Anyone got any suggestions? Problems with FW card/cubase sx

[Fosker]

I have a Hercules fw16/12, was working fine, recording all 12 analog inputs at once on my pc (athlon 64 processor with 2gb RAM), but now when I record all of the inputs at once it works fine for about 20 seconds, then they start to lag (all at different rates) and it just completely screws up, everything is set correctly, and nothing has changed on my computer, I tried a new FW cable, reinstalling the hercules, going back to an old restore point in XP, and still the same! No-one anywhere seems to have any suggestions though, might just have to return it to Thomann.

[dach]

Where do you have the Latency set in the VST multitrack Control Panel? Try setting it higher.... Other than that it sounds like some sort of Windows thing but I'll be honest... I don't even know what a Hercules 16/12 is... do other users report any driver instability on their forum?

[richiebee]

I assume you regularly defrag and do not run anti-virus with this. Sounds like a drive problem to me.

[brandondrury]

I had this happen to me. I spent hours upon hours upon hours trying to fix it. The solution was to simply format my hard drive.

If you don't have your system set up so that you can format and be up in running in about an hour or so, you should consider taking the time to do this. I actually have my system entirely setup on a spare hard drive so that if I have this sort of problem, I can simply swap C: drives (about 2 minutes) and be back in business.

Is your computer connected to the internet? ever? Don't!

Automatic updates can destroy your recordings as well. I've seen them cause problems like this.

Either way, I recommend you back up EVERYTHING and setup a system so that backing up everything is as simple as dragging and dropping one folder. (This includes plugins, drivers, everything). Then, I recommend you do a clean install of Windows. Make sure you have do a format of your existing hard drive. If you are not sure how to do this, you may want to go out and spent $50 on a new drive. I may still have the 20GB drive I bought years ago as my C: drive. It's plenty big for the operating system. Of course, I've got 2 250 GB drives for audio.

If you need any help formatting your PC let me know. I do this all the time.
Brandon

[Fosker]

Just been working on the computer all evening (sort of, while installing a all in one for my folks and watching football, haha) and I came to the same conclusion too, its the hdd, its brand new though, so I rebuild, won't take me long, despite all my bizarre questions I am actually a systems manager with an honours degree in IT! haha. Will get onto rebuilding this weekend and maybe buy a new SATA drive. Basically tonight I defragged even though it said I didn't need to, and that improved it a bit, so gave me my answer really, running disk checks, but I'll get the XP Pro disk from work tomorrow.

But in the meantime I installed the hercules on my laptop, and this will do if I can't find time to do the pc before the next recording sessions.

I was using that computer on the net, but I have a few spare computers around, 1 of them is actually almost as good, so I will rebuild that back up to use at home and use the main one just to record.

Has anyone ever used an external firewire drive to record onto that? I would guess with the hercules being FW too that wouldn't be a great idea? As I have an external 300gb fw drive.

Thanks for the info and confirming what I thought it would be!

[Fosker]

Okay, I ordered an 80gb SATAII disk for my system drive, should be here tomorrow, then I'll use the 300gb drive thats in there now just for the wav's etc from cubase, damn it, I forgot to order a KVM at the same time!

[brandondrury]

Basically tonight I defragged even though it said I didn't need to

I never listen to any messages that say "don't defrag". I always know when I need to defrag. It's before and after every session. Simple as that.

Brandon

[Fosker]

I put in my new SATA 80gb drive as the system drive, now everything is a lot slower! It's very annoying, Cubase crashed the first few times I loaded it too, I think once I get recording a band at the weekend out of the way I will have to rebuild it all again, and maybe this time leave off service pack 2.

[xav123]

Hey Fosker,

I haven't used a firewire yet, but have you checked musicxp.com (i think it's the correct address) gives lot of tips on setting your pc for music.
What cubase version are you using? Is it SX or are you running an older vst version?
Are you able to play back in cubase?
Can you play any music thru your soundcard using windows media player or any kind of media player?
Check out your soundcard settings (ie ASIO for cubase).
To me it sounds like a drivers issue, but i could be completely wrong.
Did you try to uninstall your drivers and reset the firewire, some of them need to be plugged in before/after you install the drivers.
Hope this will help you and that i did not misunderstand your problem.

Good luck
Xav

[brandondrury]

Now that I've been using Cubase for a while, the problem is almost certainly caused by setting the latency too low.

I always track with the latency low, but I crank it up quite a bit when mixing.

Brandon