Ableton Forum

For The Love Of God, what am I doing wrong?

Up until a week ago, I was enjoying creating tracks on my desktop PC. I play live electronic drums through Ableton 5.0.3. My hardware was as follows: K8N Neo4 motherboard, 2Gb 2x 1Gb of pqi single-channel DDR RAM, AMD Athlon 64 3800+ proc, 2x 160GB Western Digital SATA hard drives, (1 for system & programs, 1 for Ableton folder, audio files, etc). Just the way it should be.

Okay, this is the exiting part...

Since I play live electronic drums, I rely on low latency. The last live set I tried to play failed because my LCD screen was getting no video signal. Upon dragging my shit back home, I discovered a failed outflow fan on my power supply. I surmise that what happened was that the PCIE bus wasn't getting enough power from the overheated P/S, and failed to power up the card (or fried it, I'm not sure). So, since I am trying to knock my server rackmount case down from 4 rack spaces to 2, and I have a new 6150K8MA-8EKRS MicroATX motherboard w/ onboard video, I decided to just reformat a new system drive and have a go at my next generation live beast.
Well, I am about to cut off and fry up my genitalia. After the obligatory Windows XP tweaks, and playing musical slots, I found that my Live set, which I spent countless hours meticulously crafting, just will not play back in an acceptable fashion with my new hardware. We're talking serious timing issues, with the live set speeding up and slowing down at random times, dropouts, and an ever-present crackling sound as the audio studders and the disk drive warning light intermittently flashes.

Now, none of this bullshit happened on my old system, even before I performed the OS tweaks and disabled services. Maybe I am just screwed, and got lucky the first time, running three soundcards on an Nforce4 board (which is supposedly shitty for vst/ASIO if what I read here is any indication), but, dammit, I need my Audigy 2 ZS w/Soundfont 2.1 for my hi-hat control, I need my sound blaster live for my headphone click track while I play live, and, most of all, I absolutely must have my DIGI96/PAD soundcard run at 96KHz/256 samples w/ no dropouts or timing issues.

The Foxconn board has onboard VGA and firewire, which is why I bought it, in anticipitation of upgrading to a laptop at some future date. But perhaps there is some issue with it that my countless Google searches have failed to ascertain as applied to DAW performance. And I was wondering if any of you had any ideas. I am playing a big outdoor music fest in a month, and that's not a lot of time when you can't even play back your basic tracks, and haven't a clue why not!

Oh, to be able to be satisfied at just beat mixing other people's rekkids all night!

First place I'd look at is your onboard VGA. Shared graphics hog a lot of bandwidth...

Just out of curiosity, why 5.0.3? If I remember, the last version of 5 was 5.2.something...

ew

By shared graphics, does that just mean onboard, as opposed to external PCI-E? I wonder what the difference would be, since they both use the same host RAM. I have heard that the Geforce 6150 is supposed to be a good choice for compatibility with audio workstations, that's one reason I went with it.

As for Live version 5.2, thank you for pointing it out. It has been awhile since I last checked for updates. In any event, my problem is likely a far more basic issue with the hardware and/or drivers, resource allocation, etc. But I will D/L the latest version.

I was drooling over version 7, what with the drum pad feature, improved MIDI/Key mapping and Sampler. That would make my life easier, on paper. But now I would be just thrilled to be where I was two weeks ago. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Is it possible that there is just some hardware that, for one reason or another, will not play nice with DAWs? Or is there always something or combination of things one can do to make it work? I ask this because my last build was as unlikely to work together as imaginable- an MSI mobo w/ an ATI X600 video card(supposedly bad in tests, at least with the 1st generation of drivers), Nforce4, you name it, I seem to have picked the worst possible combination of PC guts to throw together and expect to work. But it did, with little trouble, once I sorted IRQ's out. Now I can't even get it to play 1 bar of music without stuttering and timing problems, just garbage.

Could it be power supply? That's where I'm looking next.

Your PCI-e graphics card would have its own RAM and do the processing on the card instead of on the mainboard chip. While onboard graphics have become much better in the last few years, they still cause bandwidth issues in some cases.

The nF4 issue for the most part was only with CPU loads of 70-75% or more; I had a nF4 system that wasn't too bad once I played around some- I could run up in the high 80s- low 90s before I started getting the pops and clicks associated with those chipsets.

Most of the obligatory tweaks I've found do more harm than good. On mine, about the only things I do are turn off any form of power management and turn off indexing- besides that, it's a stock XP install- eye candy and all. The stability's much more important IMO than the minimal performance gain (and it is minimal) that you'd get by following all the say blackviper tweaks.

And yeah, there are some items that just don't go well together. Your power supply idea could be possible, and it would be relatively cheap to get a new one and throw it in to see if anything changes.

ew

Thanks for the response. what you say jibes with my experience as well. With a couple of exceptions, which you mentioned, most of the improvements are made either by physically swapping things around, or changing BIOS settings. On that note, I am thinking about the APIC mode setting in the BIOS. It lets the machine use more IRQ's. Although you must re-install the OS if you want to change it, from what I can gather.

Well, I don't think it was b/c of the onboard video, because I disabled it and threw my x600 in. (At least the x600 isn't fried). Screw it, I'm back to my old system and it is rock solid. But I think I fried the PCIE bus on the K8N neo4, somehow. Oh, well. It works just fine with a vintage S3/Virge PCI card, believe it or not...

I guess I will have to lug this 4-rackspace bitch around for a while longer...