I don't think switching the drives will do it either. I have even seen Audio PC makers are using SATA drives (granted with specific MOBO's I'm sure).

The Graphics card was a Trident PCI card. The Gina was still on its own IRQ and the Graphics latency was at 32.

To me, this leads me to believe that it is a Gina Driver issue. I don't know diddly about drivers but I suppose it is entirely possible that the Gina card drivers works fine with my XP 1.2 GHz but not this new PC. I am waiting to hear back from ECHO.

THANKS to you two for all your help. In the very least I have gained tremendous confidence in PD "tweaking".

It is an Echo Gina 20 Bit. I'll have to check when I get home but I am fairly certain thatthe source was set to internal. What do you mean by "SONAR Options > Audio set properly to sync with the card"?

Well I just got a hold of Echo. Their thought is that the firmware in the Gina 20bit is just too out of date and the firmware/chipset can't handle these new computers. Which, if true, would explain why the card works on my circa 2001 Intel XP PC. So I am in the hunt for a new card/interface. The good news is that my Gina will go back in my old XP and I will be able to use it as a Soft Synth host.

Thanks again. I'll leave this thread now and let you two super-heroes help others in need

Hey losguy, big thanx for helping me out a few weeks back.
I’m wondering if you could give please me some quick soundcard advice based on you knowledge.

The cracks and pop which only happen on playback of tracks whilst monitoring a recording are becoming too much for me with my ole Delta 2496 so now it time for an upgrade.

Would the Terratec Phase 28 (PCI) be a good choice as you seem to have great success with its older brother?
Bearing in mind I find my setup works best using ASIO with the softsynths n all.

I see there are some issues with Echo and EMU drivers its just I’m not sure about the ASIO driver on Terratec’s.

I'm just a little nervous about forking out dosh on something in case there are any hidden dangers.

Any other recommendations would be appreciated bearing in mind I’d prefer to use the Sil3114 SATA controller on my mobo now so no more M-Audio stuff.

ORIGINAL: Dirk Diggler
The cracks and pop which only happen on playback of tracks whilst monitoring a recording are becoming too much for me with my ole Delta 2496 so now it time for an upgrade. ... Any other recommendations would be appreciated bearing in mind I’d prefer to use the Sil3114 SATA controller on my mobo now so no more M-Audio stuff.

Yeah, M-Audio and SiI SATA are pants together.

Bearing in mind I find my setup works best using ASIO with the softsynths n all. ... I see there are some issues with Echo and EMU drivers its just I’m not sure about the ASIO driver on Terratec’s.

Hope this doesn't come as too much of a shock, but ASIO/WDM has no bearing on the performance of your softsynths per se. Rather, ASIO and/or WDM have everything to do with how your audio interface performs. So, when it's time for a new interface, I wouldn't be too married to either one, as you're best advised to try both all over again to find which one works best with the new interface.

Would the Terratec Phase 28 (PCI) be a good choice as you seem to have great success with its older brother?

Knowing about the SiI coming in, I might choose a Firewire or USB2 interface over a PCI one. People are having great success these days with those. Also, if/when you plan to upgrade your MOBO, you will stand a better chance of it still working, as PCI is becoming kind of an ugly kid sister as PCIe steamrolls itself all over the landscape.

I'm just a little nervous about forking out dosh on something in case there are any hidden dangers.

Dosh, eh? Can you find a place with a friendly return policy wherever you are?

ORIGINAL: Dirk Diggler
Good point about PCI being slowly on the way out even though it still has the greater bandwidth over USB and firewire. I suppose needing this bandwidth for audio is another matter and with certain compatibility issues reliability takes precedence.

Right, unless you need to simultaneously need to record/playback upwards of three hundred independent channels, you shouldn't encounter a problem. PCI is possibly better at achieving the lowest possible latency, but the landscape seems to be changing there too with the newer chipsets.

USB 2.0 (which my mobo has ) would also be good for laptop DJ stuff which was something else I was looking into for future projects. ... I think I’ll write to Santa for the Terratec Phase 26 USB which seems right up my alley and looks like a good long term investment.

Looks OK, but you could also shop around. I've heard some good things about Edirol (officially, now Roland) and others. M-Audio has been mixed, but maybe their newer stuff is more reliable. I haven't researched it much, as I haven't needed to yet. But I bet there's lots elsewhere on this forum and on the Gear forum. Besides basic audio quality, I'd look into reliability and low latency performance, and quality of support.

Big thanks again losguy for the words of wisdom. ... Btw ‘dosh’ is an English slang for cash kinda like you'd get in a Guy Ritchie movie.

No problem. Britiain then? I figured it was one of the Great Isles across the sea, but at the risk of offending I didn't want to venture a guess as to which (or even which hemisphere).

That's EXCELLENT, Mr. Jim. You get a

..\D

Friday-night hat tip from this side of the dateline from the losguy. Wow, yet another good and successful hardware workaround to this vexing problem (M-Audio and SiI SATA).

And in case anyone's watching this, and wasn't watching a couple of pages back, that's a Promise Fasttrak S150 SATA controller card.

ORIGINAL: jredfern
I seem to be only getting 16MB/sec write speed on the drive... :S lets see if I can fix it.. will keep you posted. Could it be because the SATA card is on IRQ 18?

Why... is 18 your unlucky number? =) A single IRQ listing is meaningless without some context... mainly, is anything else sharing it?

Most likely a low transfer rate is due to your controller being in a lower-speed transfer mode. Select DMA/UDMA if available. You can usually find that in the Hadrware Properties in Device Manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers (though SATA controllers may also show up in their own area, it just depends).

Hola Alejandro,

I don't have direct experience with that MOBO, but it is similar to the one Nash has (page 17 of this thread, near the bottom) and identical to the one bdevlin has (page 18, near the bottom). Both encountered glitches with their MOBOs and either identified or solved their problem. Nash solved his glitches by switching his SATA drives to the other SATA port. Brian (bdevlin) at least identified that his soundcard, an old Gina 20 bit, was the possible problem... though he hasn't reported back here on any progress.

(Brian are you out there? Did you try a new soundcard? Did it work?)

Neither were using a Soundblaster, though I saw an interesting case (soundsubs, page 17, halfway down) with a PCIe MOBO (Dell Poweredge) that glitched with an Echo Layla but did not glitch with an EMU 0404. The temporary solution was to switch toi the EMU. One thing though... you may want to seriously consider a Pentium D if you're going PCIe. Dual-cores do much better about not glitching audio on current PCIe MOBOs than single cores.

Sax,

I'm not familiar with the Bryan & Freeman article. Could you provide a link?

The latency you describe sounds like realtime midi/audio latency. That really should not have anything to do with PCI latency or what drive the project file is on. I do recall seeing something about this relating to a IGNOREMIDITIMESTAMPS setting in TTSEQ.INI. You could do a search for that and see what turns up.

Post back once you get that sorted. If you still have pops, we can take a new look at your system at that point.

ORIGINAL: shea

Sorry for any confusion I may have caused. It is good, from the standpoint of general MOBO design, that the onboard PCIe graphics are disabled automatically when inserting a PCIe graphics card. However, you may notice that many are posting problems with audio crackles simply due to PCIe graphics. Apparently, the current generation of PCIe chipsets/MOBOs tend to starve realtime resources in favor of PCIe graphics, so much so that low-latency performance cannot be realized without timing issues (for audio, this means buffer glitches). Unfortunately, this design philosophy seems to be driven mostly by gaming and HD video

Hi Losguy
I have been very critical of this thread in the begining, wrongly if i may add, but have been observing it lately, and from your quote above i have learned a lot from it, since it totally cured an issue i was having.
Thanks,very interesting reading indeed and some great posts.
shea

Hi shea, it's cool that your problem was solved. I'm glad to know that I could be of help, too.

It would be great to know more about the particular problem that you were having and how it was solved for you. Was it also related to PCIe?

Thanks in advance,

losguy

Thanks for the link.

The drifting latency is mysterious, but it sounds similar to threads I've seen around the forum. Maybe searching around will turn something up.

Edit: A quick workaround may be to start a new project and copy the old track contents into the new one.

Thanks for reporting back. Interesting find... yes, call CW and please post back on whatever comes of it.

Interesting thread, Los, but not quite my problem. I spent an hour on the phone with Cakewalk yesterday (sorry to those who had to wait!). The tech took me through a bunch of procedures and settings: switching to WDM drivers (from ASIO), deleting the AUD.INI file, changing the sampling rate, so many steps I can't remember or retrace them.

His conclusion was that my interface card was the source of the monitoring latency and pops. I am using a Lynx AES16 card to carry the AES signal from a Rosetta 800 converter. This, in turn, is connected to a Big Ben word clock. So, the clocking source is actually the Big Ben, with its signal carried through the Rosetta into the Lynx card by the Digital 1 output.

We couldn't solve the problems over the phone; in fact, they got worse. But here's the WEIRD thing: afterwards, I rebooted, reset everything to the orginal settings that had the problems--ASIO, 24/88.2, opened the old problem project, set audio metronome output to back to metronome bus, which is ouput through the Master bus. And VOILA, the blooming thing worked better than ever. No flipping pops, no monitoring latency.

What the. . .?

I am still mystified by computer DAWs. They just end up working or not working for some mysterious reasons. Was it deleting the AUD.INI file? I'll never know.

Thanks for your interest, losguy. Is it true that after deleting an aud.ini file, a new one is generated the next time you open and close the program? I neglected to mention that a few weeks ago I had been tinkering with aud.ini values based on another thread -- DiskBufSize, ExtraPluginBufs, etc.. The software seems to work a lot better for me with the default values!

My setup is kinda interesting in the path that the clock source travels. As it was explained to me when I bought the Apogee stuff, the Big Ben locks onto and syncs the Rosetta 800 AD/DA converters, and the clock data is transmitted to the Lynx interface card along with the digitized audio information on the AES record 1 (output 1) cable coming out of the Rosetta. Then Sonar is supposed to pick up that clock signal from the Lynx card. It's a level or two more complicated that using most audio cards.