Whoa, fixed?!? And what's CTASIO

dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 11:33 AM
Ok, I removed the Audigy sound card from my system, loaded the drivers for the onboard audio, and did the stress test, and never locked up. In fact, before now, it would lock up within 15 seconds when doing that stress test, and this time I pushed it over a minute and it was going strong.

However, now I have a weird message when I start VMS8, "CTASIO Warning: There are no creative audio products installed and running on the system that support ASIO."

Maybe I need to reinstall VMS, we'll see. But this is really encouraging!

Comments

Himanshu wrote on 9/23/2007, 1:33 PM
Glad you got the system working.

If there is a driver uninstall or application to uninstall for the audigy sound card, you may want to try to uninstall that to see if the CTASIO warning goes away (Creative Technologies(?) Audio Stream I/O is what Google finds it stands for). Removing a sound card should not require reinstallion of any other software such as SVMS.

Once you have the system in a stable state, try to hold of any *any* other installations for a couple of days. Complete a project or two. Make sure the problem really is gone.

Then, if you really want more punishment(!!!) then put the Audigy card back in and verify that the problem does, in fact, return.
dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 2:32 PM
Good point. I thought I had uninstalled the Audigy drivers, because I went to "Add/Remove" and removed the only Creative entry there. However, when I restarted, sound still came from the Audigy (this was just a test), so I guess some drivers are still in the system. I'll try to find them.

Afterwards, I went ahead and removed the Audigy. I've been out a while, so haven't had a chance to test more, but I'm definitely doing as you said - trying VMS for several days before reinstalling the Audigy.

When I removed the Audigy, I also noticed that the motherboard connections to the front audio jacks were loose. I don't know if they were always loose, or if I had pulled them a little when removing the Audigy. Either way, the front mic jack doesn't work, although the speaker jack does.

So now I'm wondering...
(a) was it the Audigy card, or
(b) was it fact that the front connections (they're a bundle) were very loose, shorting somehow? or
(c) there's something wrong with the front jacks, and connecting them at ALL causes the error

I'll be testing these, leaving the audigy for last. If I still work fine with the front jacks connected (or not), ok.

So, if it is the Audigy, I'll need to get some other firewire connections, and possibly a sound card to relieve any load on the CPU when playing games.

But first things first!

(and the first thing is to try to remove whatever's causing the CTASIO warning)
dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 2:41 PM
Ok, searched within VMS, and ASIO is a setting you can select in Advanced, but only when an ASIO card is in use. Now I can't go into "advanced" to turn it off. So ... I'm going to reinstall the Audigy and see if I can turn ASIO off then. Fun stuff, huh?

BTW, I'm still worried, since I don't understand how a sound card could cause VMS to crash when I wasn't playing sound. For example, one stress test I found by mistake (from my son) was simply scrolling left and right in the track viewer. This was guaranteed to lock VMS up within 20 seconds. How can a sound card cause that? It's not playing video or audio, just scrolling quickly left/right.

But I guess there are drivers loaded into memory and what-not, and ... I don't know. I just hope it's fixed. :-)
dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 3:38 PM
I got the ASIO turned off by following advice from this site (crossing fingers I didn't break something else): http://www.wpfind.com/p/3320431/

4eyes wrote on 9/23/2007, 4:56 PM
When you install the Audigy card it's best to only install the basic drivers. As I had previously posted about the creative labs 24bit drivers & whatever else they can dream up to run in the background.
It's a known fact the 24bit audio drivers and some of creatives drivers simply aren't the best.
I could never get my Audigy's ASIO drivers to work properly under "Pro-Audio" and then Sonar. Trying to record & playback audio at the sametime was impossible without lockups or distortion.
Switch to M-Audio for the best sound & drivers. You also may have a IEEE1394 firewire port on that card so If you re-install it try another slot that shares the least amount of irq's and only install the basic drivers, not the ASIO drivers, the soundcard uses irq's & the firewire port uses a irq. I have to admit the firewire port works quite well on my Linux machine. Watch out for PCI Slot-1, some MB's don't like this pci slot used other than for pci video card because it's shared with the AGP slot, depends.

That card may not be sharing the pci bus properly either. I would suggest only loading the basic drivers, I had similar problems with my Audigy piece of junk and now only load the basic drivers. It's installed in the Linux machine anyway so the card isn't using any creative drivers.
Great to hear your making progress, soon you will able to get some video work done.
dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 5:12 PM
Hey, 4eyes! Yeah, I remember your previous comments about the video card - that was good advice. When I installed the card on this new machine, I didn't use the CD. Rather, I went to creative's site and downloaded what was *supposedly* just the drivers, but dang, it left stuff all over the place. And I didn't even get a choice on ASIO.

Good idea about the pci slot. I had it in the last full PCI slot, but who knows, maybe I should have put it in another. Right now, I'm hesitant to even try the Audigy again on this machine.

I will need another firewire solution, too. The M-Audio card (Revolution?) looks very good for audio, I'll just need another card for firewire.

Thanks! Glad I didn't need the sledgehammer (yet)!
4eyes wrote on 9/23/2007, 6:36 PM
I have the M-Audo 24/96 basic card, can't remember it's name. The drivers for Vista are still under development. It's a great windows card and also runs under Linux with no problems at all.
Next audio device I purchase will probably be a M-Audio firewire external unit, not sure. My latest MB uses the new Intel HD Audio (on board), seems to be pretty good running on XP or Vista.

CTASIO probably stands for Creative Technology Asynchronous I/O (input/output), doesn't work.
Only good for gamers.
Kennymusicman wrote on 9/24/2007, 8:55 AM
For your motherboard- ASIOFORALL.

It'll open up all sorts of extra features, and give you the low latency too. And works fine in Vista (inc 64).

Forogt to mention this a couple of days ago.. DOh!