PCI latency timer utilities

[Sebastian Eskildsen]

HI
Just find this link in SOS pc notes,
www.mark-knutson.com/technique_to_target_inc

Sebastian

[Oz Nimbus]

Wow! Talk about an absolutely indespensable tool!

-0z-

[Leadfoot]

At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, stupid, and foolish, what would it take to create a simple basic operating system just to run Sawstudio? With no purpose other than to record and playback audio within the realm of the memory, cpu, graphics card and audio I/O interface. I realize I'm leaving out multitudes of variables and endless hardware/driver considerations, but there's got to be a way other than microsofts way.. there's just got to be.
Tell me how naive I am, If I was a programmer, especially one of any high caliber, I would think I'd be trying to find a way. There's just got to be a way to get away from the limitations of windows. Windows always seems to be the bottleneck everytime there's a malfunction or performance related symtom. I realize all these programs were designed to run in the windows environment and it never was designed or intended to be for audio and/or video type work, but maybe it's time somebody stepped up and created a propietary OS that is strictly intended for A/V use. You could always switch back to windows for all other tasks. Jeez I wish I was a programmer, cause I see some huge potential there. Wasn't Beos supposed to be all that?
It doesn't even have to be a big public money maker, just something that runs Saw!! :) (other than windows)
Just dreamin I guess, (& sick and tired of microsoft.. for many reasons)
If it weren't for Sawstudio and recording digital audio/video, I really would have no need for a computer.. the internet is turning into a sesspool of crap
and viruses more and more everyday.. I don't even want to say where I think it's all heading.

Tony

[AudioAstronomer]

After you add support for all current video cards, audio cards, motherboards, monitors, hard drives, processors... uhhh

Yeah all that stuff... Ill be glad to do the rest of the work myself.

Ive seen 2 developers now with grand plans of an audioOS and they both totally stopped dead in their tracks after the first small time of design. It is a monumental task. SAW runs like a dream on most any windows system these days, it could be better of course... but the time spent vs the money spent to just grab a sydec or RME card and get on with actually making music? ah.

[Leadfoot]

Ive seen 2 developers now with grand plans of an audioOS and they both totally stopped dead in their tracks after the first small time of design. It is a monumental task.

That's what I thought..
Tony

[bertie]

At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, stupid, and foolish, what would it take to create a simple basic operating system just to run Sawstudio? With no purpose other than to record and playback audio within the realm of the memory, cpu, graphics card and audio I/O interface. I realize I'm leaving out multitudes of variables and endless hardware/driver considerations, but there's got to be a way other than microsofts way.. there's just got to be.
Tell me how naive I am, If I was a programmer, especially one of any high caliber, I would think I'd be trying to find a way. There's just got to be a way to get away from the limitations of windows. Windows always seems to be the bottleneck everytime there's a malfunction or performance related symtom. I realize all these programs were designed to run in the windows environment and it never was designed or intended to be for audio and/or video type work, but maybe it's time somebody stepped up and created a propietary OS that is strictly intended for A/V use. You could always switch back to windows for all other tasks. Jeez I wish I was a programmer, cause I see some huge potential there. Wasn't Beos supposed to be all that?
It doesn't even have to be a big public money maker, just something that runs Saw!! :) (other than windows)
Just dreamin I guess, (& sick and tired of microsoft.. for many reasons)
If it weren't for Sawstudio and recording digital audio/video, I really would have no need for a computer.. the internet is turning into a sesspool of crap
and viruses more and more everyday.. I don't even want to say where I think it's all heading.

Tony

hi, :)

I was also stuppid a while ago...... :)

http://www.sawstudiouser.net/forums/showthread.php?t=109

Bertie, (v3.7b)

[Naturally Digital]

At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, stupid, and foolish, what would it take to create a simple basic operating system just to run Sawstudio?
Money. Loads and loads of money. :rolleyes:


With no purpose other than to record and playback audio within the realm of the memory, cpu, graphics card and audio I/O interface. I realize I'm leaving out multitudes of variables and endless hardware/driver considerations, but there's got to be a way other than microsofts way.. there's just got to be.

Since so many of us running dedicated DAWs it's a fairly common dream I'd guess. I set up a machine to replace my DA88 a while ago. It has nothing installed but SAWStudio, Mixtreme and Windows (of course).

We spend so much time fussing and tweaking with our machines and still, when we work we often have our fingers crossed (sometimes secretly), hoping that we don't have a crash at an embarassing or frustrating point-in-time.

All things considered, we don't have much choice. There's a price to be paid for flexibility. We can see examples of dedicated OS's in dedicated HDR's such as the Mackie, Tascam, Alesis and Radar products (plus others of course).

I had my hopes up for Beos but it didn't happen. Too bad.

Unfortunately, we need to be computer experts to put together solid, streamlined DAW's. Gotta keep educating ourselves I guess. Still, since the computer plays a very large role in our studios, it doesn't hurt to know more about how they really work.

There was some good reading in these articles. It all "seems" to make sense. It just sounds a little too good to be true. Like when I 'discovered' the "real-time" priority setting for threads/apps in Task Manager. Yeah, it feels good to set it to "real-time" but does it really help anything in our world? You'd need to develop a set of benchmarks just to figure that out...

I've only adjusted the pci latency setting for my Mixtremes. It solved a glitching problem on one of my older mb's. I hadn't thought of adjusting the video or other cards' settings.

Have to do some playing around and see what happens.

Thanks for posting that.
Dave.

[MMP]

I have often thought that I could make a much better living selling my computer knowledge that is a result of tweaking systems for DAWs, than working as a composer/engineer.

But, the battle of pursuit of music vs money was won by music a long time ago.

I think we have it really easy now compared to the dark days of Windows 3.1. I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare, thinking I have to work in Wave for Windows, or that old Gem based Turtle Beach thing.http://www.sawstudiouser.net/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif

Anyhow, having computer chops is certainly a positive result of pursuing a stable system in the "old days" of DAWing.

The only downside is that I have become the computer help desk for both sides of my family.http://www.sawstudiouser.net/forums/images/icons/icon12.gif

MM

[Leadfoot]

I have often thought that I could make a much better living selling my computer knowledge that is a result of tweaking systems for DAWs, than working as a composer/engineer.

But, the battle of pursuit of music vs money was won by music a long time ago.

I think we have it really easy now compared to the dark days of Windows 3.1. I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare, thinking I have to work in Wave for Windows, or that old Gem based Turtle Beach thing.http://www.sawstudiouser.net/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif

Anyhow, having computer chops is certainly a positive result of pursuing a stable system in the "old days" of DAWing.


The only downside is that I have become the computer help desk for both sides of my family.http://www.sawstudiouser.net/forums/images/icons/icon12.gif

MM

Yes I know me too.. endless free tech support for friends and family.
I think in light of recent talks, it seems the PCI bus has almost everything to do with performance and /or glitching in audio video computers.
If we could find a good way to make sure that area of the system is working the way we need it to, it would probably be very beneficial. At this point it's mostly a guessing game as to which chipsets and bios and mobo drivers are working correctly. Someone on another forum mentioned getting the hard disks off of the PCI bus and over to SATA. This sounds like a great idea to me in theory. I just don't know if SATA drives are in fact completely seperate from the PCI bus or not yet. But alot of this type of info would be great to have in one place, and I know there's a lot of people here that could offer some insight to this matter.
Some stuff I'd like to be able to measure or see with my own eyes(so to speak) would be things like; What exactly are the interupts I'm using and/or sharing? How and when do they get stepped on. What cards are actually sharing PCI bandwith at any given moment? What negative aspects does the graphics card(AGP or PCI) have on the whole PCI bus? There's many more that I can't think of right now but you get the idea.
If we had a good way to see into these things more clearly, I think we could get our systems really stable and humming along nicely.
Anyways, let me know what you guys think. Maybe it could be in a system related subgroup or something.. if there's one there already, sorry I missed it.
If there's any geniuses on the PCI bus out there, tell us what you know.
Tony
(jeez, remember when PCI first came out? It was so fast we didn't have any data that needed to go that fast.. now we're reaching it's limitation..where will it end? :)

[Naturally Digital]

HI
Just find this link in SOS pc notes,
www.mark-knutson.com/technique_to_target_inc

Sebastian
One of the points I enjoyed reading was in the 'performance tuning windows' section. Under 'latency and buffers', he talks about real time OS's and the need for buffers. It's well worded IMO and serves as a good reminder. As we all know, buffers are the one issue that keeps us from having a truly realtime, software-based virtual console in our computers. In order to achieve a stable and powerful 'virtual console', we're forced to look at a combination solution made up of a hardware DSP based soundcard or outboard mixer for real-time (or close to real-time) needs and our software of choice (SAWStudio). I agree with the author in that the brute force method (of faster and faster cpus) just doesn't seem right to me.

We're seeing buffers get smaller and smaller so I'm curious to know where we'll be in the future. :rolleyes:

SOS magazine seem to offer a fair bit of this type of information for 'tweaking'.

Dave.

[Lance]

At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, stupid, and foolish, what would it take to create a simple basic operating system just to run Sawstudio? With no purpose other than to record and playback audio within the realm of the memory, cpu, graphics card and audio I/O interface. I realize I'm leaving out multitudes of variables and endless hardware/driver considerations, but there's got to be a way other than microsofts way.. there's just got to be.

Tony
Hey Tony;

Not exactly what you're asking for, but you could take a look at XPLite.

http://www.litepc.com

They make a utility that allows you to remove "features" from XP Home and Professional. This can speed up the OS by almost 20-30% depending upon what you remove. If you want to isolate the machine from the internet, you can even remove many of the Network services and software, including Internet Explorer. There's also many, many services that can be shut down or removed which are there solely because of the network environment, as well as several Msoft services which run on its own that may not be necessary. Thing is that it could get real tricky so a certain amount of understanding of the Windows environment would be recommended.

I haven't had a chance to try xplite specifically for SAWStudio, but I use it for other things and it's quite worthwhile.

Lance