Pops- Onboard sound?

  • Thread starter Thread starter chamelious
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chamelious

www.thesunexplodes.com
I have a P4 machine with 256mb of kingston and am currently usuing on board sound, planning to get a Delta 44 soon tho, but all my mp3's have a lot of pops in them, is the on board sound to blame you think or is the problem elsewhere? If its elsewhere im gonna have to sort it before i think about recording...
 
You're definitely going to need more ram if you're thinking about recording
 
it would help if you listed anything you might have in your pci slots already for example advanced gaming type powerfull add in pci cards can sometimes cause a problem by taking command of computer busses and processes. do you have one of these ?
its not necessarily your on board sound. other things to look for .
did you build this pc yourself or did you buy it at a retailer ???.
a tip - download a benchmark utility called diskbench.exe.
or it might be dskbench.exe. anyway this utility will measure your hard drive performance and transfer rates. if you see low figures in either case this could mean someone forgot to enable dma on your hard drive(s).
dma enabled is vitally important for high speed computers like a p4 running a daw for audio. you can check by going into device mgr under control panel and clicking on the drives properties label.
also 256 is a little light on memory particularly if - well definitely actually - for windows xp !!!!. you might consider going to 512.
your p4 should easily do a ton of tracks - like 48 for example.
also tell me if your running one or two drives.
two drives is preferable. i'll explain later if your interested in the tech whys and wherefores. also it is preferable to run two smaller drives rather than one huge drive due to the way pc architecture works.
hope this helps.
 
Currently theres a single HD, i have plans to add another as well as another 256mb of kingston. All thats in the pci slots at the minute is a 128mb graphics card, its not top end or anything. I didn't build it, it was built for me by a friend who does it for a living.
 
chamelious as an experiment and ONLY if you have on board video
ie ; so you can still see things (eg agp video). try pulling that pci graphics card and see if the ops disappear.
did you check your dma ??
 
on second thoughts chamelious - dont pull that graphics card until
we know how old that pc of yours is. i'm a tad worried it might be an oldish machine. cos if its an old machine you might loose your video capability.
tell me first what type of pc it is P3 perhaps ?
just go to control panel and click on system icon and a dialogue will pop up with details of the PC ie: processor etc.
does it have agp video. ??
tell me this before you proceed.
 
The pc's a P4 like i said, and yeah the graphics card is agp, its a Geforce Fx 5200.
 
P4. how stupid of me. right in your first post. i think i was tired yesterday ! excellent. that gives me a bit more to work with.
DONT DO THIS YOURSELF if you dont know tech stuff.. get a tech to try this.
use the p4 agp graphics, and pull that other pci graphics card
(and remember to uninstall the drivers) and see if your pops disappear.
why did you originally put a graphics card in a pci slot ?
for gaming perhaps ?
other than that i'm at a loss. assuming you have all the windows updates installed. it could be that your windows media software that comes with windows is an older verrsion. but this is just guessing.
you know what you might do is get a delta 44 on a return basis if
it dont work and see if your good to go recording wise.
check out my fav software works with deltas - powertracks from pgmusic.com. 29 bucks.
does 48 tracks. talk to a guy called rharv on the forum who runs a delta with powertracks and is very happy.
 
Mm the graphics card is AGp and thus is in the AGP slot, not a pci one...
 
ok. confusion to me. earlier you said you had graphics card in a pci slot.
so DONT PULL IT OUT. other than that WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN PCI SLOTS.??
any other cards ??
 
I would be inclined to believe that the internal sound chip has a lot to do with the problem.
You would likely do much better with even a Soundblaster Live than an internal chip. The internal chip is much more susceptible to interference from the mobo and it electronics.
One of my older machines (PIII 933 w/512 RAM and GeForce FX5200 Ultra) has a SB Live. The machine has multiple PCI cards (SB Live, NIC, FireWire and 56k Modem) and I have no issues playing mp3's. Grated, the machine has two drives in it, but it has no problems with audio files that are on the OS drive.
Before condemning the internal sound you could run dskBench to check your drives throughput.
You could also check into your PCI Latency and see if that helps any.
It may also be possible that the internal sound is sharing an IRQ with the video (lowering the FX5200's PCI Latency may help if that is the case) and depending on the OS that you are using , you may not be able to do anything about that. Short of buying a new soundcard, which you may want to consider anyway seeing as how you can get a much better one for relatively cheap.

HTH

-Ken

-Edit to add- Make sure DMA is enabled. If you don't know how to check this, here are some search results that should help.
 
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