pops, clicks, dropouts- HELP!

[jrm]

Hello-
I seem to have never ending problems with my suppose-ed audio PC. I actually put it together a while ago but haven’t ever gotten much accomplished with it. This is partly a time issue and also pure frustration. First off here is my system

Gigabyte GA7DX-R (Raid)
AMD XP 1600
512 MB DDR
20 GB Maxtor Diamondmax (system drive)
40 GB Maxtor Diamondmax (Audio drive)
Gainward MX 200 32 MB AGP video
M-Audio 2496
WIN 2K/Sonar 2.0

I originally got the RAID board so I could put all my IDE devices on their own IDE channel. This was a struggle. I found that the PC would not boot with 2 devices connected to the RAID controllers. I had both HD’s at first and then tried many different combos. (all jumpers were correct) So- I put the system (20 GB) drive on the IDE 1 (RAID). Then- 40 GB Audio as a master on IDE 3. The CD_ROM as a slave to that and the CD-RW a master on IDE 4. This setup worked but it took forever to boot – literally almost 5 minutes. The problem that I was having was when I would try to playback/record audio from the audio drive. Lots of drop outs and pops- it would eventually stop (the playback). Now I wasn’t doing anything crazy - even if I played back a stereo .wav file it would do this. I found that if I moved the .wav file to the C (system) drive – it would work fine.
Because of this and the slow bootup I figured I would change the config and avoid using the RAID controller. So I hooked the drives up like so on the on-board IDE:

IDE 3 – system drive – master
IDE 3- CD-ROM – slave
IDE 4- Audio drive – master
IDE 4 – CD-RW – slave

Now- it burns CD’s fine but I am having the same problem when trying to use the audio drive- pop, clicks and dropouts. When I changed the drives around I re-installed Win 2K and set the primary and secondary IDE controller to DMA mode. I found that if the secondary controller was in DMA the CD-ROM wouldn’t work. If I put a CD in , it would freeze the system until I removed it. Also- when I installed Win 2K I did not install the miniport or VIA Bus-master drivers. I saw that WIN2K sp2 took care of most of that just fine. So- now I don’t know what to do next. I was thinking of getting a new motherboard and trying to avoid VIA chipsets altogether (this mobo has VIA S. bridge/AMD N. bridge) but they are hard to avoid. I believe that M-Audio has problems with SiS sets as well as VIA.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated-
Thanks-

[DAW-Freak]

Hi,

I would suggest the following setup:

IDE 1 : system drive as master, CD-rom as slave.
IDE 2 : audio drive as master, CD-RW as slave.
IDE 3&4 (RAID): NOTHING. Unless you have two identical HDs to make a working RAID 1 or 0 array. BTW, i have read somewhere that not all CD-R & RW drives will work on a raid controller.

[TensTheBlend]

My (older) DAW always clicks and pops UNLESS I disable USB in windows. Before my last upgrade I was using a Delta 66, Win98, and Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. I had to disable USB then too. Probably an issue with my MB.

One cool thing about WinXP is that you can enable or disable USB and other features without a reboot.

Abit BE6-II MB with HPT366 XP driver & Abit "XU" bios
Pentium III - 1 ghz CPU @ 100mhz buss
768 meg of RAM
Windows XP pro
Delta 1010 w/5.10.00.0027 driver
SBlive
Net card for DSL
Dialup modem
USB running Sony Palm link, Memorex flash card reader, and HP 2200c scanner
HP 6L laser printer
Yamaha 24x CD burner w/ NERO 5 ver. 5.5.9.0
DVD rom drive
Sonar XL 1.3.1
Soundforge 5f
Waves Ren 1 & 2 plugins

[LeoIX]

Originally posted by jrm:

I found that if the secondary controller was in DMA the CD-ROM wouldn’t work.


I would try some more tweaking before getting a new MB. Shouldn't you be running that HD in DMA mode? That would really be negatively affecting the drive's performance if it is not in DMA mode. What are the drive specs, BTW? 7200RPM? Try running it without the CD-ROM in DMA mode and see if that fixes the problem. Is this an ancient CD-ROM? If your CD-ROM is not DMA compatible, then you might want to get one that is.

[JacinTexas]

First thing is that if you have a VIA chipset, there's a bug that you need a patch for. The bug forces your PCI to cycle even if it doesn't need to. This site discusses it (in English) and has links to the patch. http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/index.html

No matter what chipset you have, something that has fixed my system and several systems other systems I know of is going into CMOS and changing your PCI Latency. Most mobo's default is about 4-8.. kick it up to about 30 and see if it helps. You can then tweak it up or down to fine tune. If you get buffer errors you may need to lower the PCI Latency until you find what works. My mobo works great at 30 as do most I know about.

If you can't find PCI Latency in your CMOS there are CMOS utilities you can d/l that will let you change it. Try www.tucows.com. (http://www.tucows.com.)

For anyone who doesn't know what PCI Latency is here is a quote from another site that basically explains it....

"PCI latency timers are a mechanism for PCI bus-mastering devices to share the PCI bus fairly. "Fair" in this case means that devices won't use such a large portion of the available PCI bus bandwidth that other devices aren't able to get needed work done.

How this works is that each PCI device that can operate in bus-master mode is required to implement a timer, called the Latency Timer, that limits the time that device can hold the PCI bus. The timer starts when the device gains bus ownership, and counts down at the rate of the PCI clock. When the counter reaches zero, the device is required to release the bus. If no other devices are waiting for bus ownership, it may simply grab the bus again and transfer more data.

If the latency timer is set too low, PCI devices will interrupt their transfers unnecessarily often, hurting performance. If it's set too high, devices that require frequent bus access may overflow their buffers, losing data.

So in theory there's a compromise that can be reached somewhere in between, where all devices can get good performance plus a reasonable guarantee that they will get bus access on a timely basis."

Hope this helps...

[jrm]

Thanks to all that replied. After reading the posts and thinking about what's next - I really believe that it related to the fact that I cannot use the secondary controller in DMA mode. I now have some new avenues to pursue to resolve it. Hopefully one ofthem will work.

thanks agian-
jrm

[Pretty Pretty Cyanide]

Originally posted by DAW-Freak:
Hi,

I would suggest the following setup:

IDE 1 : system drive as master, CD-rom as slave.
IDE 2 : audio drive as master, CD-RW as slave.
IDE 3&4 (RAID): NOTHING. Unless you have two identical HDs to make a working RAID 1 or 0 array. BTW, i have read somewhere that not all CD-R & RW drives will work on a raid controller.


What???? Your name is DAW Freak and you are suggesting he put his Atapi devices with his harddrives????

That's a no no especially with extra available IDE / RAID ports.

For this particular setup I would suggest:

RAID 1: OS drive
RAID 2: nothing
IDE 1: hard drives (Audio)(cable select)
IDE 2: Atapi devices (cd based)(master\slave settings)

Ensure DMA is enabled on all afterwards. Good Luck!

[Pretty Pretty Cyanide]

Originally posted by jrm:
Hello-
I seem to have never ending problems with my suppose-ed audio PC. I actually put it together a while ago but haven’t ever gotten much accomplished with it. This is partly a time issue and also pure frustration. First off here is my system

Gigabyte GA7DX-R (Raid)
AMD XP 1600
512 MB DDR
20 GB Maxtor Diamondmax (system drive)
40 GB Maxtor Diamondmax (Audio drive)
Gainward MX 200 32 MB AGP video
M-Audio 2496
WIN 2K/Sonar 2.0

I originally got the RAID board so I could put all my IDE devices on their own IDE channel. This was a struggle. I found that the PC would not boot with 2 devices connected to the RAID controllers. I had both HD’s at first and then tried many different combos. (all jumpers were correct) So- I put the system (20 GB) drive on the IDE 1 (RAID). Then- 40 GB Audio as a master on IDE 3. The CD_ROM as a slave to that and the CD-RW a master on IDE 4. This setup worked but it took forever to boot – literally almost 5 minutes. The problem that I was having was when I would try to playback/record audio from the audio drive. Lots of drop outs and pops- it would eventually stop (the playback). Now I wasn’t doing anything crazy - even if I played back a stereo .wav file it would do this. I found that if I moved the .wav file to the C (system) drive – it would work fine.
Because of this and the slow bootup I figured I would change the config and avoid using the RAID controller. So I hooked the drives up like so on the on-board IDE:

IDE 3 – system drive – master
IDE 3- CD-ROM – slave
IDE 4- Audio drive – master
IDE 4 – CD-RW – slave

Now- it burns CD’s fine but I am having the same problem when trying to use the audio drive- pop, clicks and dropouts. When I changed the drives around I re-installed Win 2K and set the primary and secondary IDE controller to DMA mode. I found that if the secondary controller was in DMA the CD-ROM wouldn’t work. If I put a CD in , it would freeze the system until I removed it. Also- when I installed Win 2K I did not install the miniport or VIA Bus-master drivers. I saw that WIN2K sp2 took care of most of that just fine. So- now I don’t know what to do next. I was thinking of getting a new motherboard and trying to avoid VIA chipsets altogether (this mobo has VIA S. bridge/AMD N. bridge) but they are hard to avoid. I believe that M-Audio has problems with SiS sets as well as VIA.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated-
Thanks-



Get the Via 4in1 fix event through you have SP2 for W2K (SP3 is available as well). Update your MOBO via flash if you can. Make sure the sound card is not beside your Video card (reset PnP settings in BIOS if it is and you have to switch it out). Try toggle switching 1 stick of RAM just to make sure you don't have a bad stick.

Download all the latest drivers and fixes for all your hardware. I believe even your Maxtor hardrives has utitilies available. and last and maybe not least (for the clicks anyway), increase the latency\buffersize in your M-Audio and Sonar.