Sound crackling problem related to hard drive??

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Posted by G-Con on Sep-19-2007 12:40:

Sound crackling problem related to hard drive??

I know this isn't a production post as such but I've searched through google, searched computer forums and posted questions and can't find a solution so I'm hoping maybe some of the technically minded people in here can help me out.

Anyway here goes...

I have an Athlon XP 3200, with Windows XP. I have two hard drives. One set as my primary drive which windows and all other programs are installed on. The second drive is set as my slave drive and has all my music stored on it.

Problem is when I play music in programs such as Itunes, I get regular crackling noises every few seconds or so. The larger the file is, the worse the crackling (a wav file is unlistenable). If I am doing something else while playing a track such as burning a cd in Nero, the crackling becomes constant.

I have tried putting a few tunes on my primary hard drive and I'm 95% sure that the crackling problem disappears so it seems to be some sort of problem transferring the sound information from the slave drive to the primary drive. The fact that it gets worse with large files would suggest this is the case.

Has anyone got any idea why this is happening and what can be done about it. The secondary drive is an IDE drive as is the primary drive.

My soundcard is the Echo Audiofire4 and all driver are up to date.

Thanks for reading

PLEASE HELP!!!

Posted by kitphillips on Sep-19-2007 13:17:

I had this problem with my CD drive, I discovered it was really slowing my computer even to play a song, and it was taking hours to rip CDs and stuff. Apparently the problem was that DMA was turned off, which is apparently the ability of the drives to access the memory without going through the CPU. So of course, any data trying to get from CD drive into RAM or onto the disk was eating massive amounts of CPU...
Have a look in your device manager or whatever, I can't remember exactly how to fix it, but you may need to uninstall your drive, restart and then let the computer reinstall it automatically, I think thats what I did with my CD drive anyway...
Of course, check it with someone who knows what they're doing first to make sure you don't lose all your data, and make sure you have a backup first

Posted by G-Con on Sep-19-2007 13:58:

Thanks for the suggestion. I did look at device manager, there is no option in the hard drive sections to select DMA. There are in the IDE sections but these were all already selected as DMA for transfer mode which I beleive is the correct setting.

I have found that if I copy a tune from the secondary drive to primary and play the tune from primary it is okay. If I then play the same tune from the secondary drive it is also okay. But if I try to play a tune from the secondary drive on its own, it crackles away.....strange!

Posted by wrzonance on Sep-19-2007 22:04:

Strange problems.

If your IDE hard drives have a "Cable Select" mode, use that mode. The hard drives will know their order on the ribbion cable. That should automatically sort out any of master/slave issues, and you want have to call over Mr/Mrs. Garrison to punish anyone.

Bad Mr. Slave! ooHoo, jeshush christ

Oh and defrag your hard drives. Probably already have, but worth pointing out.

And if you're REALLY cool. You'll eventually build yourself an external RAID array.

Posted by G-Con on Sep-25-2007 13:08:

Thanks for replies. In the end, I have bought an external hard drive (i needed one anyway) and now play all tracks off that and it is okay.

I do however have one more problem that I have had for a while. Whenever I launch ableton, there is one loud pop from the speakers. It also happens when I launch itunes and go to play the first tune. After this there are no more pops whatsoever. Until recently, I have just ignored it but I've just received my first pair of monitors (Event TR6's) so now I want to get this solved so as not to ruin the monitors.

I know for now I can keep the monitors switched off until after the pop has occured but I really want to get this sorted.

Any ideas??

My soundcard is the Echo Audiofire 4 on windows xp.

Cheers

Greg