M-audio and Adobe Audition 1.5 pop problems

Brad Venable · Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007, 22:20 (GMT) Post subject:

Something to try is adjust your latency settings in the Firewire interface settings or preferences.

I have heard that there are latency issues with those boxes, and that's why I went with the Fast Track Pro. USB 2.0 is a more stable and reliable interface standard than Firewire for what we're doing anyway.

But tweak the latency settings higher. I know that lower is better, but every time there's been a problem with that kind of hiss or artifacting, latency has always been the issue for me.

Dave Andrews · **Voice Talent** Joined: 10 Jan 2007 Posts: 23

I set this up on my desktop and it has NO issues at all.

The laptop has a better processor and 4x the RAM (2gigs as opposed to 1/2 gig in the desktop).

The only thing that I can think of is that the laptop's internal drive is painfully slow, at only 4200RPM. I didn't even know they came this slow until I saw this. I thought drives were all 5400 or 7200 (or the very high end 10,200rpm's).

My desktop has a faster drive, but I had hoped that when I hooked up a fast 7200RPM drive to the laptop and assigned that in Adobe Audition that it would take care of that, but maybe the main drive is still involved somehow and causing the problem.

At any rate, I have it working on the desktop, so that would be all I need if it weren't so damned loud (and transportable).

Shaun Pyle · **Voice Talent** Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 12

I'd suspect drive speed or RAM is the issue.

You can get a faster drive for the laptop but that would require a rebuild and reinstalling everything. Also in a laptop, you may not want to go too fast. My laptop had a 5400rpm 40GB drive. It was dead silent. I had another drive laying around so I tried it, a 7200rpm 60GB drive. It improved performance but also noise. The faster the drive, the more heat will be generated so my fans kick on all the time now. I'll be going back to the 5400rpm drive for recording purposes.

Adding RAM may help quite a bit. When there's not enough memory the system will use the hard drive to cache data. If the drive is slow, it will degrade performance.

You could probably get 1GB of RAM for under $100. A 60GB 5400 laptop drive will run around $60.

A few things to check before throwing money at the issue:
Be sure in the AA setup you are using the ASIO driver for the M-Audio. I don't have AA installed right now so I can't look at the exact setting. I remember when I set mine up though I had 2 ASIO drivers listed. When I picked the M-Audio one, it defaulted to 100ms latency or something like that. I lowered it to somewhere under 10ms (it acted weird if I tried 1ms).

Changing the driver to the ASIO driver that came with my M-Audio and lowering the latency got it working like a champ for me but I also had a 5400rpm drive and 1.2GB RAM.

Hopefully you'll get lucky and adjusting a setting will get things working for ya. I HATE when I buy something and then have to keep buying crap to make it work.

Brad Venable · Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007, 22:46 (GMT) Post subject:

Dave, another thing to try is to streamline the laptop as much as possible. That is, make sure that you disable or stop as much junk that runs in the background on the laptop in Windows.

Another thing to keep in mind is that many laptops share their RAM with other parts of the computer which is usually offloaded to other hardware, like video and audio. So the video card and the onboard audio may actually be sucking RAM resources from the processing power of the computer at large.

So streamline the stuff that windows loads at startup. To get there, Go to Start, and Run, then type "services.msc" in the line given, and then you can disable a lot of the junk you don't need.

There are guides all over the interweb on how to do this. Here's just one:
http://www.pcaudiolabs.com/winxp_tweaks.asp
You can also google "windows DAW configuration" and get a good idea of where to go and what to do.

Dave Andrews · **Voice Talent** Joined: 10 Jan 2007 Posts: 23

Yeah, I've done all that. I've run it completely bare bones and still had the problem, and I had a good chunk of the 2 gigs of RAM dedicated to this program. I'm pretty sure it's the molasses slow hard drive.

I'm over it though. My desktop runs it fine. I'll just deal with the noise of the desktop for now. Nothing I can do about it.

I built a box made of 3/4" pressed wood with carpeting inside and out for the desktop. That helps cut the noise down, but it's still no sound booth. I can't do that until I can afford my own place. Right now I just rent a room from a guy.

Shaun Pyle · **Voice Talent** Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 12

I'm trying to get my desktop quiet. I just got some noise dampening material for inside the case & will be putting it in this weekend. Here's where I got it http://www.endpcnoise.com/ .I've already replaced my CPU fan. If the dampening stuff doesn't help, I'm going to look into replacing my video card fan & PSU.

I'd REALLY love a silent PC. I work on it all day and the noise drives me nuts, never mind trying to use it to record.

Good luck