Ableton Forum

I have an M-Audio 2496 PCI card for some time and have to set the buffers to 512 to avoid glitches with the 50% - 80% cpu load test in preferences. But I got a firewire audiophile box for my notebook PC - its much better and can easily run at 128 buffer size.

Why is it better than my PCI card? And what can I do to improve the latency of my PC card?

B

maudio products do not obey the laws of physics or logic in that you can never predict why one of their products blows more then another, they just do. open your heart and accept maudio's omnipresent incompitence and your soul will be burdened no further.

Thanks, I think! A bit more right-brained explanation than I was hoping for, but thanks all the same

I know its dogma to diss m-audio, but the firewire audiophile works perfectly for me. I thought a firewire or usb connection would be more trouble than a PCI card, but for once I was wrong. So if you're considering buying m-audio low cost audio and midi, learn from my mistake: the firewire is great and the PCI card seems less up to date and stable.

Cheers,
B

actually, as someone who has fw AND pci maudio.......they are possessed and will behave the way they want to behave.

it's all about what cards/mobo/otherhardware you have, I'd really like to get to the bottom of it.

Let's have a conference. Everyone bring their pc's and maudio card and well hook em up with ableton and see what the hell's going on.

Now.....how are we going to get that many people/pc's together from all over the world.......?

Yes! Yes! Yes! ... No!

Simple, as(s) an old hardware man my advice is to change PCI slot for sound card. Upgrading BIOS for motherboard can help too as well as changing PCI Latency in BIOS (default 32 or 64). It can help but the rest depends of the M-Audio Voodoo magic.

Hi Mikelo,

I looked up PCI latency and there certainly are issues with it. I checked and all devices are set at 32 (twin tuner card and video capture card) and my video display card is a PCI Express x 16 and therefore PCI latency doesn't apply.

However, I am also old enough to know that the answer which seems to fit may not be the whole answer. Thanks for your input on this issue though!

B

PCI = RF noise
FW = no rf, faster

All glitching is gone when I test the PCI card in 5.2

!!!