M-Audio Solo/Fast Asus Laptop Grunge

[swampmuzik]

Hi:
I'm new to the forum and I sure could use some help from you experts. I have an Asus z-71 notebook with at Pentium M 760 (2 ghz) processor, a gig of memory and an 80 gig 5400rpm drive. I'm trying to get into digital recording and I've attached an M-Audio Firewire Solo interface. When I do audio through the Solo, I get clicks and pops regardless of the number of buffers I assign at 44100khz. I've installed latest drivers. I use Tracktion for my editor, and when I play sample files through the laptop audio, they are OK (but click and pop through the Solo); when I try to record, I get horrible clicks and pops when monitoring, and on the recording. I've tried everything I know. Don't know if it's a software interference, the interface, or what. Can anybody give me some places to look? I've tried disabling everything that runs at the same time to no avail and am at wit's end. This machine should be sufficient to run, but noise, noise, noise. Thanks in advance.

[swampmuzik]

Well, I didn't get any replies last time, and I still have the problem. Anybody want to go out on a limb and suggest some things I might try. Thanks in advance, JR

[dcwave]

Could be the chipset on your laptops firewire interface. Make sure its a TI (Texas instruments).

[howie15]

Check to make sure that the Solo settings for bit depth and sample rate are set to the same as Tracktion. One of the biggest "click/pop" demons is mis-matched sample rates or bit depths.

Howie J

[itsplayed]

Laptops for DAW use is a crapshoot at best, regardless of how fast a system is. You can have two seemingly similar laptops per specs and you may find that one will be useful for audio work and the other will not.....go figure!
This is the biggest reason I'll only recommend laptops built for audio specifically. While an off the shelf laptop may work for you, there's just as much of a chance it may not. This is true even if you carefully checked out all the specs and components that went into making the computer!
With that said.....You can try disabling your Modem/Lan when your using the Laptop for DAW work, kill any services that are not needed such as messengers and lighten up on the graphics settings ( if your laptop is using shared video memory this is a must try).
You may also want to look at your IRQ settings for the port that the solo is using.
There are other tweaks you may want to try, but start with these to see if they help.
As mention, this could be a chipset issue...in which case a different cardbus may solve the issue.

[swampmuzik]

Sounds like some productive areas to explore. Thanks for the input.
JR

[swampmuzik]

How do I check to see the maker of the laptop's firewire chipset?
Thanks, Jim

[itsplayed]

Your only recourse may be to e-mail ASUS about the chip used. You mentioned driver updates....Have you also reflashed the BIOS?

[swampmuzik]

I haven't flashed the BIOS. Thanks. JR

[itsplayed]

Your welcome swampmuzik, if you performed an upgrade from Windows XP SP1 to SP2 there is known issue in regards to how windows subsequently handles 1394 devices. If you performed this upgrade the patch is available here......
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222

[ananth]

swampmuzik, I'm just wondering about the CPU usage. Does your CPU usage go dramatically up when you try to record?


My friend is using a M-Audio Delta card on Windows 98. Later he upgraded to Windows XP. When he tried to record in XP, there were a lot of clips etc. I tried to change buffers etc.. no improvement. (the same hardware works fine in 98)

Later I realized, Whenever he tries to record something, CPU usage goes to 100%! (in XP)

CPU usage shouldnt be an issue in your case, because yours is a pretty good configuaration. But I'm just curious to know about that.

--------------


Sound cards should take some burdon away from the CPU, right? or do they actually add a lot of processing load to cpu?

[swampmuzik]

Oddly enough, CPU usage appears to stay pretty low. That's what's puzzling to me. If the CPU was overwhelmed and data was getting dropped/delayed, etc, I could see why there would be clicks and pops, but in my case, CPU usage stays down below 20%.