ORIGINAL: HammerHead
odd story here...could be user malfunction but i dont think the manual for my
A7N8X-E Deluxe is 100% correct....i even downloaded the one from the asus TS site & still had the same issue.

Whoa, if the manual's wrong, then all bets are off, and I'm going back to my cave for the winter!

its a bit foggy in memory now but i think i remember swapping my audio card around and getting conflicts with the agp slot that weren't marked in the manual. i managed to find a free slot & all is ok but their manual is off i think.

Glad you found a slot that worked, though. By chance do you remember which one it was?

OTS, here's another A7N8X-E Deluxe saga that turned out well.

The Delta 66 card is in slot 5. I set the AGP at 88, the serial ata at 16, and the audio at 32. I also tried several other combinations. I'll have to boot back up with that hard drive, but I think I remember the serial ata being on with something else.

ORIGINAL: BeachGuitar

I disabled some other stuff and got IRQ 3 alone for my Delta 66 sound card. I still get pops and cracks. I tweaked the latency settings for the serial ata, video, and sound cards. NO luck. I deleted the AUD.INI file for Sonar 4 then re-scanned and re-set up the audio for Sonar...no dice. This serial ata is giving me fits. I can take it out and boot up from my IDE hard drive which is even defined as "ACPI" and shares IRQ's on the Delta and it works fine. But the bottom line is.....I wanna use my faster serial ata hard drives.

just for the "fun" of it try disabling the onboard network cards either through bios or in windows & see if the popping goes away.....i think thats what i finally did to get it working.

what video card do you have ?

ORIGINAL: losguy

ORIGINAL: HammerHead
odd story here...could be user malfunction but i dont think the manual for my
A7N8X-E Deluxe is 100% correct....i even downloaded the one from the asus TS site & still had the same issue.

Whoa, if the manual's wrong, then all bets are off, and I'm going back to my cave for the winter!

its a bit foggy in memory now but i think i remember swapping my audio card around and getting conflicts with the agp slot that weren't marked in the manual. i managed to find a free slot & all is ok but their manual is off i think.

Glad you found a slot that worked, though. By chance do you remember which one it was?

OTS, here's another A7N8X-E Deluxe saga that turned out well.

It's in slot 5 (wifi is disabled)

From the manual it seems like it should have worked in slot 4 also (with GB lan disabled) but it wouldnt....it always conflicted with agp...maybe my board is flakey.

slot 3 was a no-no as i use sata
slot 2 was a no-no
slot 1 = slot 5 so i used slot 5 (slightly further from the ps to minimize noise)

Day job? What's that?

haha, to be able to ask that question....

if my day job were tinkering with this god-forsaken dell, maybe i'd have a fully-functioning DAW right now...maybe....

ok, i've been playing around with this thing some more and...

i cracked open the case and looked for some identifier on the mobo, didn't see anything. i ran an intel chipset identifier executable, and it tells me i have the intel 925X express chipset family (that's where i got the 925x from before). but i don't think it's specifically the D925XCV after looking at the map of the D925XCV in its manual. mine is slightly different, e.g. it has 3 conventional-looking pci slots and one pci express slot, as opposed to the D925XCV which has 4 and 2, respectively. most of the other components look the same, though. *AND*, i checked out my IRQ assignments in device manager and they are assigned exactly as specified in the D925XCV manual for the reserved IRQs (see picture). so my mobo seems to match the manual pretty well, minus the extra slots. i checked intel's site, and the only other 925 board listed is the D925XBC. i'm thinking that's gotta be the one i have. anyway....

important notes about my IRQs, as things stand after a little tweaking:

* i disabled a usb controller that conflicted with my audio card and now the emu sits alone on IRQ 18 (bus 4)
* i disabled the firewire port on the emu, just for good measure.
* the SATA RAID controller is alone on IRQ 20 (bus 0)

i noticed very recently little random pops while listening to mp3s in windows media player. almost like a tiny bit of static or, an even better description, like the clicks and pops on a record. you know, a big vinyl disc... it's very much like a record, the more i hear it. this is *not* happening in sonar, i just thought it might be help diagnose my problem...the emu is currently my only audio card (i have disabled the onboard audio), so every sound out of my computer is going through the emu....

I would be very interested in knowing what the factory default PCI latency settings are for the PCI Express graphics device, seeing as it sits right on logical PCI Bus 0. I'm wondering if this could be the first graphics interface with a PCI latency timer hard-set to zero?

well, here's what powerstrip tells me about my nvidia card - clicky click. it would appear that the latency is in fact hard-set at 0...just like the sata/raid controller. the emu, however, is editable, set originally at 64.

as for the sonar settings, i made sure everything lined up as best i could. i am recording at 16 bit / 44.1k right now, and all the settings i can find reflect that. my I/O buffer size is 256KB. i also tried 512KB, 64KB, 32KB, with no luck. my synchronization setting is "full chase lock", my driver mode is ASIO, read/write caching turned off in sonar, disk caching is turned ON in windows (see here).

that's what i've done / figured out at this point. the glitch in sonar is still the same, skipping/stuttering away, whenever it pleases. i may try to reformat/reinstall soon, see if maybe that helps things out.

i'm gonna keep playing around with this thing, i just wanted to give a progress report. thanks so much for your input and attention.

I spoke a bit pre-maturely. I did have to go back and install power strip to tweak the latency settings. I have now successfully recorded a voice track on top of 5 midi and 2 other audio tracks. So far so good. I am running on an ACPI configuration with the Delta card on IRQ 16 and latency settings as follows:

VGA 88
Delta 192
SATA 16
Network 32

Good luck on that tokenwhite. One other thing I did that I always do is that whenever I make changes to my hardware, I go into the sonar directory and delete the aud.ini file so that sonar re-scans my hardware and re-set's the configuration. I then go into the audio panel and set my playback and recording timing to the delta card, turn off dithering, use the wdm drivers, and then set the i/o cache.

ORIGINAL: BeachGuitar
SUCCESS!!! You guys aren't going to believe this one!!! This morning I stumbled across a solution. In the Sonar 4 audio advanced settings I enabled both the read and write caching and set the io buffer size at 256. I am now running on my original configuration with shared irq's and "ACPI" and have no pops or cracks. I tried this only after disabling both network cards and bumping the Delta 66 latency to 192. I have since removed power strip and am running from a standard ACPI configuration with no modifications.
...
I spoke a bit pre-maturely. I did have to go back and install power strip to tweak the latency settings. I have now successfully recorded a voice track on top of 5 midi and 2 other audio tracks. So far so good. I am running on an ACPI configuration with the Delta card on IRQ 16 and latency settings as follows:
VGA 88
Delta 192
SATA 16
Network 32

Great to see, Beach. Now I'm curious... did turning on the R and W cache in SONAR have any impact on your CPU usage? AFAIK, the cache in SONAR is in software, not hardware.

I can't tell much difference in cpu utilization although I was running on a slower processor before I got the popping fixed. I currently am running on an AMD 1.83 processor with 512 meg ram and I run about 17-19% cpu on a 5 midi/2 audio track project using tts-1, lexicon reverb, and sonitus equalizer and compressor effects.

i tried the read/write caching in sonar, deleted the AUD.ini file, restarted sonar, unfortunately it didn't help...bah.

token, while you're at it, and if you haven't already, make sure that your SATA drive is set to UDMA and not PIO mode.

i checked for DMA/PIO settings in device manager. i could only find it as an option for the IDE channel, on which it was enabled. i looked for it on my SATA system drive and the SATA RAID array (audio), but couldn't find the option. where can i find that setting?

just for fun, i moved a couple simple projects' worth of audio data back to my system drive, to see if it performed any differently on that side. it produced about the same amount of glitches that existed when the audio data was on its own drive. which i guess could be expected...they're both SATA.

well, back to researching...

ORIGINAL: tokenwhite
well, here's what powerstrip tells me about my nvidia card - clicky click. it would appear that the latency is in fact hard-set at 0...just like the sata/raid controller. the emu, however, is editable, set originally at 64.

Thanks for checking. This makes the first video card that defaults to zero PCI latency. Must be a PCI Express thing.

It has been a very frustrating morning. With no changes to my system...except a first of the morning boot---the popping has returned. Everything I have tried this morning has not worked completely. I even returned to the "Standard PC" build with the Delta on IRQ 3 by itself...no dice. After weeks of wrestling with this serial ata thing I am about ready to give the idea up. I can always boot up with an IDE drive and everything works ok. It seems like I am spending more time being a computer technician rather than a musician.

Well I am having similiar difficulties as others on this post (CPU meter jumping on a 3.2 ghz )and "BeachGuitar" took the words tight out of my mouth. . . . . .
"It seems like I am spending more time being a computer technician rather than a musician."

P43.2 ghz, 1gb pc3200, Delta66, Seagate 'cuda 160gb Sata, EIDE 80gb OS hd, ASUS P4P800SE MB, W2K sp4.

I have had marginal success. After a complete reinstall I left the thing in ACPI mode (though I think Standard PC might be better) and turned everything possible off in the BIOS. Used WDM drivers not ASIO (they hardley work at all) and bumped up the cache in SONAR3 about 3/4 to max (forget the setting, sorry)
I actually used the windows drivers (during the fresh install) for the SATA drive and not the program supplied w/ the 'Cuda that installs the drivers. I also went through the list... Display properties, Backround Services enabled, Virtual Memory, went through Admin Tools Services (be careful with this one), DMA if avail (not PIO).
Anyway the result was that I could record 6 (3 stereo) tracks at a time with the CPU Meter still jumping up and down between 17-30% but it should barely moving. Odd, when I playback 10 tracks it just sits there at 0%. I'm still not getting the performance I should but it's kind of working.
I thought naively that SATA was the way to go but I must say other than the fun of trying to solve this "puzzle" and the educational value it's been a tricky one. After I give Cakewalk and Seagate tech support a go I may just throw an EIDE hd in there and forget it.

Sorry to hear that the tools in this thread aren't working out on your systems. As you'll see throughout this thread, certain systems just simply refuse to cooperate with SATA audio. All I have ever been able to offer is an extra place to look for a solution. Lots have been helped by this, but unfortunately, some have not. The best that I can figure is that not every system is absolutely identical; heck, even two pieces of hardware that otherwise spec out the same have been known to act differently under marginal conditions. FWIW, I think tokenwhite's system makes the first one reported here having SATA audio glitches that show up using an integrated SATA controller.

ORIGINAL: bklein
First, here is a site that runs through many possibilities for tweaking your system (SATA or not): http://www.pcmus.com/clicknpops.htm

Hi Barry, welcome and thanks for gracing this thread with your first SONAR forum post! Yeah, PCMus is one of the first places that I consulted when I first encountered SATA pops and clicks last year. (MTW, Matthew over at PCMus was the first to reply in my first thread on this topic over on the SOS forum.)

Prompted by your post, I went back and clicked around and he has updated some things. About halfway down the page that you linked to, I found this particularly interesting link. It affects all nVidia nForce2 chipset MOBOs, such as the A7N8X series. I need to crank up my system and see if I actually have this XP Hotfix. Glitches or not, excess CPU usage on disk transfers is a bad thing. I have a feeling that I already have the Hotfix, though, because I haven't noticed the huge CPU usages reported there. BTW: XP SP2 is supposed to include this Hotfix. I'm wondering if this has been verified by anyone?

Edit: Have since gone back and looked. The Hotfix mentioned is pretty old (2003) and on my system has probably been wrapped up into a later hotfix (it doesn't even show up in the Add/Remove Programs install record). As of today, I still haven't had time between projects to update my DAW to SP2 yet.

From what I am reading, systems with PATA IDE drives will work, but systems with embedded SATA have issues. So, why is this? Many new MB's have the ICH4/5/6/r chipset attached to some ports and another SATA controller for remaining ports. So do you guys see a difference if you try different SATA ports?

Until tokenwhite up there, it seemed to be tied to whether or not the SATA controller was integrated into the chipset (Southbridge, like IDE is). If you like, you can read all about that back at the top of this thread.

I work at WDC and can "drive" this issue with our engineering/support teams if there is something easily duplicated (and probably without purchasing and loading Sonar4...). We have hundreds of test systems. Is there some utility or simple program you know of that can be used for testing/debugging the "popping" issue?

Absolutely. Now we just need to reproduce the SATA audio glitches with a free audio sequencer app. Maybe n-Track?