002 Rack - should it be so difficult?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
Haven't posted here in a year or more. I see many of the old names and many new ones. Cool. I upgraded to an 002 Rack a few days ago. The basic box looks quite nice and I'm anxious to get it working well, but so far the results are a bit strange.

The PC has been running the 001 with multiple 1394 audio drives for between 2 and 3 years I think. It's been very stable. No interrupts held off. A reasonable number of plug-ins. It's XP Home, 512MB, 1394 audio drive, yada yada yada. All the standard stuff.

As a first step, I removed the 001, powered back up and attached the 002R to the second 1394 port on my OHCI adapter. After a driver install and an automated firmware upgrade it was up and visible. Good so far. Next I find I can play existing sessions just fine. Cool. However, I cannot record. The system records between 65500 and 65600 samples and then halts telling me 'Interrupts held off'.

So, obviously, since 65536 is '64K' it looks like some sort of buffer thing, but I searched the DUC here and didn't run into anything very similar.

I tried the following configurations:

(Please excuse the ASCII art. It appears from the preview that the Digi board is not kind to leading spaces. I hope the idea gets through...)

PC-OHCI<-->drive<-->002R

PC-OHCI<-->002R<--->drive

(next - using both ports on the PC - drive and 002 on separate branches
PC-OHCI|<--->drive
|<--->002R

The OCHI controller is on IRQ10. Nothing is on IRQ9. I tried OHCI on 9 & 11 also. No change.

I even tried 2 OHCI controllers with the disk and the 002R on separate buses. Same results. Playback is fine. Recording doesn't work.

(Next, using two separate 1394 controllers and buses)

|-OHCI-1-IRQ10 <--->002R
PC|
|-OHCI-2-IRQ11 <--->drive

Then, for kicks, I tried recording to a large spare partition on my system drive. Bingo. Works great at 44.1, 48 and 88.2K. I recorded 10 minutes with 8 stereo tracks. It won't record anything at 96K, not even for 5 seconds, but that's not important to me right now. (Although it might be a clue...)

So, short of an XP reinstall, does any of this ring any bells? I can certainly put an EIDE drive in teh box and dedicate it to audio, but I don't think that's the intention of the 002R.

Keep in mind that this system ran the 001 for years with now problems at all, so it's not specifically the OHCI controller or the 1394 hard drive, but they certainly could be part of the problem.

Any ideas are certainly welcomed.

Thanks,
Mark

[nikki-k]

Hi!
The big question every 002(r) owner gets first:
What firewire card?

Digi has 4 they have approved, the Adaptec 4300 being the most common (pretty sure on that one).

Almost every 002(r) problem reported here has been resolved by grabbing one of the 4, IF they did not have one prior to reporting an issue.

[Mark Knecht]

Fair enough question. They are both ADS Pyro and on the list of approved cards. I've used them under Win XP with the 001, and under Linux. They have been good cards, as are almost all that are based on the TI OHCI controlers.

I don't remember if I have an Adaptec. I'll look around. I have a Siig but I'm not sure it's the approved one, as well as a couple of Via adapters and a few others laying around in the office, but I've always used the ADS Pyro's successfully.

There's just something a bit weird about the 64K number of samples.

- Mark

[Mark Knecht]

OK, the next obvious thought was that something was left over from the 001 installations and causing a problem with the 002R, so I completely uninstalled PTLE 6.1.1, cleaned up everything I could find on the system that appeared to be part of the 001 installation (except the registery) rebooted, checked again and then installed PTLE 6.1 from the CD supplied with the 002R. No better. At this point 6.1 fails identically to 6.1.1.

I record to the EIDE drives just fine. I completely fail on the 1394 drives. I always record between 64800 and 65700 samples and then get an interrupts held off message. NOthign changes when I change the hardware buffer size.

I've not updated the new setup to 6.1.1 yet, but I will and try it.

Any ideas?

- Mark

[mersisblue]

sorry missed it

nm

[Mark Knecht]

OK, so more info.

If I take an existing session and send the audio to different 002 outputs, and then loop back the audio into the 002 inputs with cables, I can then create aux tracks and watch audio coming in with no problems. If I send that same audio to an audio track and run the session without recording there is no problem. As soon as I try to record the system gives me an interrupts held off message.

This would seem to say that my problem is not getting audio up and down the 1394 cable, but really only getting PTLE to write it on the 1394 hard drive.

Bummer...what is it with this system? PTLE with the 001 could write this disk. Why can't PTLE with the 002?

Thanks,
Mark

[Mark Knecht]

OK, almost as if by magic it's fixed.

To get it working I went to the preferences pages and just went through accepting all the settings that were default and saying OK where I could. I closed all the preferences stuff and it's now recording to the 1394 drive just fine.

My suspicion was that some 001 setting was still around somewhere and messing things up. Anyway, all fixed now. Not a lot of testing, but I can record 8 tracks at once at 96KHz so that should be more than I'll need for a while.

Thanks for your help. See you when the 003 comes out.

Cheers,
Mark

[nikki-k]

Hi!
My next suggestion was going to be trashing prefs, dae prefs, and the digi databases.

Glad it is working for you now

[Mark Knecht]

Hi!
My next suggestion was going to be trashing prefs, dae prefs, and the digi databases.

Glad it is working for you now

Actually, as I said earlier, I did a complete uninstall of PTLE. I removed the program, the 6.1.1 Updater, the ASIO driver and the Wave driver. I then searched the machine for 'Digi', 'DAE' and a couple of other things like the Digi database that was sitting on my D: drive (don't know why it was there when the program was on C: ...) and erased everything before reinstalling. Certainly I could have missed something, who knows, but even if you would have suggested this I would have told you I had already done it. (Right or wrong...)

Anyway, fairly strange that entering all of the setup menus and saving things would fix the problem, but that seems to be what happened in my case. It appears the either I didn't get everythign erased, or somethign is stored in another location that I don't know about. (The registery?)

Anyway, end of problems. Now on to 96K recording.

See you in 2005 or 6!

Cheers,
Mark