Creative Audigy/Asus a8n32-sli problems

[cmaier]

Just a heads up to anyone who may be considering timetrax with a a8n32-sli deluxe board and an audigy 2.

Not sure if it is something peculiar to my setup, but i don't think so since I took out as much as i could and still had this problem:

at random, usually after running timetrax for a few minutes, the machine will make a loud clicking sound like a fuse blowing, and restart from POST. (one time it scrambled my RAID-5, which was not a happy thing).

I found that i can record from an external mic with no problem, and timetrax is the only thing i found that causes the behavior with this combination of hardware.

The on-board audio hardware works okay, and i replaced the audigy with an m-audio revo 5.1 and that seems to work fine, too. (currently burning it in).

I'm sure that creative is heavily to blame here (given their known peculiarities) but it's a little odd that recording, on its own, didn't cause the issue. I suspect some interaction with the usb and the sound board, but i tried using a pci board that supplied its own usb and that also flamed out.

Perhaps x-fi would have been a better choice but i avoided it because of the nforce4 issues.

 

[cmaier]

Well, after playing around for a couple days, things are better but still not good. On average every couple of hours (if running TT) i get bsod's. Eventlog dumpcheck is hinting at sound issues - probably kmixer.sys. Still investigating. So far, if i leave other recording applications running instead, no bsod, but my testing is not yet extensive enough to be dispositive.

Played around with turning the TT mixer on and off and various soundcard settings, but nothing seems to help yet.

With stern starting monday, guess i'll stick to my old FX-51 sk8n system.

(btw, this problem occurs both with the released version of TT and the new beta).

 

[milton@kkom.com]

same thing with me and the asus a8n-sli premium...

 

[cmaier]

By setting windows sound control panel to only use the realtek (for both audio in and out) and "use default only" checked, I got timetrax to work all night - this morning i woke up and it was still working (i hadn't set it to record or anything, but it is still progress

Problem: when i clicked to exit timetrax, timetrax stopped responding. Waited for about 5 minutes before killing it in task manager. This is with the beta version. Memory use was about 26000 at the time, CPU ranged 0 to 5 on a dual core system.

When I restarted timetrax, it couldn't find the timetrax hardware. I unplugged the power on the hardware for a few seconds and tried again, and it worked.

Now I am testing using the on-board audio for input and the m-audio for output. Hopefully that will be stable as well, because i'd have no problem using that configuration; in fact, since i don't want to listen to what i'm recording, i like it better.

Assuming i get that working next step is to try to use windows scheduler to load tt about 5 minutes before stern and to load a script i'm about to write 5 minutes after stern. Hopefully the script will just look up tt's pid and send it a kill signal. In fact, if TT can't change the software to run as a service, why not just add a commandline flag to the .exe (/kill or something) that, when used, detects the running instance and sends it a WM_QUIT or something? supporting windows scheduler is better than nothing,

 

[PhuckNut]

there is a program that will kill a process name as well. So your script could just run that kill / Timetrax.exe and that would stop the process.

It looks like the the Beta is recording the audio into RAM and then dumping it to disk. I have not been able to locate the files the recording - only the files its recorded.

 

[cmaier]

looks like i can use the m-audio for audio out and the on-board audio for mic input, and it is stable (so far at least).

Same wasn't true with the audigy; i did try that and got the huge crash (not even a bsod)

 

[cmaier]

Yet another update. (somewhere, someone cares

This is on my system, consisting of an athlon x2 3800, and no other boards other than a usb/firewire board (i've tried two different brands with similar results, so i doubt that board has anything to do with this), and 4 seagate drives in a raid-5 array. Latest bios.

a8n32-sli deluxe with timetrax is definitely stable with onboard audio for input and output (have run it for 18-24 hours with no problems, albeit i haven't tested out timer recording in that mode).

a8n32-sli deluxe with creative audigy is deadly, and seems to actually risk damaging your hardware.

a8n32-sli deluxe with m-audio revolution 5.1 is unstable. It is slightly better if you use the m-audio only for audio output, but my most recent tests show that even in this mode you are likely to get no more than 6 hours of stability before a kmixer.sys blue screen of death.

I may try an x-fi just for the heck of it, but i'll probably just live with the on-board audio.

 

[goaliebob99]

Its most likely the Bios..

I had a bitch getting my asus p5nd2sli deluxe up and running... I had to send my bios in to be flashed because the bios were so f**ked up...

I ended up flashing to a beta bios and this board has been rock solid ever sence.

also if your getting blue screens of death double check you cpu and memory timings.. that usually causes alot of it too.

 

[cmaier]

CPU and memory timings appear fine (at least if the bios ain't lying to me I am not overclocking anything, though apparently there is some controversy with this board where the bios may not be doing what it claims to be doing with multipliers.

I don't have fancy speakers - just a cheap creative 5.1 analog setup, so I'm probably going to just live with the built-in sound for now.