I just had a new computer built. My motherboard is a mb foxconn 945g7mc. My cpu is inetel jc2d. My sound card is a creative Audigy se oe. It is running on Windows XP pro. I have problems with pops and clicks as well as songs speeding up and slowing down by themselves. I have used the search tool and read up on sound cards and the audigy se may be one of my problems. I have tried all the suggestions and changed the setting under the audio tab. The only thing that seems to work is when I set it to direct at 16 bit. When I do this I lose the ability to listen in the headset and I am concerned about the quality of the playback. Can anyone suggest a rock solid sound card? Is there anything about my system in general that might cause a problem.

Mark from PoweSurge Entertainment

I'm trying to imagine how your sound card would be affecting the tempo of your songs. However, the pops and clicks, yes. Is this sound device built directly into the motherboard or is it a peripheral card that plugs into a PCI or other slot on your board?

Although this does not occur as frequently today as it did a few years ago or so, occasionally a motherboard's PCI bus can still have problems resolving IRQ conflicts at the hardware level. If your sound device is a pluggable peripheral card (and not built-in to the board), try switching slots. Get it into a slot that does not share its IRQs with other devices on the system bus. Usually the fifth slot is one of these on a five slot PCI board. Check your motherboard documentation.

Also, if you do have a separate peripheral sound card, make sure that the one built-in to the motherboard is disabled within the system bios.

The Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card is a peripheral card that plugs into a PCI slot. I will try switching slots and see what happens.

I will have to find out how to disable the built-in sound card within the system bios. If I do this will it still allow me to use this sound card for monitoring upcoming songs in my headset.

Thanks for the tips.

Mark.

Aha! You do have two sound devices enabled at once! Although this is possible, in many instances, it is difficult to configure and in some instances will not work no matter what you try to do. So, move your Audigy card to a non-conflicted slot AND disable your internal mobo sound. Then see if your Audigy card will play free from sound irregularities. Once you are sure that the Audigy card is working (is not the problem itself), then you can try to re-enable your onboard sound. Getting the onboard sound to work in conjunction with a second sound card will require you to research the internal memory and mobo resources that BOTH cards are using and making sure that they do not conflict with each other.

Ideally, for the MixMeister line of products, you should get a single sound card that has dual audio outputs, so as to avoid the scenario you've got yourself in here.

As far as sound card recommendations go (with multiple audio channels), I highly recommend the M-Audio (ASIO) line of cards:

M-Audio Sound Cards

The Delta 1010 studio line is the best--10 audio channels (5 Stereo Pairs). I use a 1010LT.

Thanks!

quote:

you should get a single sound card that has dual audio outputs, so as to avoid the scenario you've got yourself in here.

My Soundblaster card (albeit not an Audigy) sits quite nicely with Fusion & my Onboard Lappy soundcard (I use the latter for preview purposes).

It's a 'well-known' fact amongst posters at the creative site that there is a 'crackle & pop' issue with their cards, but due to the fact that they have a big marketing budget and are bundled with so many systems, they are very difficult to avoid (particularly this side of the water!).

I suggest you download and install the ASIO4ALL freeware drivers,these work with the majority of Soundblaster devices and provide much better control over your sound card, they also provide an easy to use interface for switching between two sound cards.

Works for me anyway!

HTH!

R.

I appreciate all the suggestions and advice. I will most likely try the ASIO4ALL install first so as to save some money since I just had the system built. I had actually seen your (Wildr) suggestion about the ASIO4ALL install to other in previous postings. I went to the site and downloaded the the program and had actually installed it on my computer about a week ago. I must admit I was intimdated by the documentation and program so I uninstalled it. Do you have have any suggestions or comments to ease my mind and simplify the text book jargon? I would sure appreciate it.

PowerSurge

quote:

Do you have have any suggestions or comments to ease my mind and simplify the text book jargon?

Ok, not often I'd reccomend this, but just ignore the textbook.

Open the program and make sure that both Soundcards are enabled (they have green highlighting).

Close The Program and run up MixMeister, open the Audio Options tool section and set your on board to preview and your sound blaster to performance.

Load some songs, Mix and listen for any pops n clicks or skips - IF you get any let me know!

Sometimes, it is just as easy as installing it and then just playing your music...

I did download and install ASIO4ALL. I opened the program and enabled both soundcards under the WDM Device List. The ASIO Buffer Size was 512 Samples. The Latency Compensation was set at 32 Samples for both In and Out. The use Hardware Buffer was showing 3 ms but was not checked. The AC97 Troubleshooting had the box checked that says Always Resample 44.1 kHZ <-> 48KHZ. I was still getting pops and clicks. I did adjust the ASIO Buffer Size down to 64 and up to 2048. I still get like an electronic ping on some songs. I also messed around with the Latecny Compensation and the Hardware Buffer. The Sound Blaster Audigy soundcard shows In at 2x 8-96kHz, 24 bits and out at 8x 0.1-192kHz, 32 bits. I do have MixMeister set at 32 bits under the use WAV output. I have also moved the output delay all the way over to reliable playback. Do you know if the SB Audigy card is really 32 bits or is it 16 bits? Any other suggestions for the settings in ASIO4ALL or MixMeister.

Thanks!

Mark

i have MM studio dwnloaded on my PC, How do i access my account on my laptop as well?

The ASIO4ALL driver is designed to compensate for sound problems arising at the hardware level without really resolving the core hardware issues as related to your system. Whereas you may not be able to resolve the problems with this particular sound card and your system, you will certainly not know that for sure until you determine that you don't have physical IRQ or I/O conflicts at the hardware level itself. The fact that you are trying to use two sound devices at once is suspicious. Have you tried disabling the onboard sound device yet? Have you investigated the PCI sharing issue? Both of these are related (as your onboard device uses IRQs too). If your Audigy card is trying to share the same IRQ or I/O as another device in your system, you can have problems. I/0 conflicts usually cause a device or multiple devices not to work at all, but IRQ conflicts in modern motherboards can still arise and often result in erratic performance, even though modern PCI boards are designed to share IRQs. (In older boards IRQ conflicts used to also stop devices from working entirely). Here is a good chart of the basics for resolving these problems. It hails from the ISA motherboard days:

http://www.pchell.com/hardware/irqs.shtml

Unfortunately, most people today have forgotten or choose to ignore these basic principles of PC architecture because most of the time the modern PCI bus, in conjunction with modern software and drivers, will take care of these issues for them. However, these types of traditional hardware conflicts can still arise, and if you can determine and eliminate them, you can usually solve your problem, at least to a certain extent, after which you might still need a different driver.

To start out with it's incredibly easy to check your system resource usage in Windows XP. Goto Start>>control panel>>system>>device manager>>view>>resources by type

1. check your IRQs first, see which IRQs are being shared. Particularly, look for your sound devices here. Sound devices typically like to use IRQs 10-11 and they will often be sharing these IRQs with other devices. Of particular interest would be if both of your sound devices are sharing the exact same IRQ.

2. Then check I/O (although I doubt this is it)

Do try to shutoff your onboard sound, in any case.

I've moved this to the Workshop, as that's where it really belongs.

Let us know how you get on with the tips that Tepmix has pointed out...

Okay, I found it but I did post one in the Chillout Lounge. Please ignore that one. Sorry that I have been posting to the wrong area.

Tim, I am wondering if you would mind if I called you to have you walk me through some of the steps and to just talk in general about my issues? I tried following the steps to check my system resource usage but I do not get the same prompts as you outlined above. If you would not mind sharing your phone number it would be appreciated. If you are, please let me know what time you would prefer me to call. I am out of Kenosha, WI and I belive you are in the Chicago area.

Thanks!

Mark

Yes, indeed, we got moved to a more appropriate forum. And, yes, you may call me today in Chicago. I'm on systems support from my office today. I'll PM you my phone number.

Let me know if you have questions. Resolving hardware conflicts can be time consuming and to do it effectively, you need to try various combinations of things.

1. Check your resources for conflicts in WinXP. The sound devices may be conflicting with themselves or with another device in the system.

2. Then turn your internal sound off. Go into your system bios settings at boot. If you have custom built PC, usually you're going to need to hit the "delete" key at start up during the system initialization (prior to the booting of the operating system). Motherboards with AMI, Award and Phoenix bios usually use the "delete" key for this, although it may be F1, F2 or some other key. This will then take you into a setting area where you move around via keystroke commands. There will be a legend to indicate the appropriate keystrokes.

3. Once you have your internal sound turned off, save your bios settings and boot into Windows again. Check the performance of your Audigy. Check your resources again.

4. If you are no longer experiencing problem, great. However, if you still are, based on what you saw this time in your resource usage, you may need to change the slot that your PCI sound card is plugged into. If you have a 5-slot PCI board, plug it into slot 5 (the last one--bottom in a tower case, farthest away from the power supply in a desktop case). Slot 5 should not conflict with other onboard resources.

5 If at any point you get your Audigy to perform issue free, you can stop. Then you can try to re-enable your onboard sound and see what happens. However, usually to get both sound devices to work will be a trial and error affair whereby you try switching slots for the onboard Audigy card while the onboard sound device is enable until you get both to work properly.

Now, this may not resolve your problem if the Audigy card is just a piece of poorly designed technology that has its own hardware problems with respect to your motherboard. There are no guarantees here.

If you can't eliminate all the issues, but can reduce them through these procedures, then you might try the ASIO4ALL driver and see if that clears up the rest of the latency problems.

Thanks!

I'm also confused as to why you are trying to use your internal sound for headphone monitoring in MM. The Audigy card has multiple sound out channels, so you shouldn't need to be using your internal motherboard sound device at all.

Hi Tim,

I did disable the onboard sound card per your instructions. I played over an hours worth of music without a pop or click so I am feeling a little more confident right now.

I would prefer not to enable the onboard sound card if I can get the Audigy card to work through the headphone monitoring as well. With Fusion set on dual output it is only allowing me to pick the Sound Blaster card. I do not see a choice nor do I see multiple sound out channels. Do you have any thoughts to make this work just using Audigy?

I really appreciate all your help. Thanks so much.

Mark
PowerSurge Entertainment

Hey Tim,

I have checked into a couple of things. My motherboard only has two PCI slots and since I disabled the onboard soundcard the Audigy has been working fine in slot number two. I have the Soundblaster Audigy SE soundcard and I went to the Creative website and researched it and I do not believe it supports multiple sound out channels. In reality, it is a pretty low end soundcard.

That said, I want to make the change to the M-Audio Delta 1010LT. I have researched it and it will work in the current slot I have the Audigy soundcard in. I would first unistall Creative Soundblaster software. Then I would turn off the computer and remove the Soundblaster card. I would then install the Delta 1010LT boot up the computer and load up the software. It looks like I would use four of the analog cable line outs. Two would be used for the mixer and two for previewing songs through the headset.

In MixMeister, do I go to Audio Output Configuration and click on dual output and pick one set of line outs for main output and other for preview output? Also do I then use ASIO output interface at 32 bit or do I stay with the WAV output at 32 bit? Where do you have the output delay set at...Reliable playback or more toward Responsive playback?

I would assume I can remove (uninstall) ASIO4ALL as well.

Mark
PowerSurge Entertainment

Talked to Mark on the phone. This problem has been resolved--the result of two audio devices enabled at the same time. Disabling the onboard audio did the trick, but he's going to pick up a new multi-channel PCI audio card.