M-Audio Firewire advice for a newbie?
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Posted on Feb 15, 2007 11:47 pm
timesmith
Member Since: Feb 15, 2007
I'd appreciate some input, but I'm a drummer - no more than two syllables per word, please.
I had been borrowing my friend's M-Audio Ozone keyboard interface (USB 2.0) to run with Cubase 4 on my tired P4 HP pavilion laptop. It worked okay, well enough for me to have 16 tracks playing back, but I had some latency issues if I tried to record. So I bought myself Ozone's big brother, the Ozonic (37 keys, firewire) hoping it would improve performance. Just the opposite, in fact: With any more than a couple of tracks going at once, I get a processor spike in my performance meter, and the playback - and recording - is halted about every second and a half. My computer only has 4-pin firewire, and connecting to the PCMCIA card with 6 and 4 pin doesn't seem to make a lick of difference.
I already have the buffer size bumped up to 2048, but no change, even for simple playback. Any ideas?
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Feb 16, 2007 10:44 am Hey Time,
Sounds like a memory issue to me. Firewire will give a higher data transfer rate but only as fast as your laptop system resources will allow. I would double your RAM at minimum. I think you'll notice your P4 will be more than enough hardware. Sounds like Tech stuff might be a drag for you. Me too but I want to be able to plug in and record with out problems so its good to do a little research on this Tech Crap. I don't know for sure if this will fix your latency issue but you can always use more RAM if your system will take it.
Timfingers
pjkPrince CZAR-mingMember
Since: Apr 08, 2004
Feb 16, 2007 12:59 pm If you're seeing a spike every so often, then there's something causing the spike.
It might be that the firewire is on the same bus as something else. This problem probably wouldn't be fixable, being a laptop.
Or, there could be software that checks the firewire device. Maybe you can kill all unnecessary processes from memory, and see if that helps.
Also, maybe you could monitor the processes, and see if you can catch one taking all the CPU for itself.
If there were no spikes before, when using the USB device, then I'd certainly attach the problem to something with the firewire, or at least something else, that is now acting up, when the firewire is being used.
Maybe the firewire chipset is a bad one, or one that's been known to give problems with streaming. It it's an older laptop, you may have early versions of chipset, and that's causing problems.
hth.
