Unable to Record

Sorry for the delay. I got distracted by some meatworld stuff.

Now this info is not my usual uneducated guessing and general bumbling. It is all based on stuff I've been told by Cakewalk support and some of the super smart dudes here on the forum as well as some stuff I gleaned elsewhere on the intertubes after being made aware of the problem.

So yes there is a problem with new motherboards and old PCI interfaces. The problem is not the devices but how the motherboards are built these days. Regular old PCI (not PCIe) slots are not managed by the motherboards the same way they used to be. They used to have their own chipsets that handled the data. I may have the terminoligy wrong but I think this is called "Native Support". These days those PCI slots are "Bridged" which I think means it is being handled by stuff elsewhere on the motherboard instead of having its own technical bits and goo helping it along. This works for a lot of legacy PCI devices (yes PCI is now considered a legacy device) but with something as intensive as an audio interface apparently the "Bridged" versions sometimes fall short. There are supposedly motherboards out there that are "PCI Sure or Ready or whatever" that use "Native" support but sadly for me (and many others) I did not learn that fact until it was too late. I saw an old school PCI slot and just assumed it would work. Before I move on to what I did to help alleviate this problem I'll mention something that I have seen recommended multiple times here and on other forums in regards to the actual PCI slots. Apparently with "Bridged" PCI support sometimes moving the PCI card to another slot will help. Something about the card and it's "Bridge" being closer to where the actual motherboard workload is being done. This is way beyond my tech experience and could be completely false but I figured I'd toss it out there.

That said, the issue I was having was with my Layla Echo 3G and my fancy new ASUS motherboard. I had all the drivers updated and everything setup the way it should have been and I started slogging my way through the X1 tuts. Everything was fine until I got to the "Mixing" section and when I'd mess with Pro Channel settings even a little I'd get a drop out/stop engine crash. It also happened while using Session Drummer 3. Not cool. I harassed the forum and called up Cake support and after following all the advice I got my Layla working reasonably again. Granted I have NOT made it do anything intensive since I did all of this so it may still screw up if I pushed it but X1 is not crashing on those simple tasks like it was before. I have however bought a more modern USB 2.0 Focusrite interface since then just to avoid further issues (you may want to consider upgrading your interface).

Here is what I ended up doing (aside from the DPC Latency Checker thing):

DPC Latency Checker was recommended to see how my system was handling all the fiddle faddle that audio stuff needs to work. I didn't bother because I got it to work without it but here's the link Cake support sent me to download the program... http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

They also recommended the Sweetwater System Optimization Guide to get everything running smoothly for audio. I did all of the steps in this guide except for the "Change Processor Scheduling" section because some people here on the forum said Sonar actually needs that to work properly. Warning! This is a PDF file... http://www.sweetwater.com...Optimization_Guide.pdf

I also raised my Buffer/Latency rate up to 512 (whatever that means) and ended up getting a round trip latency report from Sonar of around 25ms. To raise the Buffer go to Edit > Preferences > Audio Driver (or Driver Settings... I forget but the it's the driver settings page) and adjust it there. You may also be able to set it within your audio interface's software.


After all that things seem to work a lot better. Now that I'm looking at my support email again I'm seeing a whole bunch of other stuff they recommended to do as well but my thingy works now so whatever. I should take another look at that stuff though. lulz...

Hopefully you can get it working properly from that. If you just can't get it figured out then you really should think about a more modern interface. You can get pretty nice ones these days for under $300. Good luck.