Ackkk, serious midi issue still =/ Any one wanna give this a

sinix · Post by **sinix** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 2:00 pm

I'll duplicate this on my system as well with SX. I'm pretty sure the timing is fairly on though.

borg · Post by **borg** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 2:42 pm

have you tried replacing 'kick me' with, for instance, EDSi8 or wavelength's plasma?

Kenf · Post by **Kenf** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 3:36 pm

Hi
I have just setup a hihat from Reason and a bass drum from EDS playing four on the floor and panned one left and one right. I recorded them to a stereo pair. Over a 4 bar loop Reason shifts about 15 ticks and EDS shifts around 80 ticks. Not much in terms of time but more than I would have hoped. This is using SFP. I will try the same with XTC.
Regards
Kenf

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 5:18 pm

Ken,

So you are finding a similar result with your test? If I read right it seems SFP an your edsi went off fairly easily compared to reason. I did read an odd tidbit, where it says that steinberg products can use two different clocks causing this, where say the midex can use your OS clock and the sequencer or soundcard can be using the Mobo clock if I read correctly, thus causing this effect.

I did another test, I have a dual boot system, I installed SFP and the demo of sonar on the other boot which doesnt have any of my DSP devices installed, and it seemed to improve the timing greatly, so I have decided to strip my box down and re-install the OS in standard PC mode and then start with just Nuendo and my scope card, Ill do the tweaks and if that actually does the trick, ill then start rebuilding the system up one card at a time to see where the weak link is.

It could quite possibly be a virtual IRQ issue since my mobo assigns like 25 IRQs, so I figure if I disable everything I dont need and do a standard PC instal, this could possibly help the situation. I dont plan to use SFP for my percussion but I will use the synths and effects, so having tight timing is worth every bit of energy spent

Thanks again for all the help guys, ill post once I blow out my system and start fresh, I pray there will be a change for the better since its going to take me hours on end re-installing all the rompler libriars lol, were talking like 15 gigs in just romplers that before all the VSTi's and such hehe..

Cheers!

sinix · Post by **sinix** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:17 pm

I did a test:

http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 6&forum=17

1min stereo file with KickMe hard on one side and the exact sample of KickMe playing through LinPlug RMIV hard on the other.

You hear a bit of flanging, but it's pretty much right on the whole minute. Nothing that makes you go *wow* that's off.

Having said that, I'll still only use vsti's for perc. sounds!

I hope you get it sorted Basic... all three of these same cards seem to be playing nicely for me.

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:42 pm

UPDATE:

Things are MASSIVLY looking brighter lol, well sort of... I re-installed my OS in standard PC mode, I took out every card in my PC except my scope card, my video card and my Midex8, I then installed all my drivers and mobo drivers extremely cautious and fired up kickme and Nuendo2, this being the only things on the entire PC atm.

With out doing any windows tweaks, things sound WAY better, I still hear a bit ofd flanging but I can say the the sound now seems workable, infact I would say if I wassnt such a stickler, most could probably consider this good enough. I will always use VSTi's for my percussion but I am just using the sample test I did as a basis for midi timing.

Now for the SCARY part, adding back in my UAD-1 & TC Powercore and praying that standard PC will not give me a severe head ache with IRQ configs, and then ofcourse PCI bandwidth.

I will post a new audio clip as soon as I get something on my PC to record a .wave, I do have another question while I am testing the bare bones set up.

- If I am using SFP can I run the lowest possible latency at 44.1? does that effect VSTi's the way it would in say XTC mode?

This is part of SFP I have yet to grasp. Any ways I just wanted to keep you guys updated of the situation, I really have no idea what was causing this before, but pray for me that the two other cards dont kill the good vibe

if all goes well and the timing remains the same things will be looking WAY better for me, already I feel a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.

Ill post again once the other cards are installed and report if it killed the timing or stayed the same, then ill post an audio byte for you guys to hear and tell me your thoughts on the new timing..

Cheers!

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:54 pm

UPDATE2:

Crap, UAD went in a thre off the timing, unfortunately it seems there is just so many things on the mobo, its forcing things to share IRQs, im gonna fiddle and post again, ill also try a different PCI slot for the UAD.

Back to the drawing board lol...

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 12:33 am

UPDATE3:

Fianlly! I have all 3 cards in the system and what I feel is comfortable levels of latency and they all seem to be working! BUT! theres a hitch, (theres always one isnt there?), my mobo has to many things on it to really be happy in "standard PC" mode, so now that I figured out what PCI slots are workable for the combo (thanks eric at jrr!), I am going to throw caution at the wind and reinstall my OS once again and try ACPI mode since I need more IRQs.

Right now all 3 cards are sharing IRQs though its working some how and sounds pretty good to my ears. Am I crazy? sure am at this point, I figue if I got it working im bound to get it to work again lol.

Anyways, ill repost once again once I see what ACPI mode does to the system.

Keep yer fingers crossed for me gang, and thanks for suffering through my 3 days of torment and 3 pages of posts, lets hope it all works with virtual IRQs..

Cheers!

PS. I just want to add, I just installed Minimax since I have botyh plugin packs as a scope SP, and let me just say "WOW!" this thing sounds incredible, my jaw dropped on some of those trance patch sounds in the very last guys patch folder. I cant wait to see what pro-one does for me hehe..

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Basic Pitch on 2004-03-04 00:35 ]</font>

Post by **garyb** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 2:23 am

acpi should be fine...

Kenf · Post by **Kenf** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 3:33 am

Hi
I did the same test in XTC mode and had about the same amount of drift. It measures around 80 ticks. One thing I did notice was that the creamware midi is always around 200 ticks late both in SFP and XTC. I put in a 2mS 'forward' delay on the track and re-recorded the track and it was just about on the beat but still with the drift.
I tried the same tests with Vectron Player and got the same results.
Has any one else measured the amount there midi drifts?
Regards
Kenf

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 4:31 am

UPDATE:

ACPI mode didnt go so well =/ I think it causes XP to install to many additional drivers that standard PC doesnt install and it might be eating up PCI bandwidth or sdomething, but I left the cards in same slots and installed exactly how I did and timing was awefull.

I then reinstalled again "sigh" back to standard PC and everything is sounding pretty good to me, the only sketchy thing is I have all 3 DSP cards sharing multiple IRQ's, though I just loaded up a pretty DSP heavy track and threw some things at SFP and it didnt seem to bother it much, I was at about 50% CPU usage, though I must admit a few VSTi's were not playing due to them bot being installed yet.

Tomorrow late eve ill install all the others and see what happens, I guess if its working and sharing IRQs maybe I should just turn a blind eye since that seems to be the only way it wants to work lol.

How bad is that exactly for the DSP cards to be sharing some IRQs? Unfortunately, no matter what I do I cant seem to get the cards to have seperate IRQs since newer mobo's have way to much S* on them =/

Either way it works, and thats what matters for now, providing when I throw something heavy at it tomorrow it doesnt explode.

PS. Played with PsyQ and Optimaster, those sound pretty great, PsyQ is a little wonder, talk about stero properties lol..

Ill post tomorrow sine its 4:30am already and I only has the basics installed lol.

Cheers!

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 5:31 am

Basic Pitch wrote:

reinstall my OS once again and try ACPI mode since I need more IRQs.

Hi BP

Hmmm. ACPI won't give you more IRQs - it just lets the system determine IRQ sharing...it's also to do with the system's power management, e.g. the system can totally power down the PC with ACPI enabled.

It's APIC which gives the extended IRQ range - its the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller.

I think I'm right in saying that without ACPI turned on, APIC cant work either.

My (W2K) system is set up as follows:

In BIOS:

"Plug & Play OS": NO/OFF
Interrupt 'Mode': PIC (Not APIC)
Standard PC installation
(Note: W2K, not XP OS)

I have the two CW cards next to each other in the middle two PCI slots, I have bitten my bottom lip and removed all other PCI cards. MOBO LAN is disabled in the BIOS. **USB2 is DISABLED** - a interrupt shit-storm if ever there was one

Seriously, if you don't need it, turn it off - all my devices are USB1 anyway. From my ailing memory, I think that USB2 causes an interrupt for every packet (or perhaps frame) of data - we are talking millions of them every second!

I haven't bothered explicitly setting the IRQs for the CW cards in the BIOS (yet) - I've let the system worry about that (seems to work OK...I was trying to find the thread on PZ which indicated which IRQs had the higest priority but haven't managed to hunt it down as yet).

What else...you should definitely remove any 'emulated' MIDI ports too - there's a noticeable difference in the stability of the MIDI Clock (output from Cubase->SFP) between the emulated and 'real' MIDI ports.

I guess there may be some additional XP-specific system tweaks, but I'm sticking with W2K myself.

Royston

Kenf · Post by **Kenf** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 6:44 am

Hi
I have just compared EDS with LM7 in SX2 and the LM7 is rock solid, no drift what so ever. The EDS is all over the place in comparision drifts from 67 samples behind to 124 samples within the first 10 beats. To be honest you cannot really hear this as there appears to be 5520 samples per quarter note.

Sinix, I listened to you MP3 and thought it sounded worse than it should. There appears to be alot of phasing effect. Can you post a stereo file, so I can see what it looks like in the audio editor?
Regards
Kenf

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 10:41 am

On 2004-03-04 06:44, Kenf wrote:
...drifts from 67 samples behind to 124 samples within the first 10 beats...

...Sinix, I listened to you MP3 and thought it sounded worse than it should. There appears to be alot of phasing effect. ...

at 44k that's about 1.5 ms and a drift in that range on layered drum sounds is well noticable.
It's not the offset, but the drift that annoys. The frequency pattern of the layered sound constantly changes and with the appropriate panning you might even get some unwanted stereo effects (see below).

The phasing is intended as part of the test:
if the example would be perfectly timed (and the sample be a perfect copy of the drum from the other channel) then you'd have the impression of a mono file, because both channels are identical.

Now every (even the smallest) difference between the channels gets kind of emphasized because our ears are more sensitive to phase information than to time and frequency alone.

It's a very clever test setup

cheers, Tom

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 10:52 am

Morning *Yawn*,

Well, what a long evening... Everything seems to be in working order though, my CW Card, Video card are sharing the same IRQ =/ The real question is, how will this impact the system, as far as the small testing I did so late in the evening, I wassnt able to push the system by any means, and I have zero VSTi's installed yet, those are pretty hungry little devices..

Maybe tonight Ill try and load like 12 Masterverbs, max out my UAD and Powercore cards, throw ULLI to around 7ms load about 10 VSTI's and put Nuendo at around 70% playback CPU and see if the system explodes lol.

I mean if everyhting is sharing multiple IRQs in standard PC mode, exactly what kind of effect could that have on the system. Clearly ide like to give everything its own IRQ but that just is not going to happen in standard PC mode, my Asus A7N8X has too many things on it causing alot of IRQ sharing I guess.

I did the entire musicXP.net tweaks, including all registry edits, I disabled com1,com2,serial port, onboard sound in bios as well as onboard modem manager in bios, left LAN but have it disabled in profiles so I can turn it on or off when needed.

I have the CW card on PCI2, UAD on PCI3 & TC Card on PCI4, these seem to be the only workable slots for some reason, though I was so tired at the end of the night, I didnt get to deep into it once it was working, after 3 OS and SFP installs that was enough lol.

As far as the "ignorportfilter" file, that actually causes more head aches than its worth for me since it causes my midex8 to show another complete set of ports 1-8 (in/out), but the 2nd set must be some sort of emulation cause they do not work very well.

If I could just get the cards to have IRQs that share with minor peripherals other than things like video cards and such I would feel alot better..

Anyways, I wont be able to test till late this eve since my wife got me tickets to see Linkin Park tonight

Ill post once I see what happens, and again, much thanks to PlanetZ, I appreciate every one taking the time to respond and try and help me get this situation figured out.

Cheers!

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 11:05 am

Sinix,

I forgot to post last night being so enamoured with getting things together, that audio clip is inline with that I am experiencing but with a different test, same theory though, it appears in specific set ups the clocking of the CW modules is horrid, Ill post a new audio clip tonight once I get software installed to show how things sound now, but I am still very affraid of this IRQ sharing bit =/

Cheers!

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 2:25 pm

Another thing:

Sinix, I just read your post on your system specs and oddly enough I wasd browsing today at P$/Intel Mobo combos and saw your mob with a P4 3.2 for like 428 bucks, I am not so happy right now how my IRQs are all conflicting with so much, if I have to I may go the intel rout and get out of the nforce boards, but ill try my current set up 1st to see if I can get any better assignments..

Cheers!

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 10:59 am

UPDATE:

I think I may have worn you guys out lol, I am having my own discussion here these last few posts haha..

Anyways, I started re-installing a few things to pick up on a project I was in the middle of when I got the hair brained I Dea to do this in the middle of a project, and also went into the bios and started manually disabling all sorts of things trying to free up a couple IRQs in standard PC mode.

I disabled, Modem Handler, Game Port, Paralel Port, LPT1, Com2, Com3 and I am also considering to disable serial (2). This helped some, it moved the UAD and the TC card to different IRQs, and moved my Video and CW card to a shared IRQ. The problem is currently that while things are working the CW is only behaving in one PCI slot, the rest cause me grief,, its wierd I know but it just doesnt wanna play nice any any other PCI slot than #2..

Now, last night I loaded up a track that had about around 10-15 midi tracks and about I guess 25 stero audio tracks, and had 85% UAD CPU usage and 35% TC card usage, so for a test I added a few Masterverb Pros, a Mini max with 4 voices, opti master and a psyQ, everything seems to play fine, but if I have the routing window open behind nuendo and manually switch views during play back I can hear a distorion noise some times, I am guessing this is because the video and CW card are sharing an IRQ.

Though it may be due to the UAD sitting at 85% CPU, thats a little heavy for that card some times.

Everything seemed to sound fine, ill have to check the timing in track since that was a test purely on routing and effects, but so far so good aside from the IRQ things. If I could get my CQ card off the same IRQ as my video I would be a much happier person but things are looking brighter...

Just wanted to update any one who is curious...

Cheers!

valis · Post by **valis** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 11:43 am

btw ACPI + XP will give you more irq's (24 vs. 16) if you have an APIC 2.0 or higher motherboard. Just an fyi...

oh and *always* disable anything unused on your motherboard in bios, jumper it if this doesn't work completely (windows likes to override bios occasionally).

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 11:57 am

Hi Valis,

I did run a test with the cards in the same slots as they are in now but done with a standard ACPI install, and the results were not favorable compared to Standard PC, unfortunately though ACPI does give 25 IRQs those are all virtual, no matter how ya cut it, there is only 15 IRQs on a mobo with a possible of 4 IRQs even able to accept PCI/AGP cards, I belive those IRQs are 5,9,10,11 the rest are held for motherboard peripherals if my research proves true.

So in essence all ACPI does it create cirtual shared IRQs so the CPU has a software to helpo it process what virtual IRQ needs its priority, also I am starting to find that in ACPI mode mode hardware actually will default to one or two standard IRQs even though they dont appear to be due to ACPI giving 25 IRQs.

My Asus A7N8X is a pretty good board and newer technology as an Nforce, but for some reason with my current set up, the CW card is only happy in PCI(2), the rest I can move around free of choice, the timing issue seems to be for the most part eliminated when I run in standard PC, so Im trying mny best to get everything in a happy state.

Ill keep you guys posted, I think I am startin to see some light at the end of the tunnel, and just think, this thread has great testing and tons of info for future CW users who might experience similar issue..

Cheers!