SF Please Help!! Clicks, Pops, and Freezes

PipelineAudio wrote on 5/27/2002, 12:26 PM
About a month ago all of a sudden my PC started behaving sluggy. In Vegas resizing events, changing the fade time on events, moving the play cursor, clicking inside the track view would cause a momentary stutter in the audio.

Now I have built a whole new system with all new parts. The system is as follows:

ASUS P4TE Motherboard
Intel P4 2.4G CPU
512meg RAM
Matrox G550
Promise Fast Track TX2000 Raid Card
Intel Pro100 Network Card
2 RME 9652 Audio Cards
3 RME ADI DS ADDA's

Here are my IRQ's:

0 System Timer
1 Standard 101 Key Keyboard
3 Com 2
4 Com 1
6 Floppy
8 System CMOS Real Time Clock
10 Intel 8280 IBA/BAM SM Bus Controller 2443
12 PS/2 Mouse
13 Numeric Data Processor
14 Primary IDE
15 Secondary IDE
16 Matrox G550
20 ACPI
ALSO
20 Fast Track TX2000
22 RME 9652
23 RME 9652

This new system seems to act as sluggy as my old system had become. Being that my old system was dual Pentium 3 700's and this is now a P4 2.4 performance should have gone up, not down. I am getting a lot of random problems, random because they dont always happen at the same place everytime, though some do. For example, I am getting clicks, pops, and freezes when clicking inside an event window or when resizing a window, saving, resizing events, moving fade points, and changing zoom.

A big freezing problem I am having is more prevalent at 96k than 48k but happens in both: Usually when I hit play the song starts right up after the buffer time just fine but every once in a while it will just sit there and freeze up for up to 20 seconds and then start up as if nothing happened.

The play cursor also moves erratically. Sometimes when it is to travel across a split or crossfade area, especially at 96k, the cursor will move just fine from left to right until right before it gets to the split area at which point it will start travelling right to left and shake back and forth causing clicks and pops, sometimes crashes.

Another problem which seems completely bizarre is that after recording it takes a long long time to build peak files. Sometimes a minute per track!

Also, the system seems to get stuck sometimes when zooming in time. Then after its done freezing it finishes zooming in just like nothing happened.

Now this is probably an RME issue, but I'll put it here anyway. There is a buzz coming out of channel 1 on my RME ADI during playback even though nothing is assingned to that converter unit. The buzz seems to sound different at 48k than 96k.

Comments

Rednroll wrote on 5/27/2002, 3:25 PM
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ScoriaMM wrote on 5/27/2002, 5:00 PM
>Promise Fast Track TX2000 Raid Card

Hey man, the first thing I would try is pulling this card. I've seen this be a real PCI hog at times (just to test).

>0 System Timer
>1 Standard 101 Key Keyboard
>3 Com 2
>4 Com 1
>6 Floppy

Second, if you're not using your COM ports, try disabling them in the bios, and put your RME cards on those. IRQ 22, and 23 sounds a little odd...

Third, using any USB stuff? What OS?

Hope it gives you something to try,
-Matt
PipelineAudio wrote on 5/27/2002, 7:00 PM
I an turn down the " pci busss utilization " on the raid card... I would take it out, but I doubt Im gonna get 24 tracks at 24/96 without raid. But maybe worth a try.

OS is WinXP and no usb anything
PipelineAudio wrote on 5/27/2002, 8:05 PM
by the way, what determines how fast vegas will draw peaks after recording? shouldnt my cpu fly thru it?

does it take longer to draw peaks for 96k files ?
ScoriaMM wrote on 5/27/2002, 10:05 PM
>by the way, what determines how fast vegas will draw peaks after recording? >shouldnt my cpu fly thru it?
>does it take longer to draw peaks for 96k files

I guess I don't know for sure, but 96k would have twice as many sample points right? And also twice the filesize? So it would make sense to me that it would be more info to have to draw into a waveform.

Also, deffinatly give the IRQ shift to 3 and 4 a try if you can. I also run dual 9652 cards in XP Pro, I havent had any problems like that on "normal" IRQ's.

As far as your raid goes.. I've never ran 96k, but I can get 40 tracks in vegas off of a seagate 40GB 7200 RPM 24bit, 44.1. If it does turn out to be a raid issue, you might want to look into a raid card that does the processing on the card itself. Personally I run off a Supermicro board, dual PIII 1Ghz, and its got a dedicated raid port. The cards start around $500 I believe.

-Matt
Geoff_Wood wrote on 5/27/2002, 11:03 PM
Probably won't solve your specific problem, but may help in general - check out Sound On Sound , March 2002 for an article on optimising XP for audio.

Unfortunately it's not for 'open' e-view until July, but you can subscribe online to either the paper or internet versions. I thoroughly recommend the mag.

http://www.sospubs.co.uk/index.htm
PipelineAudio wrote on 5/28/2002, 1:17 AM
as far as I knew the whole reason we got the fastrak tx2000 was that it DID do the processing on the card itself, instead of the " hipoint" style raid systems. I could be wrong

I used to use the "softraid " thing on win2k and xp with no probs, but I thought a dedicated raid card would be better...

I never had trouble on the old system at 48k, until very recently where it started getting ' sticky "
PipelineAudio wrote on 5/28/2002, 5:52 PM
whats a good way to measure hard disk performance? still dskbench.exe ?