Pulling hair out with Delta 1010

  • Thread starter Thread starter LemonTree
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LemonTree

LemonTree

Suck 'em and see!
Untill last week I was running Cubase 32 V5 with my Delta 1010 streaming 24 tracks at once with no problem what so ever.

This was my setup

ATHLON 1800XP
Gigabyte GA-7VTXE+
256Meg of PC2100 DDR
30 Gig IBM 7200 ATA 100

All has worked perfectly since January.

Last week I replaced the 256Meg of ram with a 512 Meg strip of the same PC2100 DDR and added a second hard drive, a Maxtor 30 Gig 7200 ATA 133 which I have now moved my audio project folders onto, so I have that drive solely dedicated to my audio tracks.

I actualy had the 256 & the 512 strips of DDR in at the same time and this was when I noticed my audio start to stutter and sound totaly degenerated. A friend told me that the two different sized memory strips could be causing the problem, so I removed the 256 and left in the 512.

My problem persists. I've tried reinstalling the card several times and adjusting the latency in the M-Audio control panel but nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions would be greatly apreciated, thanks

Alec.
 
whats happens when u go back to the 256 strip? does it go back to normal?
 
DMA buffer size

In the cubase Audio setup panel....

I was sure this was set at 128k before, now my songs will only play with this set to 32k

mistery?????????
 
Something even stranger....

When I bring up the performance bar in Cubase the disk usage is up at 85% all the way through the song. I tried copying the song folder back to the first hard drive with the operating system and cubase installed on it and it drops to 5%.

I thought the whole idea was to have a 2nd drive dedicated to your audio tracks so they could be accessed faster?

the one with my OS is Primary master the other is the secondary master. I really don't understand this.
 
Are both drives exactly the same?

Hello Mate

Are both drives exactly the same?

Does seem odd, maybe for testing purposes try putting the 2nd drive onto the 2nd IDE and see what activity you get in playback.

Edd B
 
Sounds like the ever popular DMA problem.

What operating system are you using?

If your in 98, check in device manager, 'disk drives' and make sure the DMA box is checked for the drives. If there is no checkbox than you probably have the driver installed for the controller correctly and the problem is elsewhere.

If your in XP, check in device manager under 'ide controllers', look at settings under primary and secondary controllers 'advanced' and note whether they are running in Ultra DMA Mode.

Also, some more info as to how you have your hard drives, CD-ROM''s connected ribbon-wise could be useful in optimizing your setup a bit.
 
I'm running win 98 SE

Drive one is a 7200, 30 Gig IBM DeskStar ATA 100, that's on IDE1 as Primary master with my CD rom as primary slave. The drive is partitioned into C (my operating system) D (Cubase, cool edit, Wavelab, T-Racks, etc) and E (about 15 gig of mp3s)

Drive 2 is a 7200, 30 Gig Maxtor ATA 133, that's on IDE 2 as secondry master with my CD burner as secondary slave. The drive has only one partition F which is strictly for recording audio.

I'm just in from work and that's all the info I can think of right now. Thanks for the responce.

Alec
 
DMA

wasn't checked for the 2nd drive. I've checked that now and rebooted and my problem is still the same.

Thanks Emeric, but I'm still losing hair


edit because: after checking the DMA box for the second drive I was asked to reboot. After rebooting the box becomes unchecked again. I've tried this several times now. very frustraiting.
 
Last edited:
Have you gone to the M-audio website and downloaded the latest driver? I had some serious issues when I first installed my 1010 on my new computer where I did not on my old machine. Cakewalk folks pointed me in that direction...worked instantly. Just a thought...
 
I've reinstalled the mobo drivers, done everything I can think of. Every time I go into control panel and select the drive and check the DMA box when I reboot it's unchecked again.

anyone got any ideas?
 
Have you check the Ram to make sure it's not faulty?

Put the 256 back in like word_play sugguested and see it the problem disappears. Faulty ram happens quite a bit actaully
 
I think it's a bios problem. May be it isn't correctly recognising the ATA133 drive and therefore doesn't support it in DMA mode.
Have you stated up in Bios setup (usually, hit Delete key before Windows starts). See if the drive has been recognised as the Secondary Master. You can either have this set to Auto (detects the drive afresh on every boot) or use the Auto Detect Hard Disks function and don't forget to use the Y key to accept the selections and then use "save and Exit setup".
If the Bios still won't detect the drive properly. I'd suggest you visit the Gigabyte website to see if there's a bios update available for the problem.
ATA133 drives should be backward compatable with an ATA100 or 66 controller but if your bios pre-dates the ATA133 standard it might not know this. Could also be the size of the drive that's upsetting the bios - again there should be a bios update.

I doubt the memory is to blame - you would be getting random windows crashes if it were. I will say that more than 256meg is wasted under Win98 as this o/s was not designed to handle large ram efficiently. XP on the other hand loves 512meg or more.
 
I think it is an interleave problem

I think that the process of copying your files over to the new drive deinterleaved them. To achieve good multitrack performance out of your hard drive, you do not want each file stored on a sequential section of disk. It causes too many disk head seek operations to occur and kills your hard drive performance.

Back up your files and then try this tool. It may help you regain your lost hard drive performance.


http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/interlv.htm

Note that defragmenting the drive with your audio files causes the same problem as copying.
 
I agree with Jim Y. I had the same problem on my new Dell when I added the 2nd drive from my old machine, I had to force the BIOS to recognize the drive. Before this, the drive appeared fine in Windows but would stutter on ANY wav playback. Good luck!
 
oops

I missed the part about the dma box *unchecking* itself - not enouth sleep. Have to agree with Jim Y in this case too. Still may want to interleave you files later but that is another issue. Sorry.
 
Emeric said:
1. You are using 80 wire ribbon cables on both channels?
Click to expand...

I just asumed they were both 80 wire cables. Changed that, then I completely stripped the machine last night, reformated both drives, done the Fdisk thing, instaled a minimal windoze system and put all my audio stuff back in.

It's going like an absolute dream.

I was streaming 38 tracks of audio from the second drive today in cubase and the performance bar was only showing 15%CPU usage and disk usage registered ZERO!

Thanks for all the responces, I love this place!
 
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