I appreciate the effort, but I feel quite confident that everything is OK with the OS and Vegas install. Vegas 4 has NEVER allowed me to record in ASIO pop & crackle free with my hardware. I first installed V4 when I was using Win 2K, months later I re-installed Win 2K (formatted HD) and saw no difference. I then purchased Win XP and did a clean install with that - same behavior. Keep in mind that Vegas was always one of the first things I installed. I installed Nuendo a month or so later and have not had a single problem recording 16-20 tracks at a time using a 256 sample ASIO buffer. Vegas 4 - still the same problems. The chances of me having registry problems are slim based on the above stated experiences.

To be honest, I would not be surprised if switching to different audio hardware would solve my problems with ASIO recording in V4, but why should I have to when Nuendo works just fine on the SAME system? Basic troubleshooting logic dictates that Vegas is most likely at fault. I switched to Nuendo for many reasons, not just the recording problems. I do however, want to start using Vegas for video editing as it obviously is one of the better products out there for this purpose. My original post was my way of expressing dissatisfaction with they way Sony has handled things and to let other users know that their problems could *possibly* be the fault of Vegas. Unfortunately, this is a very unpopular thing to do around here. Not all of us here are computer illiterate. I've been building systems for almost 10 years now and I'm an EE that programmed as part of my last job (writing code to automate the factory testing of RF amplifiers which involved the control of ~$300K of test equipment). I mention this only because I get tired of the constant "Dude...Vegas works fine for me so your computer must be screwed up". I understand that a lot of people have configuration issues that cause these type of problems and may blame Vegas when in fact it is not at fault, but please don't just assume that this is always the case.

I regret making the original post here as it has opened up a can of worms.

All,

This may be a clue, not sure, but I've just solved a fundamental problem I was ALWAYS having in Vegas 4.0 and Acid 4.0, but NEVER in Vegas 3.0: A simple render to a new file with no effects whatsoever caused random 1 sample dips and dropouts. Recording tracks into the programs also suffered the same fate. Consistantly. ASIO or WDM. Tried everything imaginable short of reinstalling win2k, including reinstalling the programs, changing hard drives, IRQs, the whole disgusting mess. Short of it was that the problem went away when I increased the amount of RAM from 256M to 768M. Have not had time to dissect this any further, I'm just posting it for what it's worth in the hopes that it may help others.

Jim Schley-May

"I appreciate the effort, but I feel quite confident that everything is OK with the OS and Vegas install. Vegas 4 has NEVER allowed me to record in ASIO pop & crackle free with my hardware. "

Um, there are hundreds (thousands) of V4 users who do *not* have your problem. Maybe paying heaps for the best harware isn't the way to ensure everything is perfect. You seem to omit the possiblity of your OS not being optimally set up. There are many variable - 'scuse me if we've beenthere, but what other software have you got installed. Any system utilities or AV, etc ?

Damn this is getting annoying....you guys just cannot accept the fact that MAYBE Vegas 4 has some issues with certain hardware. Again with the "How dare you say something bad about Vegas!" and the "Dude it works fine for everyone else...so your machine must be screwed up".

Look, I have done a fesh install and installed Vegas 4 as the only software on the system - still clicks and pops. Did the XP *tweaks* - still the same.

Read my posts more carefully Geoff. And believe me, there are NOT thousands using Vegas 4 and a Frontier Dakota\Montana card. I am WELL AWARE that Vegas works OK with various other hardware. One thing is that the Dakota\Montana combination has 34 input + 34 output channels and Vegas (to my understanding) keeps them all active all the time unlike Sonar/Nuendo etc. This could well be the problem. I am 99.99% sure that Sony could easily repro my problem by testing the Frontier Dakota/Montana with V4 ASIO on my motherboard (Tyan S2466N-4M).

Thanks, for the information fishtank. Along with yours and a couple others this is helping. Well it's triggering some ideas for me anyways. I understand you're frustrated with Vegas and it seems like you're pretty knowledgable in this area and have already made sure you've dotted your I's and crossed your T's.

Here's my hypothesis. I'm thinking this has a correlation with the amount of RAM on your system along with the amount of I/O your sound card has and possibly keeping up with ASIO. The more I/O you have the more resources that are required for Vegas to run smoothly. I have a high number of I/O (8in/20out), but I also have a high amount of RAM (1.1Gig). I also haven't been running Vegas in ASIO, because the Echo Purewave drivers are pretty low latency. So here's my questions to everyone having this problem.

1. What Sound Card are you using?
2. How much total I/O? (1Stereo=2 ie spdif)
3. If your Sound Card has a buffer size setting, what is it set at?
4. What driver are you using? (ASIO or Windows Classic Wave?)
5. What's the total amount of RAM in your system?

I'm really thinking this has something to do with ASIO and the way Vegas handles it, I have no proof at this point, but I work for a company that supplies audio components to Toyota and Lexus. One of the things I've found in supporting the business for Toyota/Lexus in trouble shooting problems is that they always focus in on, "what's changed from your previous design?". So with that same thought process, I asked that of Vegas between v3.0 and v4.0. The answer that comes to mind for audio performance wise is "ASIO". This would make sense to me of why all the Steinberg apps work for you with no problems. It's called development process and lessoned learned. Steinberg developed ASIO and has been designing apps using it long before Vegas ever implemented it. This is the first release of Vegas using it, so there might be some things that aren't working 100% optimal for everyone's configuration. I could be wrong, but highly probable given my design/devlopement experience.

Please take some time and answer my five questions to see if we can narrow down that haystack.

One thing is that the Dakota\Montana combination has 34 input + 34 output channels and Vegas (to my understanding) keeps them all active all the time unlike Sonar/Nuendo etc. This could well be the problem.
Unless you have added/enabled the physical port to the Vegas project, we don't open the hardware. (Who told you this so that this is how you "understood" this?)

I am 99.99% sure that Sony could easily repro my problem by testing the Frontier Dakota/Montana with V4 ASIO on my motherboard (Tyan S2466N-4M).

Why are you so sure of this? I run a Dakota/Montana rig all the time - and I write much of the audio i/o code for our products. I know that at least one of our QA team has the Frontier products installed and runs them regularly. I have no issues, and if our QA group did, they would be telling me about it.

"I will get our QA to review as close as possible the issues you have. I will even run tests against Nuendo/Cubase/Sonar - whatever."

And tell me if Nuendo/Cubase/Sonar would offer you the same kind of support!!!!!

Cheers Peter!!!

Seriously! Now THAT's support!

Sorry to have to retract the last message. The problem IS NOT FIXED by the additional RAM. I did seem to disappear for a few renders, but is really still there. Next step is to reformat the drive and start anew with the OS and apps. Ouch.

Jim

Might I advise installing your OS on a smaller separate hard disk? I have a little 30GB that I use for my OS and programs. When hoaky stuff happens that I can't figure out, I just reformat and reload. Takes like 2 hours and usually the problem goes away. Having a separate disk just makes the process muuuch easier b.c you avoid copying/pasting.

You may be well aware of this in which I case I apologize for my presumption -)

Thanks, cosmo I already have a separate HD for the OS and apps. Based on your comments, and the fact that I've tried everything else imaginable, I'm hopeful that reformatting and reloading the OS and apps will make the problem go bye bye.

yeah, I feel that. been there too many times to count -) well, not that many. good luck.

Sometimes things are just ugly, Ive done a zillion reformats, tried across many systems and soundcards and the one thing I've found, is that when you really try and push it, itll get sketchy. Usually it will wait till there are paying customers around. Render FX out as often as you can, render busses as often as you can, render edits out as often as you can and keep the track count to around 20 or less tracks with one or two fx sends and not too many edits, and things are cool usually

Well I upgraded my mobo with what is considered the most stable/reliable unit for AMD processors in a DAW (Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe), updated all the drivers - and unfortunately the start playback hesitation I've been experiencing in Vegas 4 remains unchanged. I'm extremely frustrated and disappointed with this. I will contact Sony support again, but I now have done EVERYTHING to remedy this ridiculous situation so I'm skeptical that support will be able to do anything as upgrading the mobo was the last thing on the list and even they thought it should be unnecessary. Just in case someone here has any ideas that support didn't think of, my system specs are below. My system is optimized for DAW use and there are no programs installed except what's listed. I've already went through the whole IRQ re-assignment routine, relocated PCI cards, tried ASIO instead of WDM drivers, etc, etc. Nothing has made a difference. Other than this hesitiation problem, Vegas 4 seems to work perfectly. However, this issue is completely unacceptable. Five minutes of heavy editing with this will make one want to throw something at the screen!! ;-O

Thanks for letting me vent!

drbam

XP Pro
AMD XP2400
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Nforce 2 chipset
1 gig DDR ram
Matrox 450 video card (latest drivers)
WD 80 gig 7200 IDE system drive
WD 80 gig 7200 IDE data drive
Maxtor 80 gig 7200 IDE Backup drive
Layla 24 interface (latest drivers).

Vegas 3 & 4 (latest updates on Sony apps)
Acid Pro 3
Sound Forge 6
CDA 5
Waves Platinum Bundle

Hi Red,
Here is a test for you for vegas 4+
1. set to windows classic driver
2. turn on the metronome
3.take the metronome output on your board and mult it into as many track inputs as possible. (I did 12 stereo tracks)
4. record 4 or 5 minutes of metronome
5. examine the waveforms for phase discrepencies at multiple points on the timeline.
6.try the same test using a looped sample of drums.
7.try this whole thing in vegas 3

ASIO in vegas is flakey for me. It doesn't play well with my motu driver.
It will not hold buffer settings properly. So I do not use it.
When I do this test in vegas 4, the timing varies up to several ms, and it does not remain constant.
i.e. track 2 will be out .5ms at 10 sec on the timeline, 2ms at 30 sec on the timeline, 1ms at a minute.....
and track 3 could have completely different fluxuations.
Now try tracking a drum kit.
I do not get these fluxuations with vegas 3.
Steve S.
If you wish for system info just ask.

1)Do you have the latest bios for the mobo?

2)When you did a clean install of the OS did you try to just install Vegas 4 by itself to see if it works right? [no xp optimizations done yet or audio plugins installed]

3) Your running on "standard PC mode" right?

4)Did you install and run vegas before you optimized your OS or after?

5)What kind of power supply are you using? [brand and wattage]

6)Are you running vegas on a partitioned drive? ie:partitioned say 2-3 times so that 2 partitions only have A/V related software on it and the other has everything else. This is what I do and keeps my system running well.

7)Have you tried to tweak your OS minimally and see if vegas works right? All I do is just turn OFF all the XP gui stuff. Leave it at 32bit color...1024 by 768. And I shut off the autorun for the cd tray. Thats it. What else do you do on top of that?

8) If you load a audio project into acid 3 as oneshots and play it back do you see the same results?

9)Your seeing this "hesitation problem" with no plugins in use correct? Just audio tracks? Bit rate of audio?

10)What IRQ is the layla 24 on? Is it sharing with anything else? [just curious]

Ed.

1)Do you have the latest bios for the mobo?
Yes it was just installed on Sunday - latest bios.

2)When you did a clean install of the OS did you try to just install Vegas 4 by itself to see if it works right? [no xp optimizations done yet or audio plugins installed]
No. I installed Vegas, SF and Acid.

3) Your running on "standard PC mode" right?
No. From what I can tell, the latest word on this is that standard mode is not recommended unless you are having problems. Vegas 4 is the ONLY app thats giving me any issues and if the latest version of Vegas requires standard mode, then its clearly a Vegas problem and should be fixed.

4)Did you install and run vegas before you optimized your OS or after?
After.

5)What kind of power supply are you using? [brand and wattage]
Antec, 430 watt. A very nice upgrade.

6)Are you running vegas on a partitioned drive? ie:partitioned say 2-3 times so that 2 partitions only have A/V related software on it and the other has everything else. This is what I do and keeps my system running well.
No. Partitioning drives is no longer recommended as they can cause more problems than they solve. I only have 5 audio apps installed anyway - all Sony.

7)Have you tried to tweak your OS minimally and see if vegas works right? All I do is just turn OFF all the XP gui stuff. Leave it at 32bit color...1024 by 768. And I shut off the autorun for the cd tray. Thats it. What else do you do on top of that?
I followed the tweaks that are suggested on the XP optimization site.

8) If you load a audio project into acid 3 as oneshots and play it back do you see the same results?
I haven't tried this in Acid but I loaded the project tracks into Vegas 3 and there was no hesitation.

9)Your seeing this "hesitation problem" with no plugins in use correct? Just audio tracks? Bit rate of audio?
Correct - no plugins on anything. Hesitation begins with 6 tracks and increases with additional tracks till leveling off at around 12.
24/44.1

10)What IRQ is the layla 24 on? Is it sharing with anything else? [just curious]
I experimented with this when working with Sony support. I was finally able to get the Layla on its own IRQ but it made no difference. I haven't checked which IRQ its on now with the new mobo as it doesn't seem to matter. Regarding IRQ sharing, from what I can gather from extensively researching various forums, the majority consensus now seems to suggest that unless you're having serious problems, you should allow XP to assign them. IRQ problems seem to be more prevalent with older apps and hardware. The oldest thing I have is Vegas 3 and Acid 3.

Thanks for your time and suppport. I'll consider going through the clean install, switching to standard mode stuff but given my particular circumstances, I have to admit I'm skeptical that it would resolve anything and after spending all the time I already have on this issue, I'm thinking its probably time for me to switch to another app. I've been wanting to use VSTi's so perhaps this contining Vegas 4 drama can serve as the final push that I should move it that direction. For the time being, I can continue using Vegas 3 for straight ahead multitracking and basic editing.

drbam

Cold,
Thanks for taking the time to type up the repro steps. I will definately try these out, as I'm sure will others to see what we get.

Drbam, I would also recommend doing a fresh install in standard PC mode. On one of my PC's that my wife usues, I originally had WinXP setup in Standard PC mode and it ran smooth, and was DAW capable. Then somewhere down the line of her surfing the internet, some kind of virus was on that PC or whatever, things just weren't working right. So she was complaining for me to fix the PC and I was in a hurry, so I just reformatted the hard drive and let Windows XP install in the ASPI mode, so I didn't have to take the time to configure all the hardware. Well running in ASPI mode I found out I had all kinds of audio interuptions, stuttering and gapping, but this seemed to happen in all the apps. Soon my wife was complaining because she couldn't surf the net and play music at the sametime, because the audio keeps on skipping. I found out I couldn't change IRQ's to resolve any conflicts. So I had 2 choices to fix the problem. One to either install in Standard PC mode to resolve the hardware interupt conflicts or two get a divorce. My wife is currently happy downloading and playing music at the sametime.

Avoided the divorce, good thinking! Usually the only time my wife wants to use my pc is when I'm in the middle of reformatting...the perfect time..."what do you mean it doesn't work???"

I too have picked up viruses that bunked everything until I reformatted. Now my DAW is NOT online....or, doesn't stay connected 24 7. I'm dying to see what fixes this problem....

"Usually the only time my wife wants to use my pc is when I'm in the middle of reformatting...the perfect time..."what do you mean it doesn't work???""

Cosmo,
You're right, we do have a lot in common. This is exactly, what happens to me. Hopefully, we don't have a "common" wife? Hmmmmm???? My wife is currently SUPPOSE to be in Brazil visiting her family. What's your wife look like? :-)

It just occured to me to see if the hesitation problem I'm having in Vegas 4 also occurs on my old P3 450 which I use as a general purpose machine - primarily for downloading apps, burning CDs and for occasional stereo file editing. This system runs on 98se and only has 256 meg ram, one 30 gig HD and a lowly SB soundcard. As I anticipated, the hesitation in Vegas 4 is extremely worse on this system. I can actually hear the drive spinning prior to engaging playback. However, the big surprise came when I loaded up the same amount of files in a Vegas 3 session and incredibly, as with my studio DAW, NO HESITATION! I absolutely did not expect this to be the case. At any rate, this would certainly rule out running in ASPI on my XP system to be the problem. It just blows my mind that other users aren't experiencing this or maybe I'm the only one that just can't tolerate the playback hesitation (which I seriously doubt). One thing's for sure: for whatever reason, Vegas 4 just doesn't want to be my friend! Oh well. . . a waste of time and money for me and I suppose its time to move on. ;-O

Really frustrated,

drbam

Drbam,
I think there's some confusion of issues in this thread. You're talking about a hesitation upon playback, and other users are talking about clicks and pops during playback. I was mainly focusing in on the clicks and pops issue. Hesitation on playback seems to be something totally different, which is probably due to buffering issues. I'm not too concerned about playback hesitation, because I've lived through ADATS and DA-88's, anything better than that which is most everything is not too much of a concern for me.