PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic playback problems on biab

I think I'll work toward a new PC. It's great doing upgrade after upgrade but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet & get a brand spanking new machine. DON'T WANT to spend too much as I was trying to build some cash towards another accordion, but I'd rather have a good pc to be honest

Well I'd hate to see you buy a new machine and then still have problems. Spec wise that computer should run like fire compared to my Toshiba laptop with shared video etc. Before you go buy a new machine do you have a mate that has an adequate machine that you can plug the PG hard drive into and give it a go?
The reason I ask is that during BETA when you were having issues we determined that you copied the 2011 HD files onto your older 2010 drive because you stated that the 2011 drive was on it's way out. I suspect that you had corrupt files on the 2011 and just copied the same corrupt files to the old 2010 drive. This point is not valid if you got 2011.5 on a new drive BUT if you just got the update disc then you may still have a bad copy. Take what you have to a mate and give her a whirl.

No John I've got the brand new 2011.5 in it's own hard drive hard drive so surely no corrupt files.
What myself & Rob DID notice though was testing directx ( latest download ) there was some distortion. Now it's worse when the hardware accelaration is off. Since BIAB uses graphics to display scrolling music script, I wonder would a cheap graphics card ease the cpu a bit ?

Check the prizes.

For a fast computer that is state of the art and therefore will have relevant parts available for a long time, whatever this means in IT lingo, check the options of "Sandy Bridge". Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_bridge and internet search engines know a lot about it.

Of the several available processors get one of the i7 or i5 families. I personally don't advice less than i5.

The mainboard is a different beast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155 shows an overview of chipsets. My advice is a Z68 chipset board that offers to use the embedded GPU, the graphics processing unit (not all models do). There are only a handful of manufacturers so far: ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock are among them.

With an initial 8 GB of memory, the boards accept up to 32 GB, you will have a rather fast computer

Best regards.
Guido

I'll maybe try a graphics card. Thinking back I remember some problems I had on an old pc and that was cured by shoving a graphics card in. I'm sure it's a stupid little windows problem

If I remember correctly as I am now on win 7 with xp you could right click on my computer and go to advanced and rather than have windows choose what is best for my computer tick give priority to background services, there are a number of other things you can untick that is supposed to help audio as well such as the graphics settings, a whole long list of them which helps to free up system resources.

musiclover

Will try all those thanks

OK Guys I'm hopeful a solution has ( maybe ) been found. I've configured my LynxONE soundcard and have been playing biab through that. Only problem is that the volume is very low through headphones and there's only one channel coming through. OK through the speakers. I'm guessing I need a pre amp for the Lynx. It's a professional souncard and can only be connected to speakers cans or a mike via its serial port. Brilliant sound through the speakers. WOW factor 10 !!

I'll get this damn thing licked yet !!!

Graham,
Try totally uninstalling one of those sound cards. They are both PCI cards are they not.Actually uninstall both and then reinstall the Terratec. Do you also have a built in card other then thse two. I sure hope not.

No John only the two soundcards. I'll remove the terratec tomorrow and see what happens.
The Lynx is the one I REALLY want to use

Just ordered a cheap preamp from amazon to see what happens. I'll post the results

Info to consider:

Quote:

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PCI Soundcard Compatibility Issues
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PC Notes
Published in SOS May 2007
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Technique : PC Notes


Your much-loved elderly PCI soundcard may be working perfectly, but might still have to go on the scrapheap if you upgrade your PC. Why? It's all down to the PCI specification and the location of your notches...

Martin Walker

With more and more musicians buying or building new PCs to take advantage of new features such as dual-core processing, some are frustrated to find out that their old but trusty PCI soundcards no longer function at all when plugged into their modern motherboard. The problems revolve around the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) specification, which has undergone various revisions over the years. Unfortunately, it can be a bit of a minefield trying to establish which soundcards will work with which motherboards, so this month I'm going to provide some background information that should set the scene and help you to work out whether your soundcard is likely to be a casualty if you upgrade your motherboard.
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The Slot-machine Gamble

As I explained in PC Notes December 2004 (www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec04/articles/pcnotes.htm), the PCI specification defines two basic types of expansion connectors that may be found on a motherboard: one for systems with 5V signalling levels, and the other for systems using 3.3V signalling levels. Signalling specifies the voltage level of the various clock and timing signals, but not necessarily the power supply voltage, so a particular card may require both 5V and 3V power supplies, irrespective of its signalling-level voltage.
PCnotes1
If your soundcard edge connector looks like that of Echo's Mia, shown here, it may or may not work when plugged into a modern PC motherboard featuring PCI version 2.3 expansion slots. If, on the other hand, it's a 'Universal' card with both 5V and 3.3V notches, like ESI's Julia, shown underneath, it should always work.

As you can see from the photograph above, the more common 5V PCI cards, such as Echo's Mia, have a notch in their edge connector furthest away from the backplate, while the newer 3.3V expansion cards have a notch much closer to the backplate, and so-called Universal PCI cards (such as ESI's Julia, shown underneath the Mia) include both notches, so they can be plugged into either 3.3V or 5V expansion slots. The expansion slots themselves include corresponding keys to prevent you plugging in the wrong type of card.

Motherboards in PCs bought a few years ago (such as the Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard in my old Pentium 4 2.8GHz computer) will probably have PCI version 2.2 expansion slots. These support both 5V and 3.3V expansion cards, and hence the vast majority of soundcards. However, when the PCI specification was updated to version 2.3 in 2002, while it continued to support both 5V and 3.3V keyed-system board connectors, it ceased supporting cards that require 5V signalling, only supporting 3.3V and Universal expansion cards. This means that although the PCI expansion slots in a new computer may look identical to those of your previous PC, and physically accept 5V-only cards, if the motherboard is running PCI version 2.3, only cards that can run on 3.3V signalling levels will actually work — most confusing!

Revision 3.0, introduced in 2004, takes the next step of removing support for the 5V keyed-system board connector altogether, but is not yet widely seen on motherboards. You can find out what PCI version your motherboard has using utilities such as Sisoftware's Sandra (www.sisoftware.co.uk), by opening the 'Buses and Devices' applet in its Hardware page.

What Does It Mean?

So what, in practice, does all this mean for the average musician? Well, if you have a PCI soundcard that has two notches in its edge connector (the Universal type), you can be confident that it will both fit into and run successfully on the vast majority of modern motherboards. If, on the other hand, you have an elderly PCI soundcard (pre-2002) with a single 5V notch, it may or may not work. As an example, although my Echo Mia card only has a 5V notch, according to the Echo web site (www.echoaudio.com/Support/FAQ.php), all of Echo's PCI products are in fact compatible with 5V PCI, 3.3V PCI and PCI-X connectors, and will thus work with modern PCI 2.3 motherboards. However, someone recently posted on the SOS Forum that while he could physically install his elderly MOTU PCI 324 card in his new dual-core PC, the card wasn't recognised (MOTU do state that it's a 5V-only card on their web site, and that PCI 324 owners can upgrade to the newer PCI 424 card, as they can to the latest PCIe 424 model). Meanwhile, with his Yamaha DS4126 DSP Factory pushed into an expansion slot this new PC wouldn't boot up at all (a similar fate befalls Yamaha's SW1000XG card). The reason for these problems is that all three cards are 5V only.

So if you're trying to track down compatibility information for an elderly but still loved soundcard, look for references in its specification to 5V, 3.3V or the required PCI version. For example, a visit to the Lynx web site (www.lynxstudio.com) showed that while the newer Lynx Two, L22 and AES16 soundcards all have twin notches, the older Lynx One has a single 5V notch and requires a PCI buss that's 'Version 2.1 compliant', meaning that it will only run with 5V slots and not with the latest motherboards. If you can't find the information you need, a quick email or telephone call to the soundcard manufacturer should provide the answer.
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Great info, thanks John. I've decided I don't really need a new pc.
The CPU usage remained quite low & steady whilst using biab with the Lynx which makes me think that both the terratec dmxfire & the realtek audio chip just havn't the guts to cope with the demands from biab. Stay tuned for further updates

Well if you have a Realtek chip then in essence you have 3 cards. Get rid of the Teretec.

OK