Clicks And Pops

[PocoRecords]

I was having problems with clicks and pops, especially when approaching maximum polyphony (I have GS 32). I have researched this forum, and spoken with Tascam tech support. I found an excellent guide from Tascam for optimizing a PC for DAW use. This helped the system in general, but it did not totally solve the problem. I called tech support, and the guy I spoke with suggested adjusting the sample buffers. When I told him that I was using a Sound Blaster Live, he recommended either an Echo Mia, or an M-Audio Audiophile card. I installed the M-Audio card, but the problem persisted. It is easy to reproduce. Hold the sustain pedal down and start whacking as many keys as possible. Eventually you may hear faint pops associated with key strokes. Well, I figured it out and am posting this just to save someone else the grief that I have experienced. Check out this little gem from the help system. This is from the section that describes \"Setings\", specifically \"Transition Voices\":

Select the maximum number of voices that can be “stolen” from the decay portion of a sound to support polyphony.

While a higher setting provides better block chord coverage, a lower setting increases overall polyphony. If you hear pops while playing a high-polyphony passage, try increasing this setting.

Yes, the help system actually mentions the word \"pops\" in the same sentence as \"high-polyphony\". I set the value from 6 (default) to 8 and now I cannot get any pops or clicks! It\'s a bummer that the Tascam techie did not know this! I still like he M-Audio better than the SB Live, but what a pain to figure it out! I hope this helps someone!

Best,

Poco

[J. Whaley]

You\'re not the only one with these types of problems Poco. I had a similar problem and it turned out my system won\'t work if I run MIDI off the Delta 1010. We racked our brains and couldn\'t figure it out. After 4 days of pulling my hair out I tried a different MIDI interface and it worked! I posted it and turned out there was another 10-12 people that had the same set up with the same problem. Tascam really hasn\'t got their Tech support worked out. Thanks for your insight.

[Christo7]

Another fix that I happened upon is, If you have an Intel chipset on your MB, use the Intel Ultra ATA driver which really reduced the background noise. This driver is an excellent alternative to having Microhard mismanage the system!

[Rube]

Hello all........usually pops and noises with giga is caused by at least one of the following.....
1. auto insert notification of your cd rom...{should be disabled}
2. via chipsets many times can only be used when UDMA is disabled.....{do this in the bios}
3. insufficient ram {samples are being written and read at the same time from the swapfile} add more ram or try setting vcache as follows:
[vcache]
MinFileCache=2048
MaxFileCache=2048

This setting is NOT recommended for faster high ram configurations....but it can really help alot if you don\'t have alot of ram.
setting the swap file to a set ammount may help....but on faster systems usually doesn\'t make a difference.
On faster systems, with alot of ram.....set vcache to a higher ammount....like 65536
the smallest ammount that windows 95/98/me will recognize is 2048.......any smaller ammount will be ignored and you aren\'t helping anything.
Gigastudio and gigasampler will utilize the file cache.....if you have it set to a smaller ammount on high ram systems....you are only hurting yourself. People who disagree with this should try the following:
set vcache at 2048
load and play a large gig file....and notice how much disk activity there is........then set it to a higher ammount like 65536.....play the same gig file......disk activity will occur only the first time you play a not.....after that the sample will be in the file cache and you will have zero disk activity after that {unless your gig file is bigger than 65536kb}
if you don\'t make a setting in vcache at all...all of your sample will be read from the disk which will will only hurt you......samples read from ram takes less cpu cycles than those read from disk. You will also eventually be writing the the swap file if you don\'t make a vcache entry. Robb