Recording - September 2011 - 21

Troubleshooting I spent the next weeks doing little but troubleshooting audio issues, trying to find the root causes of the problems. You know the routine—calls and emails to technical support teams, long wait times in the queue, searching hundreds of forum postings, posting new threads, tweaking, testing, documenting, changing parameters, and doggedly slogging through huge online manuals. I owe thanks to many forum users for all the advice I received. The member-supported TASCAM forum and the Cakewalk SONAR forum in particular were both a tremendous help!

Devices dialog. My scant understanding of this setting is that using Exclusive Mode provides better audio performance if your DAW software is written to stream data in exclusive mode. If your DAW software doesn’t provide any guidance on this setting, then your best bet is to test with and without Exclusive Mode. I enabled the Exclusive Mode settings for each of the sound devices, and it’s working well for me. Uninstall and reload your audio device drivers—only those required for your DAW. Although the audio drivers shouldn’t be affected by tweaking other parts of the system, I found something had definitely changed. After reloading drivers, the DPC Latency Checker began reporting better latency. Disable or mute extra inputs and outputs in your audio interface. The TASCAM interface is capable of 8 ins and 8 outs, plus multiple digital ins and outs (such as ADAT). I don’t need all of these. Muting the extra ins and outs helped to reduce static noise I was hearing in Windows audio. Disable Power Management features for all the USB Root Hub devices found in Device Manager. Then review your other devices as well to make sure power management does not exist or is disabled. Hardware Conflict Troubleshooting Although problems with conflicts in hardware resources have vastly improved over time, they do still exist. Like pesky virtual roaches, hardware conflicts have somehow managed to survive through generations of PCs, motherboards, BIOS improvements, card bus architectures, and versions of Windows. In my case, the symptoms

Typically, the majority of solutions you try are not successful. That’s all part of working through the troubleshooting process. Following is a vetted list of some troubleshooting steps and solutions that worked for me. I hope this list might help you improve your DAW performance. But remember, proceed with caution—every workstation is unique. Audio Configuration Troubleshooting First download the simple free utility, DPC Latency Checker, available from www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml. Use this tool to help determine the audio readiness of your PC, and to troubleshoot audio problems. At first DPC reported latency averaging around 70 microseconds, which is good. But after applying the tweaks and tips in this article, I’m now down to around 7 microseconds, which is just excellent! [Note that these are internal

latencies, not latencies involving A/D and D/A conversion; that’s why the numbers are measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds. See the DPC Latency Checker site to learn more.—Ed.] Disable all sound devices, except your primary DAW audio device and speakers. First disable the sound devices that appear in your system BIOS, then look at Windows Device Manager and disable any remaining sound devices you find there. Windows Audio Exclusive Mode settings can be found in the properties of each audio device listed in the Control Panel > Manage Audio

strongly pointed to a hardware conflict somewhere between the FireWire audio interface, the video card, and the mouse. It seemed I was stuck in the PC equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. Even before troubleshooting, you should always verify that your components are compatible with Windows 7, and you have installed the most current drivers. To begin troubleshooting, first use Run from the Windows Start Menu to open msinfo32.exe. Look at Hardware Resources > Conflicts / Sharing to see a clear view of which hardware is sharing which interrupts, memory addresses, and other resources. It’s typical to see a lot of resources sharing the same interrupt (for example, IRQ 16 or IRQ 18). You might see your FireWire, video card, mouse and other devices on the same interrupt. While this isn’t always a problem, it can be a problem—and it certainly was for me. But Windows tightly manages those resource assignments, so it’s not practical to attempt changing the interrupts manually. Mouse & Video Card – Mouse problems can sometimes be easily resolved by new mouse drivers, or even by replacing the mouse completely. In this case, I was already using a relatively new Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000 and a Microsoft Digital Media keyboard, both with the latest drivers. So there wasn’t much else to do on this front.
RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2011

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Recording - September 2011

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