Modern DAW Tweaks for ASIO, EWS88MT Crackles

Hi,
I'm new here, and my question concerns ASIO drivers and Windows
optimization:
I've read plenty of old tweak guides for DAW and low latency use, but
many of them are dated, don't rigorously argument why certain setting
changes should be made and sometimes they even go against common sense.
Killing video acceleration and making your paging file too small come to
mind. So is there any contemporary, well argumented tweak guide for XP
and ASIO out there? I've Googled but haven't found any. Its a bit too
pro Microsoft to my taste but one of the real rigorous anti-tweaking
guides I've read are the XP Myths at:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html

Here are some particulars that come to mind:

1. Does Cool n Quiet seriously affect realtime operation such as audiO
recording or soft synths? I like the feature otherwise.

2. Is turning on physical address extensions (PAE), memory remapping
etc... more trouble than its worth if you've got an old sound card and 4
gigs of RAM? My machine doesn't see 4 GB of RAM even with memory hole
remapping and PAE support in XP, might it be old and incompatible
soundcard drivers?

3. Howabout data execution prevention (DEP) any pros, cons or problems
in audio? I haven't noticed any positive effects but some non-audio apps
fail to run with DEP always on, namely DOS Box's dynamic CPU emulation.

4. Should processor time be optimized for background services, even on a
dual core system, and howabout dedicating more RAM to the system cache,
do audio apps do their own file caching? Most apps seem to be single
core so they use max 50 % of the CPUs and my screen reader takes some 10
or 20 percent. I do know, say, Linux already uses memory heavily for
caching when apps don't need it, but am wondering whether the system
cache will eat too much memory in Windows.

5. Are all Via chipsets bad for audio, and which devices are OK sharing
IRQs in an APIC system?

These questions are actually motivated by the particular problems I've
had in my machine. The specs are:
Amd 64 5200+, Asus M2V Mobo, TerraTec EWS88 MT sound card, 4 GB DDR 800
MHz RAM, a SATA 2 HD, Ati Radeon X300 PCIE graphics and XP Pro Sp2
English. Some of the drivers (graphics, sound) are newest out there and
the rest are the once coming with the Mobo.

In brief, I've never gotten the full 4 GB visible even with PAE and
memory remapping. I've also played around with DEP and the CPU time
settings but am still getting crackles in ASIo recording using Sound
Forge Audio Studio 8, but not when using ASIO in Sonar 4 LE. Killing
Skype, disabling the anti-virus app (F-Secure) and the networking, to,
has no effect on these crackles. Using Windows classic wave drivers
skips initial samples in Sound Forge, and all in all, sometimes the
whole machine BSOds when the TerraTEc is used for classic wave audio.

I'm running out of ideas of what could cause this. I do know this
machine uses some Via chips and have even installed the Marvell SATA2
drivers though I don't use raid. the HD works fine and fast and any of
the IDE controllers have no problems at all their modes are UDMA 6 and
UDMA 4 respectively. I'm wondering about IRQs, now since Windows does
list devices using the same IRQ 21. Here they are:

21: Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE controller
and VIA Rev 5 or later USb Universal host controller
and VIA USB Enhanced Host Controller

There are 43 IRQs in total. The boot parameters are:

/fastdetect /usepmtimer /noexecute=optout

I have no floppy drive and the KBd and mouse are USb, yet windows shows:

1: Standard 101/102 keyboard
6: Standard Floppy Disk Controller
12: Microsoft PS/2 compatible mouse

Deleting the devices in device Manager doesn't help, they keep coming
back. Is this legacy stuff, something abnormal or stuff I can adjust in
the BIOS (its the latest release, too)? I do need sighted help for that,
but that's doable.

As I'm also a screen reader user, I do use the built-in sound card for
Windows audio its called RealTec HD Audio Output
Might it affect matters? It does take an IRQ, at least:

17: Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio

Of course all these things are made worse by the fact that this machine
is not solely for audio. In addition to the TerraTec, HardSID PCI, MIDi
Sport 4x4, Evolution UC-33 and many hardware MIDi synths I won't care to
list, the non-audio hardware includes an external USb2 HD, a CanoScan
scanner (normally not plugged in), and on the software side, a custom
video interception driverr by the screen reader, Dolphin Supernova 7.03.
AS to applications in addition to audio, I use this one for old games I
can play, the inet stuff, programming (PErl and the Windows SDK) and
have set up Windows and F-secure Anti-Virus 5.4 to auto-update, since
I'm lazy. I also have MIcrosoft Update installed.

Back in my previous machine I did have IRQ sharing problems with ACPi PC
on 2k, though not on XP, and also my HDs would drop to PIO from UDMA, so
these are particular issues I have experience with and that I've already
checked. Is there a good way to check 4 GB of memory in WIndows for
faults, so that caching doesn't ruin the results, and that there are no
false positives?

Any help appreciated. The reason why I ask primarily for a tweak guide
is that I would like to try out different setting combos having heard
their rationales somewhere. I can send over even more system info if
needed. I don't expect anyone to be able to answer all the questions at
once, so please feel free to snip liberally.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Sound card problem
    ... I have suddenly lost my audio for Windows XP. ... you will lose funcionality provided by the system specific drivers you ... You either do not have a sound card installed on your computer or it is ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Similar issue, some help for you
    ... However, in mine, there is no audio under windows current version ... Also do you no a way around downloading kazaa or limewire to windows vista. ... it turns out that most important than having signed drivers is to ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsmedia.player)
  • Re: no audio on Pavillion A7181 ?
    ... Windows registry entries for the hardware. ... The presence of "digital audio" in and out, ... >> HP's on-line web site support in the form of available drivers is usually ...
    (comp.sys.hp.hardware)
  • Re: no sound
    ... Try this, open device manager again. ... Audio on it, and select remove, now reboot. ... should reinstall the drivers for them. ... > Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Horrendous Audio Stutter - current git
    ... Under kernel compilation load audio is very much unusable ... # CPUFreq processor drivers ... # Core Netfilter Configuration ...
    (Linux-Kernel)