Syntrillium Backup Forums :: View topic - cep 2.1 and win2k....... [red]HEEEEELP!!!![/red]

Raphael J · Location: Luxembourg Posts: 4

Hi everyone,just got acomputer with an AOPEN AX32 PROII motheboard and Win2K, running on a 1Ghz PIII Celeron and 392 MB RAM.

In waveform mode everything runs smooth, in multitrack mode, as soon as I insert a plug-in the graphics starts sacking and the sound chops up.

I've been playing around with buffer size and trying to find a good set of settings... in vain.

The processor is at 100% when I use a single plug-in whereas it will hardly reach 40% without plug-ins, running fine.

The background mixing indicator is at full when the sound chops, so I assume that there is a PCI bus chaos.

In my settings the PCI IRQ disabled and the IRQ table cannot be found.
In the BIOS everything seems to be like it should be (PCI steering enabled etc.)

So I downloaded the motherboard drivers and installed them which gives the same result...

Anyone have a hint?

Regards,
Raphael J.

Raphael J · Location: Luxembourg Posts: 4

Sorry, the motherboard is an AX34 PRO II

William Rose · Location: USA Posts: 467

What plug-in, and do you have the problem with all plug-ins ?

Raphael J · Location: Luxembourg Posts: 4

Hi William, any plug-in inserted on the track will lead to the mentioned result. Just eating up processor resources, didn't have the problem under Win98 on the same machine...

Pro_Support · Posts: 85

Well, right off the top, I'd say it was one of two things.

1. Your processor is being bogged down from the plug-in. Now, that just doesn't seem quite right, because I've been able to use several plugins on machines with half the processing speed of yours. (But then again, perhaps you have a bunch of background tasks using the processor as well?) Also, note that different effects can require vastly different ammounts of processing power.

2. The effect is causing CEP to use more memory than your system has, forcing it to dip into virtual memory. If you have a utility that monitors physical memory usage, then that might help you determine if that's a factor. (Again, I've been able to run CEP using several effects on slower machines than yours with less memory, but that was in Windows 98)

I hope you track down the bottleneck. In any case, locking the track should get you to playback smoothly.

VoodooRadio · Location: USA Posts: 3971

Check out the Tips and Tricks section for "optimizing". Alt/Ctrl/Delete and find out what all's trying to run in the background and shut some things down (double click on them). Shy

Raphael J · Location: Luxembourg Posts: 4

Pro Support:

1. Yes I've also been able to run plug-ins on an 800 Mhz PIII without too much trouble (except when stopping the playback while the effects window is open) But again under WIN98 SE. Unfortunately I do not know WIN2000 well enough to perform the standard win.ini and system.ini tweaks that I know by heart on WIN98 SE.

The chorus effect is definetly one plug-in to use if you want to torture your computer]:}

2. Actually watching the system monitor, the processor is going overboard staying at 100% while the memory used maxes out at about 80 MB.
The session contains:

- a stereo playback on track 1,
- a voice-over on tracks 2 and 3, running through BUS A inserting a Compressor and a Chorus (2 voices),
- Track 3 uses an additional delay effect

So in fact nothing complicated... I also have a PRO TOOLS System, ut prefer to work on CEP; just for your info.

My conlusion is that the combination Motherboard/graphics adapter/win2000 is the cause. It ran fine on WIN98 SE...

Since I'll have to stick to WIN2000 (company policy) I'll probably opt for a different motherboard and a faster processor.

Like all of us, I'd rather make music or work on audio than trying to fix a computer ;)

Thanks for your input.

VoodooRadio:

I have checked all the optimization tricks, believe me, my machine (not my choice, but the companie's, I work for) is geared for CEP. I have nothing running in the background, except for the network and the speaker symbol in the task bar...

Thanks for your ideas as well :)

Raphael J.