East West-Windows 7 problems

Hell all,

I recently set up a new system with Windows 7 and am having some issues I did not have with XP. I'm controlling East West programs from an external source, which of course means I need the latency set the lowest it can go. When I set the latency to anything under 20ms I get bad crackling and distortion from the plugin. I updated all my drivers and still no result. Has anyone had this same problem with Windows 7 and East West programs or have an idea what may be going on? As usual, thanks for any help in advance.

windows 7 is far from perfection (don't get me started with vista.. )

get the old XP Sp2 back .. that's what i've done ...

The "crackling" is due to the latency which you already have figured out. I have had that problem in xp and win7x64. It has to do withe cpu not being able to keep up and dropping samples.

I had to switch from 2ms to 10ms in cubase recently for some reason(was using 2ms and it was working fine before then but wasn't using EWQL).

In fact win7 let me get down to 2ms when I could only get down to about 10ms before crackling in xp(same audio hardware). x64 should be faster since registers are used to pass parameters instead of the stack(but of course has to be designed properly to use with it).

First make sure it is no an EWQL issue by using something that is inherently low latency(a simple synth) and see how far you can get down. Try different audio qualities such as 16-bit/44khz(with my emu-1212 I can't use anything without running into issues) and see if it helps. Progressively add more complexity and see if you can figure out what may be causing it. Note that everything in the chain adds latency(delay) and it could be a number of things(e.g., plugins).

It goes without saying that you gotta be using aiso to get the most performance. All cards are not created equal so check and see if others are complaining about the card your using. If you just have too much stuff going on then your own option is to get a better system, get another system and split the load, or accept the latency.

I imagine though, if your just doing something simple then you should be able to get at least 10ms so all I can really say is to try and troubleshoot the problem. Start from the most simple setup and see how far you can get it down and if it is significant then go from there. If not then either your system can't handle it or it is not optimized for audio.

Things you can do are disable services that are not needed... especially anti-viruses, defrag hard drive(for samples as this can help a lot), and tweak some of Win7's registry settings. All this stuff can be easily found by googling.

One thing though. If you've got a large sample library and a large HD you should keep in mind that when you format it you want to use the largest cluster size. This reduces fragmentation and allows loading up the samples faster. It wastes more room for small files(so if they are wav's then it is a bad idea usually) but is more optimal for large files.

Thanks for the responses. I finally fixed the problem. I decided to run dual OS on two separate hard drives. I set up XP on a 500gb with a new sound card and kept windows 7 on a separate drive for entertainment. Everything is working flawlessly once again.

Cheers,

D.A.