Can't speak for all our questions but....

I use a M-Audio Delta card with Vegas with no problems.....been using since Vegas Audio 2.0.

I use external hard drives for capturing, editing, and storage. RAID set ups have their advantages but not a requirment. I don't use try hot swapping drives but I would "assume" they would work similar to externals. You can run into some problems but nothing that taking your time and paying a ttention won't handle.

I'd think about talking with someone else before I bought to much from these guys.

Good luck.

Edit: Farss is correct and very knowledgeable....was answering while he was posting.

I have the same feeling.
Was hoping NOT to have that confirmed.
Wishful thinking.

I am a consultant, in general. They are full of s##t.

Audigy is reported to be "noisy" vs. more pro cards like some m-Audio models.

A "conflict" could be substantiated through a windows IRQ report where it is sharing, and thus could "possibly" conflict with Windows in general, but with a specific program, doubtful.

Before you pay them, have them supply a general "Status Report", with detailed documentation validating their claims. Tell them that after you receive the documentation, and after you validate it, you will pay them.

And don't buy a thing from them.

These self-styled "experts" rarely know a thing about video editing.

Case in point:
A couple of years ago, a friend bought Video Factory and installed it on a 750mhz machine, which by all estimations should work. Wouldn't work. Tons of dropped frames during capture. Her "consultant" charged $210 to "recondition" her machine, which probably consisted of a defrag. Still didn't work. I sat down and within 10 minutes it was capturing properly (I enabled the DMA). Oh, I didn't charge a thing for the "consultation," but I did find a $100 bill in a holiday card ;?)

If you search these forums for terms like "Audigy." "Soundblaster," or "RAID," you will find what real-world users think of them for video editing, and believe me, it's not all good.

BTW, my cheapo M-Audio beats the heck out of my old 'blaster.

I use an M-Audio FW-1814 on my second machine running Cubase SX3 and Vegas 6 frequently - never a problem with either app.

Those who can't do - teach. Those who can't teach - consult.

The drivers for M-Audio are not always what they should be. Many people find that the lastest drivers are not the best on their machine.

I use the Delta ,27 drivers rather than the latest because they work like a charm. The newer drivers pop and snap for me.

I use an M-Audio Firewire-410 with Vegas 5 and 6 and have no problems at all. Works with both my laptop and desktop.

I use to have that Audigy piece of garbage consumer card and it couldn’t even find it’s own ASIO drivers half of the time. It drove me nuts! Creative got themselves in a class action law suite because of the false claims they made about the card. They are fine for gamers and listening to DVD’s but are terrible for recording or mixing audio. I would steer far away from them.

I’d also steer far away from any consultant that claims a consumer Audigy card is better than a Pro M-Audio card for recording. They obviously are clueless.

~jr

I have the consumer level M-Audio sound card, the Revolution. I have no problems with Vegas. Even at this level, it has Asio drivers which you have to enable in Vegas.

Even if this guy is not trying to rip you off, he is giving bad information. You should post here what you are trying to do with Vegas and hardware and I bet you get tons of spot-on advice right here.

Been using Delta 410 for two years - no probs at all.

I just replaced my SoundBlaster Live with an M-Audio Delta 1010LT. Vegas 6 recognized it immediately. Because it's a multi-channel card, it takes some initial head-scratching to properly configure recording and monitoring, setting up other applications to use it, etc. But this unfamiliarity should not be mistaken for bad hardware or driver problems. It's just part of the learning experience.

I agree with the others who say 'Fire that consultant.' You'll very likely be able to get good, free problem resolutions from many knowledgeable users here on this forum.

OK, here's my take on all this ... first, there's only three types of music ....

1. Music you dance to
2. Music you listen to
3. Music that underscores audio/visuals

1. Let's look at dance music. When you're on the dance floor after a couple of beers and you're sweating to the beat, nobody gives a crap if that beat is coming from a $10,000 DAW or someone banging on the side of a garbage can.

3. Let's skip to music that underscores audio/visuals. This music is important but it just supports whatever is happening on the screen or during narration. If the audio/visual is done right, nobody should be paying much attention to the music bed except maybe subconsiously.

2. OK, this is the Big One. Music to sit back and listen to. Today, we put good raw music through thousands of filters, spectographs, histograms, whatever, and we homogenize, sanitize and quantisize the crap out of it until it's no longer music but a series of measure-accurate "sounds" . We have gone berserk with bitrates and Khz sampling resulting in sounds (not music) that only animals can hear sometimes.

Here's what to do. You owe it to whoever is listening to your audio/music to deliver it to them without noise or any other artifacts that will distract the listener from what you want them to hear. Regardless of the quality of sound card, 95% of the distractions can be dealt with through de-noisers, gates, compressors and equalization. The other 5% isn't important. With the right mics and technique, you can use the free Windows Recorder applet to record a narration or a ten piece band and have it sound great I'm talking about music, not "sounds".

Yes, the Soundblaster line is generally crappy because of noise/artifact reasons but unless you're scoring a Hollywood movie, or the next version of Quake or narrating news for broadcast, nobody will really care. Most of the world still has dorky speaker systems and much of the fine-tuning is lost anyway.

In space nobody can hear you scream.

On an iPod and those crap phones, nobody can hear your over $50 sound card.

( I still use a $1500 one though :-), just in case there are any people left who realize that iPod shouldn't be used when you really want to listen to music )

" ... I still use a $1500 one though .."

... and that's OK if it saves you time from having to eliminate noise, artifacts and abberations from what you recorded... for me, the better the quality of the hardware, the less work you have to do after to deliver clean music or narration ... what I don't understand is someone recording a good raw musical instrument and making it sound like something else ... that's why God made alto, tenor and soprano saxaphones so we wouldn't have to make one sound like the other ...

Had to go find your other post to see what the problem was...

Sherman said:
"I know this is a rare occurance on this page, but Vegas is crashing here with great regularity.
Have paid a video editing consultant who spent three hours going over my system and making suggestions. All of them I have heard and tried before.
I see no improvement.
Now Vegas is running more slowly than ever.
Just froze in the midst of a two camera edit.
Has frozen while doing texts apps,---velocity changes etc.
Have reinstalled Vegas, trimmed back startup apps fiddled with everything I can think of.
I am losing precious editing time and the work piles up.
Virus scan is negative.
Drives are defragged. Three on board and five swappable.
Stymied here and all ears for suggestions. "


Soooo, your consultant thinks the m-audio card is the problem. You could take it out of the system and see if Vegas runs better. Almost everyone here says their maudio card runs fine but you could still be having trouble. It could be a driver, an effect or filter, or ahardware conflict.

Vegas will run with lesser audio cards so you could run the system with an onboard controller if your motherboard has one, or you can get a pretty cheap PCI card just for testing the system without the maudio card. Obviously, if you take out the maudio card and the trouble goes away then you've probably found the culprit. Could be the card or it could be the driver.

Motherboard slots share interupts, generally one interupt for every two slots. It's very possible that your maudio card and an adjacent card are stepping on each other and that moving them around might help.

When you look at the motherboard, the graphics slot and the next pci slot usually share an IRQ and the pattern repeats for the rest of the slots. Maybe your maudio card is paired with a 1394 card or a network card, or it's right next to the graphics card. If you have several empty slots you could try installing the cards in every other slot.

Some 1394 controllers, and some external drives, can be problematic. While many people edit DV footage on them just fine, occasionally you can have problems. If you have enough internal storage then you might try using the external drives just for archiving. The main goal here is to simplify your system to isolate the problem.

Going to a striped raid array...it really depends on what you're doing. A single hard drive on an internal connector is plenty for DV, the same drive on firewire is usually fine as well as long as all the 1394 parts (controller and bridge board) are working well.

I've seen reviews of the 10k RPM Raptor drives that claim these deliver about the same performance as many 2 disc raid arrays. If I was throwing money around I'd opt for those before considering RAID.

Just remember that a striped array increases the chance of disc failure (2 discs = failure squared, 4 discs = failure cubed, etc). So you need to use something like RAID 5 which can tolerate a disc failure. Also keep in mind that many RAID controllers put more load on the CPU so you could actually see reduced render times. To me, RAID doesn't sound like something to rush into at this point.

The first thing to do is to simplify your system, not make it more complex. Maybe your consultant has good reason to think the maudio card is a problem, but the suggestion to buy the audigy card isn't credible. I think he's trying to get you to buy something he's famiar with. I'd give him a little credit and try out the system without the card. I just don't beleive his solution.

Rob Mack

i'm running both an m-audio audiophile 24/96 and a delta 66. no problems ever with vegas. and i had an audigy a few years back...it sucked...only one input sampling rate at 48k...maybe they're better now...doubt it though...

Went back to M-Audio card.
Like the breakout box.
Audigy 2 is for sale.
Still though, when installed the M-Audio card Windows was warning me of compatibility issues.
Should we be worried?

Computer $consultant$, suggests audigy "upgrade"...
Bwhahahahahah.
Run - don't walk away from this shmuck.

First - LIST YOUR SYSTEM DETAILS (all of it). make and model of your motherboard for one. Ram, processor model, all hd's/cd/dvd, all expansion cards (i.e. maudio, etc), ...everything right down to any bios setup changes you might have made.

>>>Went back to M-Audio card.
Like the breakout box.
Audigy 2 is for sale.
Still though, when installed the M-Audio card Windows was warning me of compatibility issues.
Should we be worried? <<<

What? What warning is this and what steps precede your seeing this?
I suspect you have some kind of software "system manager" installed (horrid, never install this crap).
Can you send a screenshot/pic of this "warning" please? (just hit "Print Screen" on your keyboard and paste into any photo app (like "paint" found in winxp accessories). I'd like to see what's running at startup as well.

* Audigy for sale? It should have never been purchased in the first place.

With the maudio and their drivers, you shouldn't see any warnings like this (other than "the driver is not signed...)".

You need to list your complete and detailed system components (all) for users here to better help you.
Do this once - save to a text file and you'll always have this info.
Any red or yellow indications in device manager?

If by "conflict" they mean IRQ conflicts whether it's maudio or audigy doesn't apply. You need to list the motherboard name/model so we can find out the mobo specifics. There are pci slots you may need to avoid (e.g. - sharing with another pci slot or agp slot, etc.).

Two people already asked you once - why can't you list which maudio card you have (and how are you going to be able to list all the other system details NEEDED to better help you)?
Windows what...windows 3.1, win98, w2k, winxp?? we dont' know - you won't list.

XP, if set to do so, will warn you when you are about to install an unsigned driver. M-audio never signs their drivers through microsoft. Should you be worried? No.

I have used M-audio cards for years. I have occasionally had a conflict but was always able to resolve it by reverting to an older driver and isolating the PCI card from the video card.

> "* Audigy for sale? It should have never been purchased in the first place."

Maybe so in hindsight, but they had their day - I remember Spot using them happily a few years back ....

p.s. I've now got a couple of MAudio Quattros which I find very good, especially because they give my laptop midi in/outs.

M-Audio Delta 44 auido card
Running Windows XP Pro
Asus mother board p4c800/p4p800 intel 875/865 Chipset
Pentium(R) CPU 3.00 GHz, 3.01 GHz, 1.00 GM of Ram
two 250 GB RAIDED drives, 200 GB HD (operations) 5 swappable drives (not hot) all drives Western Digital one 160 GB, two 200 GB, two 120 GB.
LG burner
Don't know from bios settings.
As I recall a "drive not signed" warning.
No red or yellow indicators on device manager.
Don't know from bios serttings.
What?