Take the computer off the Internet, disable anything that has to do with the Internet, make a separate profile to stop these and virus protection, energy settings, etc.

Turn the machine off and stop the frenzy.

That's my short answer.

I think Vista is a bloated resource hog in DAW systems and my attempts in using it were frustrating. Perhaps I got annoyed without fully exploring all potential answers but I set up a dual boot system XP/ Vista and use a very stripped down version of XP when recording and have been very happy. This may or may not be the best solution but Vista was pretty new at that point and maybe it has improved.
Here is a link to dual booting (but it requires a XP registered install package)
apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

I have heard 99% bad things about Vista and pro, semi-pro, and hobbyist audio.

Unsupported hardware, flaky drivers, and the OP's problems are just a few of the things I have read about.

I am waiting out Vista's reign of terror, and I will go dual boot with Linux and whatever Micro$oft does for the next OS.

While I use Vista Ultimate 32bit SP1 on four machines without any problem, it is a bit of a pig. My beta testing of Win7 is much more pleasant. If one can wait for Win7 then do so.

Vista prior to SP1 sucked big ostrich eggs. It was more broken than not. Post SP1 Vista is quite manageable. It is the same way for any new MS os. Some drivers were definitely slow in coming but most vendors have come up to speed even with the initial handicap.

Did you change your mobo at the same time you changed processors? Probably so but I don't like to assume. Have you checked the latency of your mobo and setup? That seems at least as likely a culprit as Vista. Also, each of my different laptops exhibits different latency patterns even when they were all XP Pro. It just seems the nature of the beast with mobo's.

I also have an Onyx 1640 that I occasionally use and track 16 channels at 88.2. I don't generally have artifacts in the tracks so it definitely can be done. As per the first reply, stay off the internet and disable all network cards.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm

I think you probably just need to keep tweaking till you sort it out; it's not necesarly Vista's fault, in spite of what many will tell you otherwise. (I had no idea Mackie FINALLY released a vista driver! I'm going to go download that next...) There's always a lot of trial and error with new OS's, esp with how much hostility and fear that's surrouned Vista. So many don't even want to TOUCH it, so there's a lot less overall info out there.

Try turning off resources that you know you don't need; Run task manager in the background and watch the CPU activity, look for spyware, and as everyone else has already said: Get off the web, turn off stuf that shouldn't be running, etc. (even pending updates can drive you bonkers.) Ditto for screen savers, automatic updates, etc. etc. (Make sure norton AV is OFF as well.)

There's also security persmissions with HD access and Vista, you must make sure that you have allowed "everyone" for all functions in the setup menus. Sometimes, Vista can inadvertantly halt you or slow down background processes if it "THINKS" there's a security risk.

I'm using Vista SP1 on four (out of seven) PC's here; Three are native pre-installs, one was a clean install on an older machine. All work well; but I too have removed all the bloatware and unecessary bells & whistles. One HAS to be paying attention though, for updates and work-arounds. (My other three machines are XP SP3, so everything seems to network and play together nicely, but again, it was a struggle at first.)

Three of these machines are for audio & video editing, and they're fine. The fourth is my "office" machine.

I'm also using a variety of digital audio interfaces, incluing the Mackie Onyx line, (with the originsal XP drivers) for several versions of their mixers, depending on the machine & the sitution. Again, they all work just fine, but not without a lot of TLC when using Vista. (That may change after I download the newer Vista driver).

If I can be of any help with your Vista issues, drop me a note offline here, and I'll let you know what I know, such as it is... :-?

Quote:
Make sure norton AV is uninstalled ten times over and set fire to the box as well.

Fix'd that for ya ;)

Amen on the Norton comment. It's a dark evil harrigan of a program fit for the offspring of Grendel's mother.

On a brighter note:
Joe, some folks have had minor issues installing the new Mackie Onyx driver over the top of the previous one. The route I took worked pretty well. I ran the original driver install program which detected a driver in place. It asks to remove that driver which I allow and then I cancel installation of a new driver. Now I install the updated Onyx driver per the instructions and everything works peachy.

As a side note, on Win7 the Mackie driver is known not to work. I was able to force feed it and get it to record in but not to send audio out. M-Audio FW series products seem to function fully as well as the RME FF.

Thanks to you all for the input!

Sucks that Vista seems to pose so much hassle. I like the idea of running XP on the same machine. I think I may also get a PC card for firewire instead of using the onboard one. I think the onboard one shares its IRQ with the Raid controller so that might be part of it too. This new machine is making my old one look good. I can have a web browser open with like 10 webpages open meanwhile having ableton rocking like 16 tracks with effects playing off of a usb harddrive, no glitches at all on a 4 year old AMD3200, 2gig hobby build.

Tonight I'm gonna try turning off programs in task manager, adding an aftermarket firewire port and then try using one of the installed drives instead of a usb drive. Time to test out the new 300gb velociraptor!

You misunderstand me. I really have not had any problems at all with Vista Ultimate SP1. Any latency issue I had was with the mobo which updated bios fixed. I would definitely go for a new 1394 card with a TI chipset.

IMHO the best route is audio in through firewire and saved data out through usb sata/ide or through a separate internal bus. If you have onboard graphics then that could be an issue as well but not definitively. I'm not real big on jump drives for saving audio data in real time.

At this point I've got damn near everything in Vista turned off, I don't have Norton, all drivers I can think of are updated.

I tried popping in my old adaptec firewire card and it had more pops and crackles than the on board one. I will try one that has a TI chipset tonight.

Does anyone think that this could be a problem in Bios? I did notice a latency setting, currently set at 64? I'm not really familair with this.

Also I read something about being able to set the priority for devices to have access to the bus? The particular artcile was for XP and I wasn;t able to find the same tool in Vista. anyone familiar with this?

The latency setting in the bios is for you RAM. Don't mess with it unless you absolutely know what you are doing.

I assume you've set priority to background services?

What do you have your buffers set at? You "should" be able to go as low as 64 samples but 128-256 samples is not bad either. It's a difference of 5-10 ms. Hardly noticeable.

At this point I've got damn near everything in Vista turned off, I don't have Norton, all drivers I can think of are updated.

I tried popping in my old adaptec firewire card and it had more pops and crackles than the on board one. I will try one that has a TI chipset tonight.

Does anyone think that this could be a problem in Bios? I did notice a latency setting, currently set at 64? I'm not really familair with this.

Also I read something about being able to set the priority for devices to have access to the bus? The particular artcile was for XP and I wasn;t able to find the same tool in Vista. anyone familiar with this?

At this point I've got damn near everything in Vista turned off, I don't have Norton, all drivers I can think of are updated.

I tried popping in my old adaptec firewire card and it had more pops and crackles than the on board one. I will try one that has a TI chipset tonight.

Does anyone think that this could be a problem in Bios? I did notice a latency setting, currently set at 64? I'm not really familair with this.

Also I read something about being able to set the priority for devices to have access to the bus? The particular artcile was for XP and I wasn;t able to find the same tool in Vista. anyone familiar with this?

At this point I've got damn near everything in Vista turned off, I don't have Norton, all drivers I can think of are updated.

I tried popping in my old adaptec firewire card and it had more pops and crackles than the on board one. I will try one that has a TI chipset tonight.

Does anyone think that this could be a problem in Bios? I did notice a latency setting, currently set at 64? I'm not really familair with this.

Also I read something about being able to set the priority for devices to have access to the bus? The particular artcile was for XP and I wasn;t able to find the same tool in Vista. anyone familiar with this?

Terrapin wrote: Also I read something about being able to set the priority for devices to have access to the bus?

You're talking about IRQ. The higher the IRQ, the higher the priority. You should be able to set this manually in your bios. Make sure that your graphics adapter and your firewire card are not sharing the same IRQ.

Terrapin wrote: Does anyone think that this could be a problem in Bios? I did notice a latency setting, currently set at 64? I'm not really familair with this.

Didn't I answer this question already?

At this point I've got damn near everything in Vista turned off, I don't have Norton, all drivers I can think of are updated.

I tried popping in my old adaptec firewire card and it had more pops and crackles than the on board one. I will try one that has a TI chipset tonight.

Does anyone think that this could be a problem in Bios? I did notice a latency setting, currently set at 64? I'm not really familair with this.

Also I read something about being able to set the priority for devices to have access to the bus? The particular artcile was for XP and I wasn;t able to find the same tool in Vista. anyone familiar with this?

What's wrong Terrapin? Not liking the answers I'm giving? Why don't you go on and repost that? :roll:

Sorry about the multiple posts. And Hueseph, I must have posted my last post before refreshing the screen and hadn't seen your post. I very much appreciate the information. I'll have to go into bios tonight when I get home from work and look at changing those IRQ's. I know the onboard firewire shares the same irq with the raid controller,

So I worked on it a bunch lastnight, downloaded a third party IRQ priority controller, installed a pc card fire wire port. The FW card says nothing about being TI chipset, was the only one the comp store had. Regardless of that I got the FW card turned way high in priority, raid controller a distant second. Also turned the graphics to 16-bit. Things seemed to run a *bit* better. MAybe it was late and after alot of frustrations, I'll have to try again today. Seems like ableton was pretty stable but not totally confident yet at 64 samples while running 16 tracks, 1 verb, 1 delay, 10 compressors, 10 eq's.

Hopefully I'll be able to tweak it better than that at somepoint unless thats about all I can expect from my new build. I still may try turning off the on board graphics and popping in my gamer quality video card. That beast really seemed to make my old machine run ableton better,either that or it just decided to start kicking ass one day!

My new machine specs:
AMD Phenom II 4 3.0ghz quad core
4gb corsair dominator ram
2 x WD caviar black 1TB drives in raid 1 (system drive)
1 x WD velociraptor 300gb scratch drive
Asus m3a78-t
Corsair 750w power supply

Does it seem reasonable that I could get 32 sample latency out of a machine with this while running 16 tracks with effects?

And as always thanks to everyone on this board for such great advice!

Are you,
Is h-
Waaaaaaaaagh!
Have you been running with 32 sample buffers the whole time?

Put it to 2048. Don't ask why, do it.
Maybe even higher if it needs it.
Mixing should be done at the highest reasonable buffer size and tracking should be done with zero effects and the lowest reasonable buffer size.

I've just been trying to bench mark the system to see where it starts breaking up compared to my other machine.

Up till now I only really used my gear to record live multitrrack stuff, so yes latency was never really an issue. I am now embarking on doing a more traditional studio type project that will be doing overdubbing. Just testing the waters to see where the threshold is.

when overdubbing is 128 samples a reasonable delay? At 64 ableton tells me its about 5ms, seems about the distsance of a performer from a stage monitor?

Me = studio rookie!

If you can work with 128 samples, great.
That would be how I'd define reasonable.

Plugins require processing power that is not passive.

Overdubs fit into the same category as tracking. Turn off all the FX. A 32 buffer is going to be a real tough nut to crack for most systems not built by pro audio designers. 128 is more reasonable IMO. The fewer tracks actually in the session will have better results. Just muting a track doesn't stop it from being processed. Also, if things don't line up exactly you can nudge the track in your DAW.

Other than that....what Codemonkey said.

check out optimizing your Daw

http://www.editthis.info/sonar/Optimizing_Your_DAW

I started a post about the 'stuttering' in x64 with solutions, facts, and other possible issues.

I'll summarize it right now by saying that the root of all of your noise issues is the DirectX8-10 emulation of DirectDraw via Direct3D. Windows 7 will alleviate this issue with advanced drivers and DirectX11.

Microsoft made the change back in the DX8 days to reduce CPU demand for 2D graphics rending and transfer the majority of the load to your GPU. I really don't know why but it pretty much borked Vx64 users since we don't have any direct control over this feature.

All multimedia apps can be affected by the noise which ONLY should affect playback. If you experience noises while recording it could be your latency settings (being too low), your computer is just a slow pile of funk, or there's another problem unrelated to the DX 2D emulation in the x64 environment.

My post is in point form so just take what is interesting and continue with your own research. I'll just close by saying NEVER use on-board graphics for a DAW (some people overlook this too). Good luck.

{old-link-removed}