songblog

120 Ways, Take 14 sounds good!

This last week or so I have been unable to work on this piece. As have many before me, I had the dreaded 'audio crackle syndrome' or ACS on my audio recordings.

As I am sure I wrote of late, I now am using the digital outs on my XL7 and that works a treat, as they say in England - totally quiet, not a real high output level but that is easy to correct once its recorded.
For some time now I have had problems with some crackling in the audio, especially it seems with non-synth tracks. I drove myself crazy every few months trying to find the answer - new drivers, updates, messing with the card slots, but nothing worked.
Lately it got so bad I was determined I had to do something about it. This was really getting to me since the digital recordings were so wonderfully clean.
Once again I searched the web, updated the drivers, messed at some length with the BIOS settings and moved the audio card around in the machine. What would happen is that another device - the VIA (hiss!!!!!) USB universal cotroller, would also end up sharing the IRQ with the audio card. I had even considered buying a USB audio card, in the hopes that that would solve the problem. Finally, a user at youraudioforums.com named stringtheorist - now why couldn't I think up a great handle like that?? asked if I had pulled any of the cards out of the PC. Of course I had, I thought, but then it occured to me that I since I had two open slots, and I didn't want to move more than one card, I just swapped the card into the other open slot.
It had never crossed my mind that those two slots themselves could be the problem. I moved my NIC over into one of those slots and the audio card into where the NIC was. Bang! After the reboots, my audio card was on its own IRQ!
Of course, as my luck goes, I had to reinstall the NIC for whatever reason. And lo and behold, the NIC and the VIA device are now happily sharing the same IRQ. So anything in those two slots will end up sharing an IRQ. Really, really, really stupid design. I don't think I will ever buy a board with a VIA chipset again after all this nonsense.
I have just done some recording of one of the analog synths that was negatively effected by all this and I am happy to say that between the notes, there is nothing but blissful, pristine silence.
The lesson to me I suppose is that I should never take anything for granted. You would think I would have learned this after a decade in the computer industry, but as my old boss would have said, whats the point of being stupid if you don't show it?
Now I will finally be able to finish this song, thanks to all who have stayed with this and given me your comments.