PCI-822 User’s Guide
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— Video card and hard disk adapter drivers —
Your video card and hard disk adapter each have drivers (software
that supports hardware devices), and those drivers might be hogging
the system and causing audio glitches. You can check this by
recording while watching the Windows System Monitor follow the
soundcard’s performance. See “Tuning the System” later in this Guide
for details about using the System Monitor. If you detect non-zero IRQ
Misses in the middle of a recording, the most likely cause is a bad
driver, and the most likely suspects are the video card and hard disk
adapter drivers.
In Windows 95/98, you can run a similar test with patches enabled in
the Patchbay but without doing any recording. If all is well, then the
hard disk adapter driver is the most likely cause. If you still get IRQ
Misses, then the video card driver is the most likely cause.
We recommend that you frequently check the manufacturers’ web
sites to see if there are more recent drivers that can be installed.
Many problems can be eliminated by simply updating the drivers for
the video card and/or hard disk adapter. Also, if your video card
driver has a “PCI Retries” option (Control Panel
g
Settings
g
Display
g
Settings
g
Advanced), disable it.
— Hardware buffer size —
The PCI-822 card has a programmable hardware buffer size in the
System tab of its control panel. The Buffer Size setting controls how
many audio samples are transferred at a time between the card and
your computer’s motherboard.
In general, the default setting (256 samples) is recommended, but
sometimes increasing this buffer size will eliminate glitches due to the
behavior of another device on the PCI bus. Before changing the
Buffer Size setting, shut down any open audio applications.
