Please help FAST!

  • Thread starter Thread starter ad0lescnts
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No, Intel board's no good for clocking.

For your swap file go to Settings,Control Panel, System. Click on the Performace tab, there'll be settings in there for Virtual memory. Make it 1GB or something reasonable.

And make sure you defrag
 
Yes the "MOTU FireWire Audio" is the ASIO driver.
In the same window that you select the driver, is there a button named "Control Panel"?
If there is, after selecting the MOTU FireWire Audio driver, click it. It should take you to the MOTU's control panel. Set your buffers via this method.

Ultra DMA mode 2 .... How do you have the hard drives connected?
Are they both on the same IDE cable, or do you have drive 2 on the same cable as a CD ROM/RW etc?
When looking at the DMA modes ... you have two IDE channels, Primary and Secondary. Each of which will list transfer modes for Device 0 and Device 1. Device 0 would be for whatever device is connected to the end of the cable and Device 1 would be what is connected mid-stream of the cable.
My suggestion would be to have hard drive 2 on the Secondary IDE controller all by it's self, jumper set to Master. Have any CD/DVD etc drive on the Primary IDE controller with the OS drive. Set the jumpers as follows .... hard drive = master ... CD/DVD = slave.
The IDE controllers may only transfer as fast as the slowest device connected to it. If this is the case, it would be better to slow the rate on the OS drive rather than the audio drive.
If the hard drives are both on the same cable .... well that blows the whole "The IDE controllers may only transfer as fast as the slowest device connected to it" theory, and drive 2's firmware may only support UDMA 2 (hard to believe being a new drive and all). If it does in fact only support UDMA 2 .... I'd think about a replacement or an installation of Windows onto the UDMA 2 drive and format the UDMA 5 drive for the audio.
Pain in the ass, I know. :mad:
I can't imagine that virtual memory would be an issue at this point, seeing as how you have 1 gig of physical RAM. You can check this (Windows XP) with Ctrl/Alt/Delete Performance tab and PF Usage (virtual memory). If you have never messed with the virtual memory, then it should still be set to "System managed" sizes. If the PF Usage isn't showing over 300+ MB ... I wouldn't worry about virtual memory at this point as being the cause of your troubles.
I'm just guessing that you are using XP .... if so check out MusicXP.net for tuning tips.

That's about all I can think of at the moment, but if anything else comes to mind I'll post it.

-Ken
 
i would get a tech to check that udma 2 drive. if thats the one your recording to. its operating very slow. i think its THE PROBLEM.

its really easy to test if udma2 drive is the problem.
do a recording using udma 5 drive. you should get lots of tracks.
NOTE ; you should get a tech to check that udma drive is capable of the higher modes. i dont know when you got it.
 
Why don't you bounce down some tracks? Maybe mix down the drums to a stereo track?

14 tracks seems a lot to me.
 
:) disconnect physically (not just turn off) all USB stuff (cablemodem, card-reader, etc...) and reboot

:) goto your bios and disable all the "on-board" stuff you dont need for this session, like internal modem, internal soundcard, game-port, midi-port etc.... (dont worry, you just can enable it afterwards again)



:) get "Ulysses", which is a performance monitor and read the help file CAREFULLY - there is great information there

http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/

this should allow you to figure out where your bottleneck is. While you are on this site, check out the info and lower the PCI latency of the GRAphICS-card (yeah, Graphics, not sound) ... its likely set to 256,




:) check for IRQ conflicts ... a good link w/ explanations is:

http://www.pcmus.com/clicknpops.htm

basically, the more "on-board" stuff you disable in the bios, the less likely are irq conflicts.


these are good starting points ...

best of luck and keep us informed
alfred
 
Agent47 said:
Why don't you bounce down some tracks? Maybe mix down the drums to a stereo track?

14 tracks seems a lot to me.
Click to expand...

A good idea.

I'll ask a stupid question - how many plug in effects do you have running? I sometimes forget that I have been addding compression and eq to tracks until the CPU load starts to climb.
 
I really don't want to bounce down tracks. I've done about 22 tracks before wtihout too many problems. I think it should be working just fine with the computer setup i have... I'm also running 4 plug in effects at the time.

I transfered all my files off my UDMA 2 drive onto my UDMA 5 drive and tried then, and it was the same exact problem.

I don't know what to do, and it seems no one else does either. Who should i take my problem to?

thanks,
T
 
Is your pc attached to the net?

Have you maybe picked up some trojan that's gobbling cpu quietly in the background?

Have you run ad-aware & spybot over your machine recently?
 
now this is getting might interesting. i love puzzles of this nature.
so you have a bottleneck somewhere. i agree with bh.
one idea at prorec.com is a software freebie called diskbench.
something like dskbnch.exe. its small and fast and will tell you how many tracks your pc is capable of , and disk throughput. its very nifty.
you might want to give it a try on your hard drives.
you just put it in a folder on the drive you want to test.
it would help to post your results.
just out of interest are you using this pc as an advanced gaming machine as well ?
 
my PC is attached to the internet, but not while I'm recording. I don't use my computer for gaming either.

I'm gonna check otu that diskbench thing, and yeah i ran ad-aware. does ad-aware get rid of trojans? I have a firewall whenever I'm connected to the internet... I don't know how something like that would happen.

Thanks,
T
 
You need anti virus s/w like Norton or AVG to remove trojans.

You should also run spybot.

The other point to remember is even when you're not connected to the internet, some nasty that previously downloaded itself via Kazaa or whatever, has got itself installed in your registry and is getting started up every time you reboot. It's quietly sitting there in the background, interrupting every now & then, consuming ram and gobbling valuable cycles that you need to record more than 14 tracks
 
i got spybot and cleaned up everything it found.

I did dskbench but it closes itself when it's done, so you can't really look at all the info. basically it said something like 129 tracks with CPU= 5% or so. Don't know what this means.

I'm going to try again tomorrow with trackng now tht i got rid of all my adware and spybot stuff

thanks,
T
 
129 tracks is good. excellent.
if you could post the disk transfer speed diskbench found that would help.
question. what do you have in your pci slots ?
 
I"m not sure which is which, but under the first 'block size', it says 131072, 20 MB/s, 0.87% CPU. Above that it says write - 34.13 MB/s with CPU: 2.3%, and read 24.74 MB/s with CPU: 1.39%. CPU index: 5.6.

My only PCI cards is a 56K modem I don't use and a firewire card.

Thanks,
T
 
adolescents.
those stats on the hard drive. were they the udma 5 hd ?
they are ok. not out of this world - but ok.
there are only 2 things i can think of.
assuming you have pleanty of ram.
1. try uninstalling that modem card you dont use.
OR
2. lets look at that firewire card. i dont use motu.
dimly i seem to remember there might have been problems with some firewire
chips. but i might be wrong. you might want to ask motu about the firewire
brand you use working with the motu. how did you come by the firewire interface ?
also one other thing.
on boot up of your pc with no audio programs running
press CTRL+ALT+DELETE and a screen should come up showing whats running at that point. do you see a very huge list of running processes or
only a few running processes ? if you see a very huge list - it means
a lot of resources are being consumed even before you open your multitrack software. could be one reason for low track counts.
also - how did you come by this pc ? retailer ?
did you build it ?
 
also adolescents i just realised. at no point did you post the bit depth or other details your recording at. 16 bit ? 24 bit ? 44.1 ? 88.2 ?
would like to know this. OR are you recording at 16 bit ? 44.1?
how many channels at once are you recording to different tracks of the pc ?
my concern is if your recording many channels at once of say 24 bit 88.2
maybe something cant keep up while playing back the mix at the same time in real time. make sense ??
 
When I press CTRL+ALT+DEL about 20-25 'processes' come up. No applications however... Pretty much all of them say that they are using 00 of the PCU. This isn't normal?

Those stats were for the UDMA 2 drive. I'm still concerned about this as it is more than a year newer than the UDMA 5 drive. I'll uninstall the modem tomorrow and get back to ya on how it's working so far.

I'm pretty sure that the problem isn't the firewire card. It has always worked just fine before... I got it for really cheap on ebay however, it's a "for best ports connection" IEEE 1394A Card. I'm going to email MOTU right now.

There are about 14-16 tracks recorded in 24 bit/44.1 sample. I'm only trying to record one track at a time on top of it.

Thanks again so much for all the help guys,
T
 
I was also just looking at all the info in the device manager about the firewire card. It says that it is IRQ 22. Shouldn't the number be lower??

I also went on the MOTU website and found a note saying that you should only use firewire cards with the TI or lucent chip. I looked in the user manual of my card and all it said was 1394 chip. Think this could be a/the problem?
 
In the Device manager expand the list for IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers.
If it is a Texas Instruments chip, it will say "Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Controller".
Also in the Device Manager, click view > Resources by connection > expand the list for Interrupt request (IRQ).
Look to see if the IEEE 1394 controller is sharing an IRQ with anything else.
If you don't use that modem ..... remove it.
Also, while you are removing the modem, move the FireWire card to a different slot. Then check it's IRQ assignment again. You do want it to have a lower number. You may even have to try all of the PCI slots, so leave the case open for a bit. Just make sure to remove the power cord each time. ;)
Not sure if this would be the cause of your problems .... but it sure couldn't hurt.
 
ok adolescents. that number of processes is reasonable. there are certain processes win needs.
thnx for the 24 bit info. now things are starting to make more sense.
crankz has some good ideas.
tell me this...on the udma2 drive in the drop down list does the list show
higher possible dma modes like 5 ? you click the little down arrow to view options. it zseems to me that the udma 2 drive should be capable of higher modes. but its best to get a tech to check. particularly as its a recent drive.
tell me - who installed the drive ? you ? or a tech ?
you might want to ask motu about about your particular firewire card.
do you know the brand ? so you can tell motu ?
you know i have to say looking at the motu spec on motus site that if as claimed the convertors are so good, i dont see why you dont record at 16 bit. i developed a computer program awhile back to analyse bit patterns in
24 bit samples, and the reason i didnt go 24 bit as yet is i found a ton of wasted space.
 
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