Please help me out of Firewire hell

[Laura_Live]

Hey, i just got a new PC and I thought things would get better on the dropout and glitch front, but it stayed the same. I can't go below 256 samples without having constantly dropouts etc..
With 256 it's ok but stuff like resizing windows in Live with my touchpad cause dropouts which is really unbearable, this stuff even happens when I turn my WLAN/WIFI and hardware acceleration of my video card off...

WHAT SHALL I DO? Please give me advice.. I know it must be solvable

This is my setup:
Live 7.0.10
Lenovo Thinkpad T61 T9300 CPU, 2 GB RAM
Windows XP Sp3
Best Conectivity Firewire 1394a, 2-Port 34 mm Expresscard /w Texas Instruments Chipset
Digi002 Rack

Thank you !!!

Laura

[CWoodOne]

Hey, i just got a new PC and I thought things would get better on the dropout and glitch front, but it stayed the same. I can't go below 256 samples without having constantly dropouts etc..
With 256 it's ok but stuff like resizing windows in Live with my touchpad cause dropouts which is really unbearable, this stuff even happens when I turn my WLAN/WIFI and hardware acceleration of my video card off...

WHAT SHALL I DO? Please give me advice.. I know it must be solvable

This is my setup:
Live 7.0.10
Lenovo Thinkpad T61 T9300 CPU, 2 GB RAM
Windows XP Sp3
Best Conectivity Firewire 1394a, 2-Port 34 mm Expresscard /w Texas Instruments Chipset
Digi002 Rack

Thank you !!!

Laura

Hi, what sample rate are you using?

[Laura_Live]

44,1 khz

[FrancodeLeon88]

this is a shot in the dark...but way back when I was a Pro Tools user, I discovered that the Uninstall of the QuickTime Player actually allowed me to get my latency down significantly.... It may be that....

I know its random. But I made sure, years ago, that that was the problem. If you want, you can read some off shoot posts I put up on the DUC concerning latency with the Digi 002 Rack here:

http://duc.digidesign.com/archive/index ... 13719.html

Beyond that, I would also suggest that you make sure you system is optimized for audio work...

[Laura_Live]

OK, if I disable an USB2 Enhanced Host Controller that shares the same IRQ (19) as my Texas Instruments Firewire Hostcontroller, things get better, I don't get dropouts when resizing elements and windows in Ableton... but STILL there are occasional dropouts!! Please help!!!!!

[djsynchro]

Firewire on Windows was crippled by Microsoft in SP2/3 have alook here:
You need to downgrade to the old SP1 firewire driver have a look here:

http://www.xpfree.org/windows_xp_speedup.htm

Hope that helps

[gjm]

Firewire on Windows was crippled by Microsoft in SP2/3 have alook here:
You need to downgrade to the old SP1 firewire driver have a look here:

http://www.xpfree.org/windows_xp_speedup.htm

Hope that helps

Thanks. Great overall article.

[adventurepants_]

the bit about the firewire downgrade is very interesting. not sure if its true, my gut tells me someone would have noticed before this that the firewire bus was tapping out at 100 mb/s instead of 400 mb/s.

though i thoroughly agree that firewire on windows is very problematic.

Laura, i solved a similar problem by going into my display control panel, and turning the graphics acceleration slider all the way to the left. My graphics card was sharing an IRQ with my video card.

Im going to have to give the downgrade a go though, im an inveterate tinkerer.

[synnack]

This makes a big difference:


Under Start > Control Panel > System, select the Advanced tab. Under Processor Scheduling, select "Background services” to ensure lowest latency with ASIO-based drivers (ASIO drivers run as background services in Windows). Select "Programs" under Memory Usage to ensure that enough RAM gets allocated to your applications.

[UKRuss]

not particularly helpful as i guess it's not a solution you can follow right now but...

I solved all these issues by buying a mac.

[Coupe70]

I solved all these issues by buying a mac.

[Superchibisan]

macs actually f'ed everything up with their latest computers by using shitty firewire chipsets.

[gjm]

Firewire on Windows was crippled by Microsoft in SP2/3 have alook here:
You need to downgrade to the old SP1 firewire driver have a look here:

http://www.xpfree.org/windows_xp_speedup.htm

Hope that helps

I used HDTach to measure the average read speed of my external hard drive using FW400 for both the SP3 drivers and the SP1 drivers.

SP3 = 41.1 MB/s avg read
SP1 = 41.3 MB/s avg read

Basically no noticeable change with the different drivers.

The drivers in the SP1 DL from noted link share the same Date and version numbers as SP2. If you dive deeper some of the details are slightly different.

If my SP3 FW driver had been crippled, would I not have seen a difference in the avge read time of my ext HD?

[adventurepants_]

Firewire on Windows was crippled by Microsoft in SP2/3 have alook here:
You need to downgrade to the old SP1 firewire driver have a look here:

http://www.xpfree.org/windows_xp_speedup.htm

Hope that helps

I used HDTach to measure the average read speed of my external hard drive using FW400 for both the SP3 drivers and the SP1 drivers.

SP3 = 41.1 MB/s avg read
SP1 = 41.3 MB/s avg read

Basically no noticeable change with the different drivers.

The drivers in the SP1 DL from noted link share the same Date and version numbers as SP2. If you dive deeper some of the details are slightly different.

If my SP3 FW driver had been crippled, would I not have seen a difference in the avge read time of my ext HD?

have you tried the videocard acceleration tip? im dying to know if this works for anyone else.

nice going on the SP1 drivers, your results are what i would have expected, but im glad someone tested that wasnt me.

[gjm]

Firewire on Windows was crippled by Microsoft in SP2/3 have alook here:
You need to downgrade to the old SP1 firewire driver have a look here:

http://www.xpfree.org/windows_xp_speedup.htm

Hope that helps

I used HDTach to measure the average read speed of my external hard drive using FW400 for both the SP3 drivers and the SP1 drivers.

SP3 = 41.1 MB/s avg read
SP1 = 41.3 MB/s avg read

Basically no noticeable change with the different drivers.

The drivers in the SP1 DL from noted link share the same Date and version numbers as SP2. If you dive deeper some of the details are slightly different.

If my SP3 FW driver had been crippled, would I not have seen a difference in the avge read time of my ext HD?

have you tried the videocard acceleration tip? im dying to know if this works for anyone else.

nice going on the SP1 drivers, your results are what i would have expected, but im glad someone tested that wasnt me.

Yes. I have done the Video Card Deceleration. I am about to give it a test with the sound card and Live. Interesting though, I now get a warning message just after start up about the ATI panel not working...what ever that is.

My hunch is the SP1 thing might be bogus. I have an identical laptop with SP2 on it and the driver dates and versions are the same as SP1 and SP3. On top of that, choosing the driver update option tells me that there is not a better driver to be found. Will report back.