abacab Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 22 minutes ago, John Vere said: Looking at the 3rd screen shot I see the #1 spot is ataport.sys. I googled this and there sure is a lot of issues with audio ( on board) and hi DPC due too this driver. Not sure what is actually does there's not much about that part. I spotted that ataport.sys on Michael's screenshot too. The DPC numbers look way too high for audio. ATAPI devices include CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface I would see if there is a way to disable your optical drive in the BIOS, or at least in Windows device manager. Maybe even rename the driver to ataport.bak extension to keep it from loading when Windows boots up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, Michael McBroom said: I tried a new, but older model of ATI Radeon when I suspected this NVidia card of beginning to fail. Couldn't get the video to come up. I even had their tech support in on it. The conclusion was that my system just wasn't compatible. I don't recall the model number of the card, but it was new about a year ago, priced the same as the NVidea (about $40), and I subsequently found out that, even though new, it was old tech. So, I dunno. Find maybe an 8 or 9 you Radeon with HDMI on eBay? The ASRock site says the 890GX Pro 3 mobo had this for onboard graphics: Quote Integrated AMD Radeon HD 4290 graphics, DX10.1 class iGPU, Shader Model 4.1 Graphics Output Options : D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI I would pull the NVIDIA card and try running with the onboard video, at least as a test. You would do better without the DPC numbers shown for that NVIDIA driver. Here is my LatencyMon Driver Report. Notice the NVIDIA Kernel Mode Driver highest execution time is .17ms here: Edited January 20, 2021 by abacab Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 I can't remember why I installed a Graphic card, I just looked and the MoBo has the typical 3 ports same as the card. I think it was when I wanted to run the TV screen as a monitor. I guess I should pull mine too. It would be a shame to kill your DVD drive. I use mine a lot to burn CD's to proof mixes. Modern drives are SATA however yours is possibly ATA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 (edited) 9 minutes ago, John Vere said: It would be a shame to kill your DVD drive. I use mine a lot to burn CD's to proof mixes. Modern drives are SATA however yours is possibly ATA. Only suggested that as a test. Troubleshooting 101. Gotta rule it in or out somehow. Mine is SATA. His should be too, just by looking at the mobo specs. Mystery is why is the ATAPI driver being loaded. Maybe it's Win 7 thing that needs ATA driver support ? I don't see ATAPI on my Win10 here. Could always rename the driver and reboot, see if the drive still works. https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/890GX Pro3/index.asp Edited January 20, 2021 by abacab 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 (edited) Ya I opened my W7 laptop and didn't see it there but then that laptop came with W8. The people killed the hardrive by overfilling it, system wouldn't boot. They gave it to me. Acer 2016? i5 TWO hard drive bays and DVD. Anyhow all I had was my W7 Premium install , W10 would have cost money. Slapped a SSD drive and cleaned to original drive and put in bay 2. I should really upgrade it as it's sort of not 100% happy driver wise. The camera and card reader as example. But here's an example of looking at what the issue is and taking action. As I posted above my office machine was High DPC. So I removed the offending Graphic card and now its well within the safe zone. This is only 30 sec but I had ran it for a good 30 minutes and it only went about twice this amount probably because I was on the internet and stuff. Here's the WITH graphic card Edited January 21, 2021 by John Vere 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 John, your results with the your last example are almost identical to mine, just not as bad. Even the same drivers seem to be the culprits. Regarding earlier comments about my DVD drive being ATAPI, it isn't. It's SATA. This drive is the newest component in my system. I bought it just a couple months ago. Is ATAPI for optical drives only? I ask, because I have a couple of old hard drives in my system that are ATA drives with their 30-pin cables (or 50 pin or whatever they are). They're old, but they're big. I use them for data storage -- photos and videos, etc. Even some of my old music files. I also have an exterior drive that is hooked up to the system via a USB cable. I ordered a 1TB SATA SSD today. Should be here in about 5 days. I'm thinking I'll just install Win10 on it. I don't see much point in installing Win7 if I'm just gonna update it very soon. About my Asrock 890GX Pro 3 mobo, I dunno, maybe I got an early one? Abacab, you're showing specs that indicate it having HDMI, but mine doesn't. Wish it did, obviously. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 So might be all along it's those old drives causing issues. I haven't had an active ATA drive since ?? You should see what happens if you disconnect them as part of this trouble shooting adventure. I pulled the graphic card and now the DPC is under control. This computer has always had weird graphic issues anyways and I should have done this a long time ago. The on board graphics actually seem cleaner and brighter. You got me going on all this upgrading and I just dumped W10 into my W7 Acer Laptop. Weird I used the same windows 10 key I used for my old Silverstone. It was a piad for license so if I have an issue I think I can deal with it in my account. But so far there are no weird messages about authorizing. I find it interesting you put the W10 download on a DVD. I couldn't do that because it was a couple 100 MB over the DVD limit. Did you use a dual layer DVD? I had to use an old SATA laptop drive. I just used it again to put windows on the Acer. Now I'm going to put W7 on the Silverstone because it's not happy with W10. I want at least 1 W7 machine running anyhow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 John, when I finally replace this machine's motherboard, I plan on installing the Asrock in another case with its memory -- cuz it's DDR2 -- and just keeping it as a Win7 machine. Win7 has been a very stable OS for me, and I think that I'd like to keep it around to preserve compatibility with old stuff. If/when the time comes when I can no longer use my Delta 66 card, I'll put it in that machine so I can still use it. I'm thinking about, at that point, networking the new and old machines with the possibility of sharing resources in my DAW environment. I downloaded Win10 from Microsoft's website. It fit on a standard density DVD, not a dual layer. But part of the installation process was having an active Internet connection, so that's probably where the rest of the OS came from. My system's case is kinda buried and has about a bazillion cables connected to it and surrounding it, so it's always a major deal having to dig into that case. I think I'll put off disconnecting the ATA drive(s) until the SSD drive gets here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 15 hours ago, Michael McBroom said: About my Asrock 890GX Pro 3 mobo, I dunno, maybe I got an early one? Abacab, you're showing specs that indicate it having HDMI, but mine doesn't. Wish it did, obviously. You can get a DVI to HDMI converter for $4.69 + free shipping from Newegg. https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-ea-ad-dvi2hdmi-mf-dvi-to-hdmi/p/N82E16812119962. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 (edited) 15 hours ago, Michael McBroom said: Regarding earlier comments about my DVD drive being ATAPI, it isn't. It's SATA. This drive is the newest component in my system. I bought it just a couple months ago. Is ATAPI for optical drives only? I ask, because I have a couple of old hard drives in my system that are ATA drives with their 30-pin cables (or 50 pin or whatever they are). After you ruled out the optical drive as using SATA, and from what you said about your older HDD's being connected by PATA (parallel ATA) ribbon cables, I suppose that the HDD's may be the reason that driver is in use. In my experience, have only seen ATAPI used with optical drives, but if those old drives are using internal SCSI, that may be why. ATAPI allows for SCSI commands over ATA. Edited January 21, 2021 by abacab Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Will. Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 (edited) On 1/18/2021 at 7:37 PM, Michael McBroom said: This is a topic I brought up maybe a couple years ago? But back then things weren't nearly as bad as they are now. So I thought I'd go ahead and mention it again, just in case somebody might have a bright idea or two why this is happening. First off, I think there's something about my computer that's causing this, but I don't have a good idea as to what the culprit is. The problem has to do with audio output. If I watch streaming video or if I play wave or MP3 files exterior to CW, everything sounds great. But when I play tunes within CW, both audio tracks and midi tracks have chronic distortion -- Rice Crispies everywhere. The kinda weird thing is, it varies. Sometimes it can be really bad -- bad enough where audio dropouts occur and it's impossible to get any work done. Other times it's rather light -- annoying but I've learned to work through it. And other times -- more rare than the others -- it behaves perfectly normally. This is an older system running Win7. I've tried to update it to Win10 but it errors out almost at the end of the installation process. So I continue to use Win7. I have a sound card that I really like -- it's always done a good job for me. But more recently I bought an audio interface, suspecting that the sound card might be the culprit. It wasn't. The problem exists with the audio interface as well. The problem first showed up a couple years ago, right about when I changed monitors to a LG 34" screen. Problem with this monitor is it is HDMI only, and my motherboard is old enough where it doesn't have an HDMI port. So I disabled the motherboard's video and installed a bare-bones card that has an HDMI port. I've always wondered if the card's audio might be corrupting CW's audio, so I did what I could to try and neutralize the problem. I went into Device Manager and disabled the card's audio. Unfortunately, this had no effect. About a month or so ago I bought a license for a cleaner sort of program called Restoro and ran it. It did what appeared to be a deep cleanse of my system and after it finished, I noticed that the distortion in CW was much less than it had previously been. Prior to running Restoro, the distortion was so heavy, CW had become unusable. So it helped some with whatever it did. One thing I did notice was that it seemed that, with each successive update my machine got from Micro$oft, the audio got worse. I'm not positive of this, but there's no question that things got worse over the past two years. With the current tune I'm working on, most of the tracks are MIDI -- there are only two audio tracks. The machine produces bursts of static every second or two. In CW, the little bars that correspond to the number of cores in my processor always jump whenever the distortion hits. It's worth noting that another piece of DAW software I use a lot -- Band in a Box -- has a similar problem. But it responds differently. If I've loaded a tune that is straight MIDI usually I don't get any distortion. But if I load a tune that has more than one audio track, I get distortion. Some tunes of mine are mostly audio tracks and they are heavily distorted. But usually within 8 bars or so the distortion disappears, and stays gone until I have to restart the tune. Then the cycle repeats. I'm convinced this same problem is affecting both DAWs, just each handles the problem differently. So anyway, there you have it. Excuse the length, but at least it's complete -- more or less. So, any ideas what might be the cause and a solution? Yeah, I know, buy a current motherboard and upgrade to Win10. That is definitely something that will happen in the near future. But until then, I'd sure like to solve this mystery. Try this: Click me Once you are done with those steps - go to control panel and uninstall Asio4All. Re-install your M-Audio Interface Drivers. Go to your DAW, preferences>devices and set your interface drivers sample rate to match that of your windows sample rate. Edited January 21, 2021 by Will_Kaydo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 (edited) Abacab, that's a good idea about the converter. I didn't think it was possible, since HDMI carries audio as well as video. Shoot, I'll get me one of those. That might go a long way toward solving my problem -- with my dual monitor setup not working, at the very least. Those old ATA drives aren't SCSI. I used to run SCSI drives on an older system way back when, it required its own SCSI card and a terminator at the end of each SCSI chain. Cool old tech, that. Will, thanks for the tips. My system's recording and playback figures match, and have matched for a long time. Cakewalk and my sound card's numbers also have corresponded to these values for an equally long time. Also, this machine does not have -- and won't ever have, if I can help it -- ASIO4All installed. I really don't care for that product. Edited January 21, 2021 by Michael McBroom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, Michael McBroom said: Abacab, that's a good idea about the converter. I didn't think it was possible, since HDMI carries audio as well as video. Shoot, I'll get me one of those. That might go a long way toward solving my problem -- with my dual monitor setup not working, at the very least. Those old ATA drives aren't SCSI. I used to run SCSI drives on an older system way back when, it required its own SCSI card and a terminator at the end of each SCSI chain. Cool old tech, that. Will, thanks for the tips. My system's recording and playback figures match, and have matched for a long time. Cakewalk and my sound card's numbers also have corresponded to these values for an equally long time. Also, this machine does not have -- and won't ever have, if I can help it -- ASIO4All installed. I really don't care for that product. The DVI adapter won't carry audio, just the video. I used DVI for years between a PC and my living room TV and had to run a separate audio cable to the TV. But in your case not an issue since you probably don't want audio running to your monitor anyway. HDMI is very similar to DVI, but doesn't include audio. For the drives, I wasn't meaning they were actually SCSI drives, but for some reason they are apparently using the ATAPI driver (nothing else on-board seems to be), which I wouldn't expect from a typical IDE drive. (In fact, some early ATAPI devices were simply SCSI devices with an ATA/ATAPI to SCSI protocol converter added on). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface Edited January 21, 2021 by abacab Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 (edited) Ah, ok, well I don't have any idea. I needed to refresh my memory so I took another look at the ATA culprits, which, as it turns out, is only a single ATA culprit. It is a single 500 GB drive that I partitioned into four partitions. I was thinking it was two drives with two partitions. Now, I do have two ATA drives hooked up but apparently that second one is DOA. Edited January 22, 2021 by Michael McBroom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 2 minutes ago, Michael McBroom said: Ah, ok, well I don't have any idea. These drives may be kinda old but for ATA drives they're kinda new -- 500 GB and 750 GB each. I understand. But in any case your DPC numbers for that driver were way too high, so best to find some way to rule it out via testing, process of elimination. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 Agreed. I will be pulling the ATA drive's plug when I tear into the case to see if it makes a difference. It would be nice to resolve the conflict though, rather than just having to yank out a drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abacab Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 1 minute ago, Michael McBroom said: Agreed. I will be pulling the ATA drive's plug when I tear into the case to see if it makes a difference. It would be nice to resolve the conflict though, rather than just having to yank out a drive. Well one thing you never know until you try it, but maybe Windows 10 will handle it better? Good luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xoo Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 47 minutes ago, Michael McBroom said: Ah, ok, well I don't have any idea. I needed to refresh my memory so I took another look at the ATA culprits, which, as it turns out, is only a single ATA culprit. It is a single 500 GB drive that I partitioned into four partitions. I was thinking it was two drives with two partitions. Now, I do have two ATA drives hooked up but apparently that second one is DOA. If one is DOA, that could be the culprit - if you can't get to it physically to unplug, try disabling it in the BIOS if you can. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 OK, I guess that's what I'll do first then. Heck, I figured if a drive was dead, that was it. But I guess it kinda makes sense that if it's not working, it might be tying up resources. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael McBroom Posted February 1, 2021 Author Share Posted February 1, 2021 (edited) Well, it's been 10 days or so since I last checked in here. I finally dragged my PC out from the weave of cabling, and checked the drives. I dunno why I did it, but I had mounted a fairly recent drive that had suffered a fatal crash when I dropped it from about a 3 foot height onto a carpeted floor. A 2 TB drive that suddenly reported it was a 130 MB drive. Yep. Megabytes. Maybe I was hoping it would wake up, or I could perform some sort of diagnostic repair to it, to get back the entire drive? I dunno. It was a few years ago when I did this. Anyway, I yanked the drive. Another Seagate. I swear I will never buy another Seagate. I've owned a few over the years and they have all crashed on me. A few days ago, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my PC. Win10, of course. I went with an Intel i5 3.5 GHz processor, 16 gigs of RAM and an ASUS mobo that has 1) PCI slots and 2) an HDMI port that handles the high resolution my monitor needs (2560x1080). I also bought a 1TB SSD to handle the OS and other chores, like CW. I installed my trusty old M-Audio Delta 66 card -- a 20+ year old design -- using Win7 drivers. It runs fantastic, without hiccups. Oh, and the Rice Crispies have vanished. YAY! Which, btw, were not cured by the removal of that drive. It definitely helped, but it didn't rid my system of the problem. I still think it was the video card. But I'll never know I guess because I have no more use for it. Anybody want an NVidia G210 card with hi-rez HDMI/DVI/VGA outs? I'll let go of it for cheap. This new system with my old Delta 66 card sounds amazing. Everything is sharp and clear with superb response. I love it. The system will be getting one more upgrade before I'll consider it complete. I also bought a 4TB drive (should be here in a few more days) that I plan to copy the data and files from my old two drives onto, mostly to simplify things. These old drives are gonna go into another case with my old mobo and processor and ram and I'm gonna clean up its Win7 install one way or another and keep that machine as a legacy machine so I can run older software and hardware I'm not willing to say goodbye to just yet. Which has caused me to wonder -- is it possible to network two computers together in a single DAW environment? Over a network maybe? Such that they can be synced when music production is going on? One possibility I thought of is to configure the spare system as a MIDI instrument and just hook it up to the master system as if it were, say, a MIDI keyboard or something. True, that limits its usefulness -- no audio for starters. Maybe assigning its audio and MIDI outs to audio and MIDI tracks in the other machine? I dunno. But it seems that, for this to work, at a minimum, sync must occur between the two machines and the auxiliary machine must be able to share its variety of patches and audio voices. Edited February 1, 2021 by Michael McBroom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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