New Audio PC..troubles & fixes

[CosmicDolphin]

Hey All

I replaced my 5 yr old Dell with a new PC tower this last week or so. On a tight budget so I just went for something off the shelf rather than any kind of dedicated audio PC. There were quite a few issues to resolve that I hadn't anticipated so thought I would share just in case anyone else gets stuck in a similar situation.

So...out went a Dell Vostro mini tower..Core2 6600 2.4ghz 2gb Win XP Pro based system which had run everything from about Sonar 5 onwards....

In came a Vibox ( yeah ..who  ? ) Core i5 2500 Sandbridge , 4gb , but with no O/s on which I installed Win 7 Pro & Sonar 8.5

I'd bought the far cheaper student licence of Win 7 Pro ( legally as a parent of a schoolchild  BTW ) so first thing I did was try to install it onto the 1TB drive in the new PC.

Problem No.1. - You can't install the student Licence version onto a bare drive, it's an upgrade...now I knew this but the last time I did an upgrade from Win 98 to XP all I had to do was put the original Win98 disc in the machine before it would let you continue...and I have all the original disks for everything from Win3.1 , 95, 98 and XP.  Well I guess times have changed and now it has to find the previous installed O/S on the hard drive.  Stupidly it doesn't tell you this but keeps rejecting the activation key...I had to Google around to find out why it wasn't accepting it.   Then I tried to install My WinXP onto it first thinking I could upgrade it right afterwards to Win7...but all I got was part way through the install and a repeatable BSOD. 

Panicking now.... I took the boot drive out the Dell , which was a fairly new 2TB Seagate Barracuda-more than three quarters empty....tried to boot the new PC using it ..it got most of the way but asked me to enter my Windows XP activation Key and rejected both the Dell one that came with my old PC, and also the other 'retail' boxed version's activation key I own.  Eventually I just rebooted it with the Win7 disc inside and crossed my fingers..amazingly it worked and I was able to get into Windows 7 and activate it.

Problem No.2  I installed my firewire card and Focusrite Pro24 soundcard, played back some demo music from media player...It was glitching even just with a simple MP3....read all the Focusrite info about using a legacy Firewire driver..changed it..no difference....read about a handy little program to check something called DPC latency

" DPC Latency Checker takes one measurement each second, providing a readout of current latency (which, on most PCs, is a relatively constant figure) plus the absolute maximum value recorded since you first launched the utility, which may occasionally spike to a considerably higher value on some systems, because of one specific hardware device. "

 ( http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun08/articles/pcnotes_0608.htm

[mickbrit55]

Glad you got it all worked out Mark. Seems like you went through ALL the probs that I did a couple of years ago when I upgraded to Win7-64 bit. You were dead on researching all the drivers and updating them! So many people think that Win7 is going to do all that for you -  wrong. You have to do it manually, even down to the mouse and keyboard plus all the ports.

I'm surprised that you had to switch off core-parking though, that was an old trick with the original versions of quad-core processors that I thought was resolved. I don't need to switch mine off. Hey, but different systems have different needs. After building over 20 computers now, I know that the problems are always going to be different

When you get a chance increase your RAM to 24 Gig - 3x8Gig units - and you will find an even greater speed increase.

Mick.

[CosmicDolphin]

When you get a chance increase your RAM to 24 Gig - 3x8Gig units - and you will find an even greater speed increase.

Mick.

Lol , I think I can only put 2 sticks in.  It's plenty fast enough for now...I usually do a ram upgrade after a couple of years.

These were the settings for the CPU

EIST Off

C1E off

C3/C6 Off

That resolved the audio glitching / crackling and I have a good set DPC latency readings.

This is the most hassle I've had with any PC for audio, all my others just worked right out of the box for the most part.

CD

PS - This chip is ripe for overclocking apparently...have you any experience of that ?

[mickbrit55]

PS - This chip is ripe for overclocking apparently...have you any experience of that ?

If it's a 2500K chip it can be clocked and usually ships with an app for it. If it's a 2500 then it's ocked and you can't. If you haven't clocked before then just use the templates they supply or you can damage the chip.

Mick.

[CosmicDolphin]

PS - This chip is ripe for overclocking apparently...have you any experience of that ?

If it's a 2500K chip it can be clocked and usually ships with an app for it. If it's a 2500 then it's ocked and you can't. If you haven't clocked before then just use the templates they supply or you can damage the chip.

Mick.

Ahh it's the standard version....never mind 

[mickbrit55]

Ahh it's the standard version....never mind 

Yeah, but you probably don't really want to overclock it anyway for audio/video work. You are looking for stabillity rather than pushing the chip to its limits. Hopefully the price of the i7's will come down a bit later next year. They are about half the price over here than the European market.

Even so, sounds like you have a screamin' demon on your hands. Enjoy

Mick.

[CosmicDolphin]

Yep , should be plenty fast enough - the difference is night & day. I think if you wait 5 years between upgrades it's always a big jump. 

CD

[CosmicDolphin]

Here's one for you Mick

I just tried to import some ape files from Doc, and for some reason they won't import,,,get a Directshow Error and a message about the file format not being compatable .

I do have Monkey's Audio installed so I can covert externally to wav and then import them but I didn't have to do this before...I could just import them directly into Sonar.

I'm not sure why it won't work now ? ?

CD

[mickbrit55]

Here's one for you Mick

I just tried to import some ape files from Doc, and for some reason they won't import,,,get a Directshow Error and a message about the file format not being compatable .

I do have Monkey's Audio installed so I can covert externally to wav and then import them but I didn't have to do this before...I could just import them directly into Sonar.

I'm not sure why it won't work now ? ?

CD

I have never been able to directly import ape files with the 64 bit version of Sonar. I can only assume that they changed it or simply left it out for some technical reason. I have to fire up Monkeys and decompress to wave also.

Mick.

ps. Just tried it on my trial copy of X1 and get the same error ... not supported.

[CosmicDolphin]

That sucks - it worked great in the old version...quite a time saver..oh well   

I'm trying to think whether it just worked on the 32bit version out the box or I installed something that made it so it did.

Can't recall. 

CD

[mickbrit55]

When you get a chance increase your RAM to 24 Gig - 3x8Gig units - and you will find an even greater speed increase.

Mick.

Lol , I think I can only put 2 sticks in.  It's plenty fast enough for now...I usually do a ram upgrade after a couple of years.

I went to the Vibox website and they seem like a decent company and the prices are pretty good. Which system did you buy? The reason I returned to this thread is because something bugged me about your motherboard.

All quad cores should be running DDR3 RAM, which is a triple channel chip. If you were able to switch out the RAM you have for 3x2Gb (preferrably more) then you would see a significant speed increase because of the use of the 3 channels. Are you sure you only have 2 RAM slots? You can check your whole system by using this tool, I use it all the time for fixing other peoples PC's :

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

Mick.

[CosmicDolphin]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/VIBOX-Work-Mate-Quad-Core-Processor/dp/B007P2F3PI/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1340216351&sr=1-2

Here's the Motherboard..sure it's only two slots for the ram

http://www.ebuyer.com/344018-gigabyte-lga1155-intel-h61-2xddr3-gbe-lan-2xusb3-0-u-atx-motherboard-ga-h61ma-d2v

[mickbrit55]

Yup, it's a dual channel MB thats using tri-channel RAM .... and just the 2 RAM slots. Weird, but I guess at that price you can't complain. I know you weren't complaining ... I was

So long as it's speedy enough who gives a toss anyway, right ?

Mick.

[CosmicDolphin]

Yup, it's a dual channel MB thats using tri-channel RAM .... and just the 2 RAM slots. Weird, but I guess at that price you can't complain. I know you weren't complaining ... I was

So long as it's speedy enough who gives a toss anyway, right ?

Mick.

 

I'm sure in 5 years I'll be moaning

[CosmicDolphin]

Mick

Another glitch...

See if you can work this one out....

I just converted a bunch of apes with the latest Monkeys audio for Nitch's song 'Just What I needed' that he asked me to mix and most of of them won't import into Sonar.

They look like they should be , but then at the end of the import no audio appears. It even imports the track name onto the Sonar track.  A few of them do work ( yours included ) and they all seem to be 24 bit....the others all seem to be 16bit.

I've tried changing the Global setting to make Sonar import them all as 24bit ...made no difference.

This is very frustrating.  On my old system with the same version of Sonar 8.5 ( 32bit ) I could import the ape files without conversion....on Windows 7 with Sonar 8.5 64bit I get a Directshow Error, so I figured I'd convert in Monkey's first...now I can't even get that to work !

CD