Welcome to My Nightmare

C

Cal D

New member
I am having serious problems with Cool Edit Pro 2.0.

Each time that I use it, it cuts out during playback and makes terrible popping noises…similar to what you would hear through your speakers if you unplugged a stereo without first turning the power button off. The noise is so bad that I wouldn’t even think of trying to record anything.

I have spoken to Cool Edit Support once and have also acted on several recommendations provided to me via e-mail. Some of these had to do with tweaking Windows XP Home, and others had to do with tweaking settings in Cool Edit Pro itself.

For example, I have tried what seems like dozens of different buffer settings in an attempt to resolve this issue. I also downloaded the latest drivers for my Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum card. I also note that no other audio programs trigger this same problem. It appears to happen only when I use CEP 2.0.

To eliminate the possibility of hardware issues, I brought my computer to the computer store that built it and they had their technicians test it and certify that the hardware is fine. This excersize cost me $90.00. They also checked the bios. They maintain that any issues related to Cool Edit are not hardware related and are particular to the Cool Edit software itself.

I went as far as formatting my entire hard drive and then reinstalling a brand new copy of Windows XP Home Edition, thinking that it may have been the operating system that was causing corruption.

Despite all this expense and effort, I am still stuck with virtually an inoperable Cool Edit Pro 2.0. I am at my wits end as to how to resolve this. All my music projects are in this format.


I'm desperate..any ideas are welcome......

Thank-you
 
Well, okay, if you're desperate here's a relatively painless test. Take your copy of Cool (have you got the CD?) and load it on a friend's computer and see if it works. If it works on the friend's computer, then the problem isn't Cool, it's some sort of incompatibility between that computer/soundcard and that OS and Cool.

I don't remember hearing complaints about problems running Cool on Windows XP Home, but it might be worth posting this problem at the Syntrillium board to see if anybody has had problems with Cool and XP.

You know, I once went through a boatload of grief trying to get a Gadgetlabs spdif soundcard to work. Emails to Syntrillium, changing the buffers, the whole banana. In the end, by contacting other users of the same card, I found out that the problem was simple - that particular soundcard just didn't work.
 
Sometimes simply uninstalling and then reinstalling Cool Edit Pro 2.0 will fix a problem. Have you tried this yet?
 
I had your problem exactly. Nothing I did changed anything. I tweaked the hell out of XP home edition. I reinstalled everything. I applied every bit of valuable knowledge I found on here, the TASCAM tweaks, CEP recommended tweaks, you name it - I did it.... No-Go.

I'm not saying that this is the answer, but I think with some computers and Operating systems combined, fixing this problem is less than a science -- there are way too many interdependent parameters involved. XP home edition was cool for all the other stuff you do with your box, but in my case, not for audio. In my tweaking efforts I wound up blowing up my box and I had to do a factory re-imageing using the restore discs that came with it. So I wound up back on the OS that was preinstalled on my box, Which was the Dreaded Windows ME! -- Which I hated - for everything else I used my computer for other than audio. For shits and laughs though I decided to reinstall CEP before running my XP upgrade again -- and for some strange freakin reason my box and CEP loves Windows ME! So I went back to all my old drivers, the original OS, I shut off Windows updates, and all other unnecessary background running programs, and now I never even get a studder, pop, click. CEP seems to love the current climate with it's default buffer settings too. That computer is now used only for audio. I unintalled everything else. Every program is different in the way it reacts to your box, your soundcard, your processor, your hard drives, your drivers, your OS, and the direction of the freakin wind that day. All I know is I can finally do what I wanted to do with my box and CEP, which is focus on the music. Good Luck!
 
It's true, Cool Edit loves Windows ME. I recently upgraded my RAM, hard drive space, and OS to Windows 2000 Pro. I expected to get all this great performance out of Cool Edit but didn't really get much. I use Cubase now as well, and Cubase doesn't work with ME so I kind of had to do it. When I first installed, I had all the issues you're having, clicks, pops, skips... tell us, when you get the clicks and pops is your processing meter empty out as you are experiencing your skips and pops? I don't think that's the actual name of it - but you know the meter to the lower left of the screen that decreases as your heavy processing kicks in. With me, there weres several things I had to do and I can't pin it down to one actual thing that fixed it. I think OS's like 2000 Pro and XP use up more virtual memory than the earlier versions of Windows. Are the sessions you are listening to that you're getting pops and crackles in using a lot of real time effects processing, or maybe a lot of volume or panning envelopes? How many tracks? Or is this happening even when just recording a single track in a new session? There's a trick Rwhitey showed me to set up the swap file for audio recording that helped me. Also I had some issues with configuring Cool Edit with my sound card (Audiophile). I had to pull back bug time on my real time effects processing , especially Waves Trueverb which was a bitch of a memory hog. Everything seems to be OK now. What about your sound card drivers? Are they up to date?
 
Well, Cal D seems to have disappeared, but this thread's been interesting to me. I'm running Win98 still, and it's good with Cool. But on the basis on this thread I'd be really dubious about installing WinXP Home. But what I really want to know is what the important variables are:

OS
soundcard
recording/editing software

Anything else?
 
1 - The OS,
2- The daw SoftWare,
3- Soundcard and Drivers,
4- the Bios,
5- Hard Drive configuration -- (DMA settings, Partitioning, speed, Etc.),
6- processor speed,
7- Other installed Audio software and the way it interacts with your sound card.

I found that some of my problems had to do with My PC box itself . I have a Sony Vaio slimtop 800 mhz Pentium 3, and my BIOS was having difficulty with XP home edition. I bought the box because it was quiet and small, but found out later that it would soon be discontinued due to complaints about some of it's limitations for upgrade. It has an oddly customized motherboard cunstructed to fit in a tiny box, as are the rest of the components like the hard drives and the CD Burner. They are all customized for a small box. So all these other factors may be particular to my situation. But when I hear people struggling the way I did after a great deal of tweaking, I begin to wonder if the bios version and the Factory insalled OS play a part in how well the box works in general.

Technicaly, if you start over by formating your hard drives and do a fresh OS Install, none of that should be an issue. In my case, upgrading the bios either before or after a fresh OS install became impossible. I would have had to buy an external floppy drive to pull it off because the box came with out one, and didn't have a slot to add one, plus until I upgraded the Bios, I can't boot to a CDR. Yeeesh -- I just wanted to make music... If the box, bios, and CEP are happy with Windows ME, that's good enough for me.

Interesting side note: None of my sonic foundry products worked in XP Home Edition either despite my tweaks. They all work fine with Win ME. Go figya!?
 
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"I think your processor and RAM are going to have a bit to do with things as well."

Okay, but that's just a matter of capacity, rather than incompatiibility, right?
 
Maxing your RAM is always a good thing, but I had all those problems with 512 meg of RAM, and then I know people running CEP just fine on Win 98SE Pentium 2 machines with 128 Meg of RAM.
 
dobro said:
"I think your processor and RAM are going to have a bit to do with things as well."

Okay, but that's just a matter of capacity, rather than incompatiibility, right?
Click to expand...

Yep!
 
Dobro-

An upgrade to XP Professional might be a wise choice, provided that your soundcard has the right drivers. OSs like 98 and ME are designed for 256megs of RAM, because that was the high end when they were realised. Anything over 256 on 95,98, or ME can actually have adverse effects.

Those OSs based on NT technology (2000, XP) crave as much RAM as they can get, like a Mac, and XP actually expects it.

That was my reasoning for upgrading, at least . (Plus a buddy got me a free installation disk from the University he works at. :) )


I've had not a single problem with XP with my soundcard (Delta) or CEP 2.0.

Rock On
Chris
 
I think Cal D has left the building, but here's my two cents worth. I run CEP 2.0 with XP Home with no problems. I think the issue must be your soundcard or drivers. Just out of curiousity... did you try running it in compatability mode?
 
I'm not sure what you mean, "compatability Mode", is this a XP home edition feature, a sound card feature, or a CEP feature?
 
recwall said:
I'm not sure what you mean, "compatability Mode", is this a XP home edition feature, a sound card feature, or a CEP feature?
Click to expand...

This is an XP feature that allows you to run software that ran good on a previous OS. If you ran it under a previous OS and it ran great, then you upgraded to XP and had problems, you can try it in "Compatability Mode" and that will sometimes take care of the problem. I'm not on my XP machine right now, but I think if you right click on your desktop icon (not the system icons) there is a tab called compatability. Here you can select which version of windows you previously ran the software under. I've used it on a few items and some work OK, others don't.

Greg
 
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