Help! Clicks and Pops During Recording / Playback

[kurkomat]

Need some help!

I just purchased PT M-Powered 7.1 and the M-audio 410. When I try to record a track with my electric guitar I get occasional (sporadic) clicks and pops every few seconds. This happens on recording and playback. In another post someone suggested checking my firewire connection. I've since switched cables and tried each port on my FW card into my PC. I'm only recording at 44.1 and have increased the buffer time on the playback engine and am still having the same issues. Any ideas?

I'm using a 2.4Ghz P4PHT system with 1.25G of RAM. Tks in advance for any help provided!

[kurkomat]

Update- Problem Fixed

Just in case anyone else was having this problem I ended up root-causing the source of the pops to my firewire card (which is attached through via PCIE into the motherboard.) My firewire card has multiple ports, and I had the M-audio 410 plugged into one port and an external harddrive (where I keep my audio) plugged into another. When recording a lot of notes the card simply couldn't keep up with all the incoming information and write it to the audio drive real-time.
When I record to the system drive I have no problems with pops or clicks. Hence my current solution is to record to the system drive and drag and drop onto the external drive when done for storage reasons. If this is a pain another solution would be to buy another firewire card and plug it into a remaining PCIE slot (if you have an open one). That way you can have the M-audio plugged into one and the Audio Drive plugged into another. I haven't verified that this works but theoretically it should work.

tks-

Matt

[dillon99999]

you should really consider doing your recording a different way.
from what your post indicates, you are trying to use the same "bus" (i.e. PCI) for multiple tasks.
this is not recommended - and if you read more posts about users trying to do so, you will understand why.
m-audio does not recommend that you have a firewire hard drive connected to the same firewire card as the 410.
but to take it a step further, ideally, you want to isolate the "record path".
by that i mean that if you can, you should have the 410 on it's OWN path (firewire).
and you should consider giving the audio drive it's own path (i.e. IDE, SATA, USB are some options).
by getting another PCI device, and trying to do things that way, you are still using the PCI bus.
there could be potential resource conflicts, as wells as irq conflicts, and in general, you will be clogging up the PCI bus with all of that traffic, making your cpu / motherboard work harder to sort out all of the signals that are being routed through them.
also, it is highly recommended that you avoid using the system drive as your audio drive.
these are just a suggestions.

my config uses the IDE as the system drive, and SATA II as the audio drive (in a raid-0 stripped configuration).

with this type of setup, it isolates the audio signals from the "system" signals, and thus, helps the system run at top speed.

consider this:
if you had a straw in a glass of water, you could only get so much water out of the glass.
if you had TWO straws, you could pull twice as much water out of the glass during the same time duration.

good luck.