Please help FAST!

  • Thread starter Thread starter ad0lescnts
  • Start date Start date
adolescent

did you DL the Ulysses monitor that i mentioned in the earlier post? ... if yes, let us know the ball-park numbers for

- win at idle (b4 opening your audio SW)
- the same after opening your audio SW (having the SW idleing)
- and have the SW record or playback ...

I have had similar problems w/ CoolEdit pro ... where the comp basically went to its knees w/ 8+ tracks (procesor load went to 100%) ... I can do 15+ now in Cubase w/ loads of around 40-60%

just post the 3 screenshots (w/ typical values) of the ulyses ... that would provide the very knowledable people here w/ plenty of information

best of luck
alfred


ps: I just recalled you use cubase - so the values of cubase ideling and being in playback should be roughly the same, as their audio engine is always in "on"
 
While your in the box yanking the modem and playing with the FireWire card, look to see how the hard drives are connected.
What drive is on what cable and what else is on the cable with each drive?

Don't bother with trying to select a higher UDMA mode from the drop-down list .... there isn't an option to do so. The only two options there are is "PIO only" or "DMA if available". You can't manually change transfer rates. This is a fixed value, determined by the controller built into the drive.
Read back to my previous post with regard to an IDE controllers transfer rate being as fast as the slowest device connected to it. See if this applies to the situation.
Also there is no point in forcing the 24 bit converters in the 828 to operate at 16 bit. Using a 24 bit word length isn't going to use much more resources than 16 bit. Using higher sample rates however, may, in that you have a much lager file to process and samples to load into buffers. Your bit depth and sample rate shouldn't be the issue.
I'm still inclined to think it is a buffer issue along with hard drive throughput because of the fact that you are getting skips and stuttering.
If it where clicks and pops ... then I would be thinking drivers and/or PCI latency.
As long as the CPU isn't pegged at 100%, you should still get adequate playback, provided the hard drives transfer rate can keep up (throughput) and you have allocated enough buffers for the samples.
 
The system manager says "VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller" for the firewire card... I don't know if that's what is necessary.

I was moving the card around and the best I could get was 17 while sharing the built in sound card, 18 while sharing the USB controller, or 21 while not sharing anything. Is it ok if it's sharing the USB controller if I don't have any USB devices plugged in?

I have the buffer sample is at 1028, and i tried 2056 and it was the same problem... Not sure whats up here.

I have the main drive UDMA 5 on the primary and UDMA 2 on the slave connector on the same cable. I don't think the problem is the drive though, because I had the same problem when I transfered my files to my UDMA 5 and tried it then.

I got the Ulysses program but I don't know how to do screenshots so I'll type it out:
Idle: Cpu: 3.1%, interrupts: 70, Cpu Queue: 0, Ram Avail: 809 Meg, Page faults: 30/sec, File Cache: 0% (but whenever I do something small it goes up to 100), Drive C: 4 k/sec, Disk queue: 0, Drive D: same as C, Disk Queue: 0, NetCard1: 9Meg 48B/Sec, Loopback 9Meg.

Cubase Open: CPU: 37-60%, Interrupts: 1507, everything else about the same.

Playback: same except- Interrupts: up to 1700, Drive D: up to 30%.

It's weird though, because some of the problems only happen at certain times in the songs. I bet when those things happen every single one of these stats goes up to 100%...

Oh I also just realized, when I try to playback using my built in soundcard I get the pauses and stuff still. So i doubt it's the firewire card.

Tell me what you guys think,
Thank you still for putting up for this long,
T
 
Last edited:
ad0lescnts said:
The system manager says "VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller" for the firewire card... I don't know if that's what is necessary.

I was moving the card around and the best I could get was 17 while sharing the built in sound card, 18 while sharing the USB controller, or 21 while not sharing anything. Is it ok if it's sharing the USB controller if I don't have any USB devices plugged in?

I have the buffer sample is at 1028, and i tried 2056 and it was the same problem... Not sure whats up here.

I have the main drive UDMA 5 on the primary and UDMA 2 on the slave connector on the same cable. I don't think the problem is the drive though, because I had the same problem when I transfered my files to my UDMA 5 and tried it then.
Click to expand...

Yeah .... I don't know if the VIA controller would be the root of the problems. MOTU says nothing about their chips.
Seeing as how you don't use the USB controller, I'd share with it. Though in the Device Manager, I would right click on it and select disable. You may even be able to disable USB in the BIOS and totally prevent it from getting an IRQ assignment.

Now with the drives .... this is what I would try .....
I take it you have Windows and all of your programs installed to the UDMA 5 drive and were using the UDMA 2 drive for just the audio data directory.
I would take the drive for the audio and connect it to the Secondary IDE controller all by it's self and set it to Master.
If you have a CDROM/Burner/DVD/whatever connected to the Secondary IDE controller, connect it to where the UDMA 2 drive was and set it to Slave. Better yet don't even connect the CD drive at this point, because if you do Windows will swap the drive letter assignment of the CD drive and the UDMA 2 drive. However you can reassign drive letters with the Disk Manager. So it's up to you as to how you want to deal with that, but by booting the machine without the CD drive Windows will assign the main drive as C and the second drive as D. Then after connecting the CD drive and booting, the CD drive will be assigned the letter E.
The way you have it now, the audio drive and the OS drive are on the same IDE controller. It's best to have them on separate controllers, and the audio drive alone on it's own controller. Less chances of interruptions of drive reads and writes due to sharing the same controller with the OS/Programs drive.

Also, I wonder if there may just be some weird issue with that particular song project. :confused:
Maybe you could start a new empty project and import all of the tracks (wave files) into it for shits and grins. Of course this would mean re-mixing and re-adding whatever plugs to the tracks, but nothing ventured .... nothing gained.
Something is bound to work out. I'm a firm believer of my signature. :cool:
 
crankz1 said:
Don't bother with trying to select a higher U[/COLOR]DMA mode from the drop-down list .... there isn't an option to do so. The only two options there are is "PIO only" or "DMA if available". You can't manually change transfer rates. This is a fixed value, determined by the controller built into the drive.
Click to expand...

crankz1,

please bear in mind that XP will AUTOMATICALLY revert to PIO if there was a (precisely "6") problems w/ DMA on the controller...


snip

PIO mode is enabled by default in the following situations:
...
For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.

In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).
...


/snip



for more information:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

a workaround find here:
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm

bye
alfred
 
actually I think Crankz suggestions fixed my problem with the UDMA mode. I messed around with the slave/master configurations and made both hard drives masters on separate cables. Now in the device manager it says For the both the Primary and Secondary IDE channels that device 0 is set at UDMA mode 5, and device 1 is UDMA mode 2. If I'm not mistaken I believe that means both the masters on each channel are 5, and the slaves are 2 (in this case my CD drives).

Nonetheless I still have my skipping problems. I'm going to try transfering all the files to a new project still.

Thanks,
T
 
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