morgan Hill, and the CPU is P4 prescott

The Video card is an Intel Extreme graphics 2.

Nothing out of the ordinary before the problem occurs.
And thats the thing, I could be recording fine Monday night, and then shut it down, turn it on Tuesday morning and WHAM! there's the screeching, and it seems to happen after about 3 weeks following a new OS install.

I'm going to run the RAM test now...

Thanks for your help
 
And thats the thing, I could be recording fine Monday night, and then shut it down, turn it on Tuesday morning and WHAM! there's the screeching, and it seems to happen after about 3 weeks following a new OS install.

It doesn't sound like heat issue since it happened on a cold boot.
On your OS install, was it an upgrade or was it a restore? Could you be running on a generic driver instead of the specific driver for the Audiophile 2496?

Also driver files can become corrupt. I had a similar problem to yours where watching a news clip with windows media player would start the screeching. All audio was messed up afterward that until I rebooted. I reinstalled the sound drivers and haven't had the problem for several months now. OS here is XP.
 
estring, here's links to a couple of memory testers in case you couldn't find them:
http://www.simmtester.com/page/products/doc/docinfo.asp
Make sure you get DocMemory, not the SPD reader

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp
Microsoft memory diagnostic

These will require you to make a boot disk and copy the software to it.
Along with checking you memory, you ought to have scandisk do full surface scan of your harddrive, in case there's some bad sectors causing file corruption.

When you re-install your OS, before you start to "use" your computer, you should make sure you have installed ALL software and driver updates. Also, make sure your OS has all its updates. With Windows Update, sometimes, when you think you've got all the updates, there's updates to fix the updates you just got; so you should keep checking windows update until it says you have no more updates. Don't rely on automatic updates.

Heat doesn't just cause immediate results of lockups, pauses and reboots. What's worse is the longterm effect of causing hardware to prematurely fail. This is what I was wondering about. So heat could still be an issue.

Also, about the possibility of a generic audio driver, while that often happens with typical pc soundcards, that doesn't happen with "pro-sumer" soundcards because pro-sumer cards don't use the same audio chips of typical pc soundcards. As far as I can remember, I always had to download and install the m-audio drivers manually for sound to work at all.

There's also Dell support forums. I did a quick search for audiophile and there were several pages of posts regarding problems with Dells and the Audiophile card. If you haven't already, you might want to check that forum.
 
So far the RAM is not defective.
heat is not an issue.
I am beginning to think the combo of Mobo ,chipset and so forth are not a good match for audio recording.

But still it could be the HD.
 
To me it sounds like you have bad connections either on the soundcard or on your ram. Humidity would affect that, thus the here today gone tommorrow symtoms. Start with cleaning your in and out cables that go to the soundcard. That may do it right there. If not remove the soundcard, clean all the connectors and give that a try. If that doesn't work then I'd try cleaning the connectors on the ram and or your other peripherals.
 
I would check the fragmentation of the HD. If it is always after about the same amount of time/work and it goes away with a re-install it would be a place to look at. And check the the HD is not on cable-select (CS), that it is not on the same controller/cable as the cdrom/dvd and that dma is enabled. Stupid things, I know but you did mention a Dell.

Maybe time to go to a 2 hd setup?

Drivers can fail, but usually you have installed/updated some (new) soft then.
 
NYMorningstar said:
To me it sounds like you have bad connections either on the soundcard or on your ram. Humidity would affect that, thus the here today gone tommorrow symtoms. Start with cleaning your in and out cables that go to the soundcard. That may do it right there. If not remove the soundcard, clean all the connectors and give that a try. If that doesn't work then I'd try cleaning the connectors on the ram and or your other peripherals.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the input, however that wouldnt explain why everything is fine after a reistall of the OS.....
 
Havoc said:
I would check the fragmentation of the HD. If it is always after about the same amount of time/work and it goes away with a re-install it would be a place to look at. And check the the HD is not on cable-select (CS), that it is not on the same controller/cable as the cdrom/dvd and that dma is enabled. Stupid things, I know but you did mention a Dell.

Maybe time to go to a 2 hd setup?

Drivers can fail, but usually you have installed/updated some (new) soft then.
Click to expand...


OK heres what I have decided to do....I am going to go out and buy another HDD. I'll copy/move the audio files from the "bad HDD" and see what happens. IF nothing else I have another HDD for my system or for my kids gaming computer.
If I move the files to the new HDD they should perfect, thus solving my problem...right?? If not then F it I need a new DAW!!!!!

Thanks alot for all the repsonses!!!! I tried them all......
I'll post an update after I give the new HDD a chance to show its colors>>>
 
estring said:
OK heres what I have decided to do....I am going to go out and buy another HDD. I'll copy/move the audio files from the "bad HDD" and see what happens. IF nothing else I have another HDD for my system or for my kids gaming computer.
If I move the files to the new HDD they should perfect, thus solving my problem...right?? If not then F it I need a new DAW!!!!!

Thanks alot for all the repsonses!!!! I tried them all......
I'll post an update after I give the new HDD a chance to show its colors>>>
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced that will help. I would toss a coin as to whether it's an IRQ conflict that is tied to network activity or a virus infestation (or both). Neither of those would be fixed by changing hard drives, but both could spontaneously go away after a reinstall, then spontaneously return.

Just my gut. Unless you are reformatting the hard drive each time this thing goes nuts, I very much doubt the hard drive is at fault.
 
dgatwood said:
I'm not convinced that will help. I would toss a coin as to whether it's an IRQ conflict that is tied to network activity or a virus infestation (or both). Neither of those would be fixed by changing hard drives, but both could spontaneously go away after a reinstall, then spontaneously return.

Just my gut. Unless you are reformatting the hard drive each time this thing goes nuts, I very much doubt the hard drive is at fault.
Click to expand...


Well, I'm not on any network,and as far as I can tell there is no IRQ conflict.
Why would this problem occur at almost the same time each time, about 3 weeks after reformat? It seems that there is a bad sector on the disc and everything is fine until "it" reaches that bad point...does this make sense?

Thanks for your input.
 
I uninstalled the 2496 and removed it. Reinstall the Soundmax. Its an intergrated soundcard.
I still have the problem, with cd's and the Windows start up sound.

Something I Noticed when I had the 2496 in. It showed the IRQ as 22. I thought the most computers had was 16(?) But it does not allow me to change the IRQ manually


Thanks guys.....
 
estring said:
Well, I'm not on any network,and as far as I can tell there is no IRQ conflict.
Why would this problem occur at almost the same time each time, about 3 weeks after reformat? It seems that there is a bad sector on the disc and everything is fine until "it" reaches that bad point...does this make sense?
Click to expand...

Not really. A bad sector would cause one file to fail to be written, or if it is in the middle of swap space, would cause an app to crash repeatedly. The only way I could see stuttering occurring because of a disk issue would be if the drive were seeing massive errors (which should cause all sorts of other serious failures).

Anyway, a quick way to test... find some software that reads the SMART status (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) of the drive. That should tell you the total number of failed operations since the drive was powered on. If there are read/write errors (even corrected "soft" errors), they will show up in the results. I can't tell you a specific program to check the status---I'm a Mac OS X guy and it's built into the OS there---but there should be plenty of them available for free or shareware.

My laptop's SMART status looks like this:

{
"Errors (Read)"=0,
"Total Time (Write)"=336182855719,
"Latency Time (Read)"=0,
"Bytes (Read)"=443333632,
"Latency Time (Write)"=0,
"Retries (Read)"=0,
"Bytes (Write)"=1036999680,
"Errors (Write)"=0,
"Operations (Read)"=17995,
"Retries (Write)"=0,
"Operations (Write)"=56380,
"Total Time (Read)"=219589165379
}

The errors values indicate a hard failure of a sector. The retries indicate a soft (recoverable) failure. A non-zero value in those fields indicates a drive is going south.

It also tells how many bytes I have read/written, the total time (probably in ms) for read/write operations, the number of read/write operations, and a latency estimate. I'm guessing my drive doesn't support latency monitoring, since zero seems suspect, but I've never seen a nonzero value, so either none of them do or it means something different from what I'd expect. Dunno.

Another fun thing to note is that my average write operation was just over 18k in size. My average read is almost 25k. And my OS is doing a good job of disk caching because I'm writing 2.3 times as much as I'm reading. :-D
 
estring said:
I uninstalled the 2496 and removed it. Reinstall the Soundmax. Its an intergrated soundcard.
I still have the problem, with cd's and the Windows start up sound.

Something I Noticed when I had the 2496 in. It showed the IRQ as 22. I thought the most computers had was 16(?) But it does not allow me to change the IRQ manually
Click to expand...

Historically, yes. I just found out, much to my surprise, that with APIC-based motherboards, that's no longer the case. However, some devices may misbehave at higher IRQs. You might be running into such a situation. Try disabling APIC in the BIOS and see if the problem goes away.
 
22 is a virtual irq, not a real irq, from what i understand. this is all discussed at m-audio's website. It's a long read, but it might solve your problem:

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.faq&ID=80d7b56e35ea51e73104295aec1f755b

check this out too:

http://www.musicxp.net/hardware_tips.php

Be aware that your BIOS must allow manual selection of irq's to use the "switch from acpi to standard" work around. it won't do you any good to switch to standard if your bios will not let you reserve irq's.

My M-Audio 1010LT acted up quite a bit until I got it assigned to a lower irq. I did what was suggested and tried different pci slots until my sound card had it's own irq.

Good luck.
 
TravisinFlorida said:
22 is a virtual irq, not a real irq, from what i understand. this is all discussed at m-audio's website. It's a long read, but it might solve your problem:

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.faq&ID=80d7b56e35ea51e73104295aec1f755b
Click to expand...

Well, it's a lot more complicated than that, apparently. If you have an IO APIC, those should be real IRQs. If you don't have an APIC, with ACPI enabled, you'll get interrupt steering and everything ends up on interrupt 9....

Anyway, yeah, move the card to a different slot and see if it helps.
 
TravisinFlorida said:
22 is a virtual irq, not a real irq, from what i understand. this is all discussed at m-audio's website. It's a long read, but it might solve your problem:

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.faq&ID=80d7b56e35ea51e73104295aec1f755b

check this out too:

http://www.musicxp.net/hardware_tips.php

Be aware that your BIOS must allow manual selection of irq's to use the "switch from acpi to standard" work around. it won't do you any good to switch to standard if your bios will not let you reserve irq's.

My M-Audio 1010LT acted up quite a bit until I got it assigned to a lower irq. I did what was suggested and tried different pci slots until my sound card had it's own irq.

Good luck.
Click to expand...

Travis... You did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


First and foremost, thanks to all of you that took an interest in my problem. I tried every suggestion. In the end it was definitely a combination of everything.

It took the suggestions from you guys as well as some deep Googling to get it. Its amazing how changing one word in a search can yield completely different results.

Anyway, heres what I did.
My CPU has something called Hyper-Threading. I disabled this in the BIOS and immediately saw a decrease in the screeching and crackling.

Second, I went to the link Travis recommneded.

and this site as well,
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/May03/articles/pcmusician0503.asp

If you remember I said my card had an IRQ of 22. This is actually a "virtual" IRQ and is shared with something underneath it. A couple of you mentioned this. But, there was no way to change the IRQ.
I found out the difference between ACPI and Standard PC mode.
I had to switch mine to Standard PC so I could change the IRQ.
I also disabled several devices occupying IRQ's. Printer, network some USB ports.
I finally had a lone IRQ for my card!!!!!!!!!!!

Crossed my fingers and hit Play....perfect!!!!
I set my I/O buffers at 512. and my latency at less than 2ms!! (audio)
Not a single snap, crackle or pop.

One more thing. Remember I had the crackle with the Windows startup? That is gone as well....

Those two links should absolutley be stickys. They are a tremendous resource for this topic. Especially the M-Audio link.

You guys kept me thinking and eventually WE found the answer!!!!!
 
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