PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi there,
I know i've been posted this problem before but i swear this is the last time.....
there's a lot to go through here i know,but i've nowhere else left to ask,Creamware themselves won't respond to my email (great customer support!!!),so what can i do?? thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read this!

I recently purchased a Pulsar 2 DSP software version 3.01 card and i am having problems getting it working,
My system is:

PC Athlon 650Mhz
384MB RAM
Windows 98
Cubase VST5
Wavelab 3.0

Here's a list of what's wrong:

1.After installing the card and software it worked fine for about 4 hours (i had 3 modular synths open and the micro mixer).I loaded Poison into the Pulsar software,recorded a midi track with it in cubase and after around 30 mins the sound went dead.

2.shortly after an error appeared in cubase saying 'No AISO driver error'

3.i tried selecting the SCOPE driver from Options->Audio setup->system but it could not get communication with the card.

4.back in the pulsar environment,the cursor appeared 'busy',i.e the pulsar triangle kept spinning.

5.when i switched the 'slave' option in 'settings' the pulsar enviroment became normal once again.

6.back in cubase an AISO driver still could not be found

7.to test the card,i played a .WAV file in wavelab and selected the 'creamware play' to output sound but no sound is outputted,and after approx 3 seconds of playing a .WAV file the program hangs until stop is pressed.

8.i uninstalled all the software and drivers and then reinstalled but the same problem occured.

9.i changed the card to a different PCI slot but the same problem occured.

10.i have tried changing many settings but i cannot resolve this problem,i suspect there is a problem with the win9x driver.any one else using this driver?

11.The PC will no longer boot up after it 'restarts',i need to shut it down first,the turn it on for it to boot.

can anyone give me a solution to my problem?

thanks,
minipax.

Yikes! No fun here. Sounds like serious business that a superhuman like subhuman may be able to help with. But a couple of simple things first:
* Have you read the manual and installed everything in the approved way?
* Have patience with CW support, they usually answer eventually...
* When you say that "the same thing happens" does that mean you're fiddling with the slave/master and ASIO settings in the same way every time? Maybe you're performing an odd sequence of commands every time.
* When you uninstall Pulsar does your PC then function normally? Does it reboot OK? Does VST run normally with Pulsar uninstalled?

Answers to some of these questions may help narrow down the problem.

Stay calm, you'll soon be having fun

and when your in slave mode, you should have a digital carrier singal from outside (like spdif in from a dat recorder). if in slave there is no carrier, any driver can´t work.

felix

tried bigger latency or more cooling (let case open for experiment)?

Hellooooo Minipax .... how are you going ?

hey,
well,it seemed to be an IRQ thing,my SBLive and pulsar were on the same IRQ.but for some reason if i changed the IRQ setting in safe mode to an unused IRQ it wouldn't boot up,so i just swapped it with my modem and it worked fine...for about 1 minute,the the pulsar environment kept on being 'busy' unless it was switched to slave,and cubase keeps giving me a message 'outputs may not match etc... " after a while even though the XTC synths load up normally. all this happened last night so i haven't really had a chance to monkey around with it yet.

when everything is uninstalled cubase functions normally with my SBLive and it restarts normally too.
even when i took everything off the system the Scope driver was still available to select in cubase but of course it couldn't find it.why didn't the scope driver dissapear?



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: minipax on 2002-01-14 08:49 ]</font>

at the moment my card is in the middle PCI slot,this is the only slot where it doesn't share an IRQ with another PCI/AGP card, although it does share the same IRQ with the 'SCI IRQ used by ACPI bus' and the 'ACPI IRQ holder for PCI IRQ steering'.

is there any point in changing the IRQ of these devices? if so,how do i do it? in normal mode windows won't let me change the IRQ settings,only in safe mode.if i change a devices IRQ to an unused IRQ the PC won't boot.so what do i do? i tried reserving an IRQ but that woulnd't work either.

everytime i changed the Pulsar to another PCI slot and i reinstalled the drivers i got around 2 minutes of everythng working fine then the pulsar environment became 'busy' and a message came up in cubase saying that communication was lost and 'XTC plug not properly installed',so i reinstalled the pulsar software without XTC functionality and again i had sound for a minute then the 'No AISO driver' message appeared ;(

since i have no normal MIDI cables at the moment,i'm connecting my keyboard via the SBLive! joystick->midi connecter.I seem to be getting a bit of conflict here also,on occasion it will not recognise MIDI in but MIDI out works fine.strange.
and in VAZ a message will appear 'could not open midi port' or something similar.usually after a reboot it will right itself
but it still happens now and then.

everything works fine when the pulsar software is not installed.

Although Pulsar+Soundbastard can coexist, it can be slightly tricky to setup, as you are seeing.

You will definitely want to disable "SB16 Legacy" in the Device Manager, or you'll have all sorts of conflicts. Give that a try...

I also usually disable ACPI in the BIOS settings otherwise it will take irq 9.

Regards,
Stuart.

Quick edit - Only do this if you don't require the special power management features. Pulsar cards really work best on dedicated systems where you can disable stuff like USB, Parallel/serial ports, ACPI in the Bios to free up resources and add to overall system stability. Well it works for me anyway!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: bassdude on 2002-01-15 15:04 ]</font>

Minipax i recommend u to take the sblive out of your pc. cause pulsar and sblive doesn't really work fine together,and u never can know when an error will appear or problem while using both. i had another problem with using both and had to change the pci for pulsar and had to take the sblive out. and no more problems in that class. yeah just in that class cause i'm a via chipset user !

well,it's working!!
thanks for all your help guys.

so i did everything that i could,moved cards around,changed IRQ's, disabled my other cards...basically everything,and then i changed it back to the way it was before i started!

but what i did in the end was,loaded up the pulsar software,changed it to slave (because as master it was always 'busy' remember?) and hooked up inferno to a mixer to the outputs (i was absent mindedly doing all this,i was talking to someone at the time...) started up cubase (the aiso driver was the multimedia one,not scope),put a riff onto a track and selected the creamware output.what happens next? nothing but nothing was crashing so i set it back to master an bang! TB-303 coming at me from all directions! and the pulsar enviroment stabilised too....great,but the aiso driver was still the multimedia one,so i colsed everything down and started cubase on it's own to see if the scope driver was working,and cubase found it without hassle!

what the hell was wrong in the first place?!?!

thanks again for all your help....i'm sure it's not the last you've heard of me!

What can sometimes happen minipax is if you lose asio while running cubase it stuffs up ok, so then you go to restart cubase and it comes up with all sorts of errors saying "no asio driver loaded" etc. If you go "OK" and let cubase startup, it will default to the MME driver and disable audio all together!

So what you should do is "kill" cubase when it says "no asio detected" or whatever, shutdown and reboot the system, Start pulsar up or let the background project start up as normal depending on how you configure pulsar, startup cubase, select the scope driver again instead of mme, enable audio, then once again shutdown cubase and restart it. You should now be back to normal!

Or buy Nuendo! (That's what I did, I was convinced that half of my problems were cuased by cubase since it was originally designed for midi not audio whereas Nuendo was designed for audio/video from ground up. I've never looked back since. Put myself in big debt though!)

Best regards,
Stuart.

i've had a go with nuendo but i really couldn't see the benefits over cubase,i work totally in midi,maybe only using audio tracks for an exceptionally long sample or something.when mastering,mixing i just do it live in midi,using my outboard mixer to set levels etc...
does nuendo offer anything over cubase for this kind of application?

it seems all the pros work in audio,but since i don't live instruments is there any point in me working in audio? it just seems like a waste of time and disk space to record everything that has gone into the sequencer as midi anyway! give me a few reasons why you work in audio and the benefits.

also,on the the subject of nuendo,explain why it's better than cubase,surly all the plug-ins are the same aren't they? if i had Nuendo and my pulsar 2 can I record my tracks in 5.1 surround ala Orbital,or do i need special hardware and software?is the pulsar capable of outputting 5.1 surround sound?

i'll look forward to reading you comments!

sure, if I could, I'd work midi only. Midi allows you to change any parameter instantly, while audio is already 'unediteable'. Of course, fx can be applied, but that's different than changing the original source, if you understand what I mean. I'd go with midi untill the song just in pre-mastering stage. For mastering, I use audio. I want the final pre-mix channels in hardcopy, rather than in volatile midi.

Pulsar can output Dolby 3D, but only 'thru-put'from a DVD source or so, Pulsar cannot generate Dolby Surround.

The main difference between Nuendo and Cubase is the audio part, where Nuendo has way better Mastering possibilities.

If you do midi only, Cakewalk's still my midi favorite (remember those CAL's?)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: atomic on 2002-01-18 09:50 ]</font>

Of cousre, Pulsar can totally output surround - in discrete channels. It doesn't encode it into Dolby Digital (there are expensive dedicated pieces of hardware to do that), but if you have a mixer which allows multiple speakers (Yamaha 03D, or even A16, LunaBox, etc), you can use ie: the Surround Mixers in Luna or /SP and pan something around 4 speakers - it's actually quite awesome.

Minipax, the nuendo thing wasn't really meant to be taken seriously . If you mainly do midi then cubase is better for you as nuendo only has very basic midi support and wouldn't be worth the $$$ that you would need to fork out. I don't do much midi stuff. I mainly record bands at the moment.
A lot of problems I had, like the one you described, disappeared when I went to Nuendo. Pulsar seems to behave better with nuendo. At least for me anyway.
I've always had problems with automation in cubase. If you only had a few audio tracks it wouldn't be a problem but with 24+ tracks, the automation wasn't reliable. I only use it for track levels but whenever I would go to make slight adjustments, there was a risk that the rest of the automation would suffer latency problems. The list editor data would be correct, the fader would move up/down at the correct moment, but the change in the track level would not happen until maybe 1-2secs later!

I don't know if this was fixed in VST32. It was hard to get any info about this from the various cubase forums I visited. I guess, at the time, no-one was really using it that much! But after some research I decided to go to nuendo as I mainly do audio anyway and IMO nuendo has better automation implementation than cubase. Not as good as pro-tools though

this is getting ridiculous!
i loaded up the pc after that glorious night of a working pulsar and it went back to square 1 again

cubase is playing a few synths from pulsar,starts of but then sound goes.i let it play some more and the sound comes back for a second goes off,stutters a bit then goes off for good.when i look at the signal on the fader of the mixer it's frozen,but will change every once in a while but still freeze...when it was working properly the levels are in real-time..

i tried closing cubase,restarting etc.. but no good....

so exactly what is the problem here do you reckon? it seems as if the pulsar software is being interupted and getting starved of cpu attention,but there are no other PCI devices sharing the pulsar IRQ,only the ACPI driver..and i can't seem to remove this (i can't find it as a device and there's no option in BIOS to disable it)...very strange isn't it?

i think i'll send another email to creamware...

I'm not sure whether this will make you feel better or worse, but VST and ASIO just frustrated the hell out of me. I got sick of fiddling with it. I like fiddling with Pulsar and playing music ! So I do everything in Acid 3.0 and Soundforge. Nothing ever falls over or drops out, my little 600MHz CPU rarely gets above 40% and I can actually get things done. When I need MIDI I use Cubasis V1.1 which was released in 1995 then sample that into Acid.

Just about everyone does things differently.

I believe the long-term solution is a dedicated sequencer for Pulsar.

VST and Pulsar can work together - but you have to have the whole system tweaked, and one of the main things (there are quite a few "main things") is Pulsar not sharing an IRQ with anything.

To remove ACPI you can rerun WIN98 setup (over your current installation) this way:
From desktop, open a DOS screen. Change directory to the CDROM drive/ directory where Windows Setup.exe is. Type the following command:
Setup /p.i.

After the installation, do the usual housecleaning - get rid of all background projects, System.ini tweaks, turn off write-behind caching, read ahead optimization, etc, etc - probably have to reinstall Video driver.

In your MBoard bios, turn off PlugandPlay.
Now you should be able to assign an IRQ to Pulsar.
Reinstall Pulsar driver, 3.01, then 301b.

There's many more tweaks to apply, but this should get Pulsar and Cubase cooperating. You may want to eventually format and reinstall from scratch, but for now this will fix your ACPI/IRQ problem (so you can move on to the next problem).

/dave

thanks for your help guys,it's much appreciated...