Problems with AA2 and Echo Mia Midi

You may have noticed from my post about problems uninstalling BFD http://audiomastersforum.net/amforum/index.php/topic,6123.0.html.

Having cleaned out BFD and uninstalling/reinstalling AA2.0 I found I had horrible latency problems with my Mia Midi card. Previously I could play any session without FX using 256 or 512 samples. Now I still have distortions, dropouts and you name it even at 2048 on a clean session with only 4-5 tracks!

I tried restoring a backup version of the settings folder (2.0) which I had taken when all was still well, but it didn't help. I tried rolling back to an earlier Echo driver - no good. I even uninstalled the card and reinstalled it

When I tried running Guitar Rig 2 stand alone with a very heavy rack I had no problems at all, and none in Sonar, which leads me to believe that the problem may be with AA.

Does anyone (Steve?) have any ideas what I could try - it is driving me balmy and I have even started thinking (vaguely) about rebuilding my machine with a clean disk, but I don't really want to.

Does anyone (Steve?) have any ideas what I could try - it is driving me balmy and I have even started thinking (vaguely) about rebuilding my machine with a clean disk, but I don't really want to.

I should start out by saying that even though I've got a Mia, I've never run it with AA2.0. Come to that, I haven't even run it with 1.5; it's on the oldest machine of the lot which still uses... wait for it... Win ME! I really ought to do something about this, I know, but it's not exactly urgent because there are plenty of other MOTU and E-mu devices around for the other machines.

But I'll tell you something weird about OS's and Audition. The laptop went in for a video card repair, and I sent it off with a blank spare HD in it - didn't want to send it off with the original disk because I didn't want HP to screw it up. Machine came back working fine, and HP had installed a fresh XP OS on the disk I'd supplied - you'd think that this was a cheap way of getting a new OS, but the cost of the repair means that it doesn't quite seem like it... So, I put the original (worked fine before) disk back in the machine, and suddenly had the whole thing slow down by a staggering amount, and this was rather more noticeable with Audition than anything else loaded on the disk.

This isn't actually a problem - I've reinstalled everything on the new (larger) HD, but I am still speculating about what causes the massive slowdown on the other one. The obvious thing that's changed is everything to do with the video system - HP have done a hardware change here, not just a replacement. The old driver works still, and claims to be the right one, but I'm not so sure.

I can't preclude AA here - it's definitely sensitive to something going on. But I don't think that it's Audition per se that has the problem - it's the relationship that it has with some other part of the OS (like the video driver?) that appears to be causing the bottleneck. But I can't prove it. If you do benchmark tests, the entire machine runs slower with the 'old' OS, and this really doesn't make a lot of sense - the OS's are essentially both the same, being XP Home with the same build state. But the effect on Audition is rather more marked than it is with anything else.

I'm also open to suggestions/conjecture about this, although I'm not likely to implement any ideas thrown up, because I don't need to. I would like to know what causes it though, and what it is about Audition that makes it so sensitive to the machine state, just for future reference purposes. I'm guessing that there are going to be registry entry differences, but as to what they entail or alter, I really don't know. Trying to get more information out of HP is a non-starter. I believe that the shipping state of Audition has any potential OS optimisations for different processors turned off, so it's unlikely to be caused by anything like this. And I wouldn't recommend turning them on either - this would probably cause more stability problems.

I'm still going with some sort of PCI bus bottleneck here, and I'm also still very suspicious about the video card driver...

Well, you may not be far off the mark with the video card/driver. I had updated to the latest ATI driver, but all my 3d games refused to find the graphics card at all (everything else worked OK with the card). So I had to roll back to the earlier version. I wonder if it left something behind, and if so, how the h*ll do I find it?

I may be forced to reinstall the OS etc. - but this time I will make sure I have all the files/serial numbers etc that I will need BEFORE I start reformatting my HD.

Mark, I suppose you also did an uninstall and reinstall of the soundcard drivers? The problem sounds familiair to me, having had the same problems some time ago with my soundcards and AA. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers did the job. I also had to re-install the ASIO drivers.

If you suspect your graphic card to be the culprit, uninstall the driver and, to be sure that nothing is left, remove all left-overs from this driver using Driver Cleaner (http://www.drivercleaner.net). It is a very small utility, able to remove all driver remains that were left by the uninstall program. Driver Cleaner has cleaning filters for ATI cards and others. The s/w used to be freeware, but I see it now will cost you appr. 10$. You will also need to have .NET Framework 2.0 or higher installed.

See this weblog for additional ATI removal instructions: http://comp-tipsandtricks.blogspot.com/2007/01/uninstaling-graphic-card-drivers.html; check this page for all the bits and pieces of complete removal of ATI drivers: http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_4.html

Good luck!

But I'll tell you something weird about OS's and Audition. The laptop went in for a video card repair, and I sent it off with a blank spare HD in it - didn't want to send it off with the original disk because I didn't want HP to screw it up. Machine came back working fine, and HP had installed a fresh XP OS on the disk I'd supplied [...] So, I put the original (worked fine before) disk back in the machine, and suddenly had the whole thing slow down by a staggering amount, and this was rather more noticeable with Audition than anything else loaded on the disk.

This isn't actually a problem - I've reinstalled everything on the new (larger) HD, but I am still speculating about what causes the massive slowdown on the other one. The obvious thing that's changed is everything to do with the video system - HP have done a hardware change here, not just a replacement. The old driver works still, and claims to be the right one, but I'm not so sure.

Is the video card PCI express, or AGP?  I've heard some bad things about PCI express video interfering with audio performance (though I've not had any problems myself with the PCIe video on my HP laptop that I use for audio).  (In fact, I think I heard those bad things from you, so you may already have thought of this...)

Is the video card PCI express, or AGP?  I've heard some bad things about PCI express video interfering with audio performance (though I've not had any problems myself with the PCIe video on my HP laptop that I use for audio).  (In fact, I think I heard those bad things from you, so you may already have thought of this...)

I think that considering the vintage of the laptop, and that it's reported as an NVIDEA GeForce FX Go5200, it's an AGP one. Well, it is now, anyway!

Well, I did a clean reinstall of the OS and all software - AA runs faster, the audio card works perfectly, and my personality hasn't improved - two out of three ain't bad!