Audio dropout on PTT

michaelshive wrote on 6/29/2003, 11:32 PM
I have a peculiar problem and I'm not sure how to isolate where the weak link is. I'm hoping that someone else out there has experience or is experiencing a similar problem so we can find a solution together.

I have a brand new laptop and have been editing with an external ADS Dual Link Firewire Drive (has the oxford 911 chipset). Everything has been great but when I try to Print-to-tape I experience audio dropouts on the tape from the very beginning. The dropouts don't show up when I playback from the timeline during editing - only when I PTT. This was only the 2nd project that I exported from the laptop and had no difficulties with the first (but I used a Western Digital external drive on the 1st one).

I tried everything I could think of to get it to work...and then it magically worked on the last time I said I was going to try it. There was no explanation for why it didn't drop audio the last time I exported (that I can think of) b/c I didn't change anything. I've since tried to export several more times and cannot overcome the audio dropout problem.

However, if I take the ADS firewire drive to a different computer it will PTT fine w/o any audio dropout. The only thing I haven't tried that I can think of is to use a firewire card in the available cardbus slot to see if that works.

The specs on the laptop are:

3.06 HT enabled Processor
1 GIG DDR 333 RAM
60 gig system drive
200 gig external firewire drive mounted in ADS case
I think the motherboard is based on the SiS645DX Chipset

So, if anyone has any ideas on why I would get audio dropout, let me know.

Comments

mikkie wrote on 6/30/2003, 10:18 AM
Have you tried PTT to your laptop's drive, perhaps using a small section of your proj to test? That would isolate any firewire issues I'd think, ie, show whether you should be looking for firewire related prob..

Might have to try a firewire card if the on-board chip isn't fully complient with specs - there's a list of chipsets etc. on this (sofo) site.

Otherwise, how about anything running whilst doing ppt? I think I read here where someone had success turning off pwr mgmt in the laptop bios. If you're running xp this site has a listing of services you can turn off, though in my (non-laptop) experience turning off some services actually hurts: http://www.blackviper.com/index.html

Try using task mgr to turn off background apps that might be continuously polling, check the taskbar, that sort of thing...
Zulqar-Cheema wrote on 6/30/2003, 1:16 PM
Had simliar on my laptop, I had to get change the ACPI in device manger to Normal PC and then it worked no problems, though you do loose the auto power saving thingies. DO A BACK UP FIRST, just in case.