Latency issue with inspire 1394...

[Tripp_chaos]

So I've had a PreSonus inspire 1394 for about a month now and every so often I can actually get a good recording with no latency but the rest of the time I just get random pops and clicks...

Heres my setup:

Instruments>Inspire firewire(6 pin to 4 pin)>laptop>monitors

Laptop specs:
Cakewalk music creator 3/Fruity loops (and not cubase that came with it don't like it)
Vista- 32 bit
Dell studio 1735
Core 2 duo @ 2.16ghz 2.17ghz
2Gig ram
Only important services are running and 70% of devices are disabled along w
all the processes that go with them and all the junk services
The Wireless card is disabled when not in use only the usb ports that are in use are kept on...

I'm not using more than 1G of memory while recording
And don't just say its because I have vista or bash my setup, that's all I've gotten anywhere else...

Thanks for any help towards this

[Moseph]

Grain of salt: I'm not familiar with Vista, so there might be some tweaking that needs to happen there I won't be able to tell you about. This is NOT a bash, it's realism about my advice.

I had similar problems with my laptop which is dramatically underpowered compared to yours (Pentium M 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM). After a lot of tweaking etc. I did manage to get it working (and quite well) with as many as 26 channels of audio.

The first thing I would recommend (though it sounds like maybe you've done this) is to check out http://www.tweakVista.com/ and see if there's anything you can do to increase performance and RAM usage.

Additionally, make sure you're using the latest drivers for the Inspire, and a stable firewire device (devices using the TI chipsets are typically recommended). Make sure you're running seperate busses for all your high-speed data gear (i.e., if you're running an external hard-drive, make sure it's not on the same data bus of the motherboard as your Inspire). Generally a PCMCIA card can be used in conjunction with one native port and it can be assumed that two seperate busses are in use.

You may also want to purchase more RAM, which is relatively inexpensive and can do a lot to help make things run smoothely. I've heard that 2 GB is generally considered the minimum you want for decent performance with any moderately intensive processing in Vista (again, all heresay and conjecture: I've seen no numbers).

Next, I would suggest trying to live with larger, but still manageable latencies. Generally a buffer of 256 (5.8 msec of latency @ 44.1kHz sampling) or 512 bits (11.6 msec of latency @ 44.1kHz sampling) can provide stability with minimal issue. At minimum, try maximizing your latency settings and see if the problem goes away. If not, you've got a driver/hardware issue. If it does, then you likely have a processor/RAM consumption problem.

The last thing I would check is to see how your hardware is being set up by Windows. My problem ultimately ended up being that all my hardware (audio interface, video display, external harddrive, even the USB mouse) was being routed through the same Interrupt Request Channel (IRQ). It had something to do with a design in Windows based on the assumption in a laptop that power preservation was important and that most devices wouldn't be used concurrently in such a way to overload the IRQ buffers. In other words, a bad assumption was made if the laptop would ever be used by somebody who needed to process a lot of data using external devices.

The way I fixed it was to switch my laptop from operating as a "laptop computer" to a "standard PC" computer, which in fact altered a good deal of my functionality. The key benefit was that all external devices were now always assigned their own distinct IRQ until I ran out. However, I lost the ability to monitor battery life using software, the computer can't shut itself down (it dumps me to the old '95-era "now safe to shut down" screen), and I know some of the more advanced power-preservation and system clock stuff isn't available. It's not recommended you try something like this until a last resort.

[Tripp_chaos]

I've been through the whole Vista tweaking updated drivers and it reminds me of the xp days with my other lappy, mess with everything to customize the whole thing but vista does have it's setbacks it's on it's own irq bus and all I have hooked up is the inspire, usb monitors and usb mouse, the latency buffers but the farther you go with the time it slightly buys you more before it does a random pop or click... I've been looking all over and some people are saying that vista can only utilize 2 gig and nothing more I know for sure Microsoft only allows netbook users to buy 2 gig with vista and 1 gig with xp through dell and stuff...

[Moseph]

I've been through the whole Vista tweaking updated drivers and it reminds me of the xp days with my other lappy, mess with everything to customize the whole thing but vista does have it's setbacks it's on it's own irq bus and all I have hooked up is the inspire, usb monitors and usb mouse, the latency buffers but the farther you go with the time it slightly buys you more before it does a random pop or click...

Check your hard drive spinning speeds as well. 5400 rpm won't cut it for streaming audio. I've had success with 7200 rpm drives though. You also should consider 2 hard drives: 1 to handle your audio read/write (faster spin speed and transfer speed is always good here), and another to handle your Operating System and DAW operation (you can get away with slower hard drive speeds here).

[Tripp_chaos]

ah thats what it is mines a 5400 and pretty shotty (dell, psh) and the irq is in on the same wave of wireless card pci bus host 4 and 6 and audio codecs... so that's fked