Playback track problems while recording

n-Track Studio Discussion Forum
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Soundcard playback

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I am experiencing intermittent Realtec AC97 soundcard playback pops and several seconds of silence for one pre-recorded track while recording another track at the same time on my lap top computer. I am using the ASIO4ALL driver at 24 bit. Any ideas what may be the problem or how to correct it? Thanks.

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Could any number of things, unfortunately, you have to troubleshoot them to find out what. This covers most possibilities:

Troubleshooting audio

However, my bet would be one of two things:

First of all I would be looking at buffering, and tweaking the settings in Asio4all up and down to see if you get improvement.

Or a driver issue: AC97 onboard sound is fairly poor for serious audio work, I’m afraid. Just Google on ‘AC97 audio problems’ to see what I mean. Try updating your drivers (Asio4all acts as a kind of wrapper on your card’s wdm drivers, IIRC).

Also try running the card with its own drivers - maybe it doesn’t like ASIO4all?

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You could try 16 bit to see if that works any better.
Nick

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Thanks for your help. I am trying to stay with ASIO4ALL since it takes advantage of the 24 bit depth capabilities of the Realtek AC97 sound card in my lap top. The WDM driver that goes with it only provides a 16 bit depth.

For some reason ASIO4ALL would not work with n-track at greater than a 512 sample buffer, which is probably already too large. However, when I increase the number of buffers it appears to eliminate the cut-outs and pops so far.

THH