GIGASAMPLER AND FAT32X

[andy]

Dear Gigafriends,

I have an ABIT BE6 board with Celeron @ 400 Hz, 192 MB RAM, IBM 7200 hard drive ULTRA ATA 66 13.5 GB (sequential write time: 0,0098 s, sequential read time: 0,056), Windows 98\' SE installed, SoundBlaster Live! as soundcard. I got installed on my drive some heavy gigs like Steinway Piano or Bosendorfer Piano. GigaSampler loads them but when I try to play from my MIDI keyboard, it pops and cuts notes and hard drive keeps on turning! The same is when using a sequencer like Cakewak or Cubase. Sometimes Gigasampler even stops or slacken playback! I have 13.5 hard drive formatted with FAT32X (extended). Could this cause Giga bad working?I\'m really desperate! Does anyone experienced anything similar? Could someone tell me how to repair this, acting, for example, on Win \'98 configuration (someone told me to increase stack pages number) or GigaSampler configuration. Have I to partition disk or to add another separate hard drive? Or is it a memory configuration problem?

Thank you for your help, mates

Andy

[Griff]

Have you tried defragging your drive? That seems to help resolve pops and clicks sometimes.

[aspenleaf]

Andy,
I had similar problems and it took me a while to get it worked out. Here\'s what worked for me. Make sure you have the DMA box checked under properties on your hard drives, and under the hard drive controller properties, try checking the 128kb DMA buffer box. I\'m using FAT32, but with Partition Magic I changed the cluster size to 32K instead of 4K. This seemed to make the biggest difference. Disable write behind disc caching under the file system troubleshooting tab. Check your Vcache allotment. I have mine set to 8192KB for both minimum and maximum. I set my virtual memory to 500MB min and maximum on the drive holding my programs. I am only using a Pentium 166 (without MMX) with 80MB of RAM a Soundblaster Live! value, and I can play the EastWest Steinway B and record (at 44.1 16 bit) in Cakewalk ProAudio9 and it\'s smooth as butter now. Before I would get lots of pops and sometimes Gigasampler would freeze up. I hope these suggestions work for you.

[andy]

Thanks a lot,

Think I\'ll try to apply these advices. I\'d like to know from Aspenleaf... it seems he\'s using two hard drives: one for Windows, and the other for Giga and audio recording. Isn\'t that? So it makes me think that buying another hard drive for audio production is the basic choice. What do you think about that?

Best regards,

Andy GIGA

[aspenleaf]

Yes Andy, I am using two drives. I would highly recommend keeping your programs on a seperate drive from your gigs. Soon I am going to add a third drive so I\'ll have a dedicated drive for gigs, one for audio recording and one for programs. I\'m going to upgrade to a faster computer with a bigger power supply first. I should also mention that with my setup I can only work with one gig at a time, then record it into Cakewalk. So editing a complex piece is not as easy as it would be if I could load several gigs into different channels and work on the midi editing simultaneously. But I would think you would be able to do that with your setup.

[Kevin Cheung]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by aspenleaf:
Andy,
I had similar problems and it took me a while to get it worked out. Here\'s what worked for me. Make sure you have the DMA box checked under properties on your hard drives, and under the hard drive controller properties, try checking the 128kb DMA buffer box. I\'m using FAT32, but with Partition Magic I changed the cluster size to 32K instead of 4K. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Is it possible to specify cluster size
other than using Partition Magic? I have
a brand new hard drive. I wonder if FORMAT
can do the job.

[aspenleaf]

Kevin,
I believe you can change the cluster size using the DOS program FORMAT and using the command z http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/frown.gifcluster size). It\'s been a while since I did it that way, so maybe someone who knows for sure can help. You may want to go to www.prorec.com (\"http://www.prorec.com\") and search the articles for Hard Drive Optimization. It had lots of good tips on it.