Recording Issues

Almost Enough · 06-29-2011, 05:06 PM

Can someone with some experience help me out? I'm getting really frustrated with my recording rig.

I have a Samsung RF510 laptop with the Intel i7 Q720 at 1.60 ghz processor, 4gb of RAM, and a 5400rpm hard drive. I'm running a TASCAM US-1641 interface with the proper TASCAM ASIO driver installed. I'm trying to record to Adobe Audition 2.0. I'm running Windows 7.

I can't get through a single track recording without having SOMETHING bug out on me. I'm either getting distortion, clipping, or some form of drop out whenever it's recording the track. I can't even make it two minutes into a recording without SOMETHING happening.

I've tried setting it to the highest latency, and switching EVERY setting in the TASCAM interface, and it still does this. It's caused my laptop to have it's first BSOD. Actually, it's the first BSOD on one of my personal machines I've had in YEARS.

Can anybody point me in the right direction to figure this out? I'm almost to the point of selling all my recording gear and just buying studio time whenever I want to record any little thing.

**surferdude9375** · 06-30-2011, 11:56 PM

If it is firewire, try using the legacy driver in the device manager on the firewire controller. Also, turn off your wifi card and see if that helps.

Almost Enough · 07-01-2011, 10:29 AM

I'll try the wifi thing next. My interface is USB 2.0.

Would there be any BIOS settings that would affect how it works?

Maestro_dmc · 07-01-2011, 04:36 PM

Definitely turn off the wifi whenever you are using your recording software.
By chance are you monitoring through the software using plug-ins live?

Almost Enough · 07-01-2011, 04:58 PM

I have, but it does it even if I'm recording a fresh new track with no monitoring other than a metronome.

FWIW, on my older Vista machine that got stolen I was able to record multiple tracks while monitoring multiple tracks with plug-ins running. That machine had like a dual core processor, too, and half the RAM.

I'll try with the wifi off when I get the chance. I'm not going to be able to do any recording till next week because of my anniversary trip.

Would the wifi actually make that much of a difference? Is it that intense of a resource hog?

Maestro_dmc · 07-01-2011, 07:09 PM

I'm not really sure why it messes it up but I know it can. Good luck.

**surferdude9375** · 07-02-2011, 12:00 AM

Most of these types of problems stem from PCI bus crowding. Disable WIFI, picture card slot controllers (laptops integrate these with USB/firewire cards to save space/money) usually frees up the bandwidth hogging to a good extent.

Also might help a slight bit to make sure your chipset drivers are up to date.

Almost Enough · 07-13-2011, 05:18 PM

I tried it with the WIFI off, and it lasted a little longer, but still glitched on my metronome and caused my whole track to be screwed up again. I didn't disable the picture slot, I'll try that next time.

Is there something else that could be causing this problem? It's EXTREMELY frustrating that I have this gear that is unusable for no apparent reason to myself.

Almost Enough · 08-08-2011, 11:37 PM

Just thought I'd finish this thread off.

I made a desktop.

Works great.

End of story.

**surferdude9375** · 08-08-2011, 11:53 PM

Your problems stems from the way laptops are designed. In most laptops, the firewire card and many other services share the same bus slot going into the motherboard. So as you can imaging you want the firewire service to get all the priority on the bus and clearing out the other services to make room is the best thing you can do outside of buying an expansion slot firewire card. Couple this problem with just generally crappy driver designs on integrated cards (Firewire and Picture cards are commonly coupled together on a single chip) and you get big problems.

Almost Enough · 08-09-2011, 12:07 AM

Yeah. I did a lot of research on that, and decided that I was better off building a computer dedicated for running recording software.

I spent less than $500 and I have yet to run into any snag. Everything runs smoother, and that makes everything so much easier in the long run.

BTW, specs:
Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5TB 5900 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
MSI 880GMA-E55 AM3 AMD 880G SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor
LIAN LI Lancool First Knight Series PC-K57W Black SECC / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner
Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D Green 380W Continuous power ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory

pwfirst · 09-23-2011, 03:32 PM

I used a tascam 1641 for a year or so and Mine was very glitchy on my lap top too. XP it worked fine , Vista no joy and windows 7 was OK Setting the latency was my problem. If you every up grade Look at the M-audio 1010. very stable and expandible and a lot of used stuff on the market. Phil