please help me!

hey all, happy holidays! i've been through three different software programs and not having much luck getting up and running. I first tried protools mbox2 for about 10 days. couldn't get it going and took it back. Then Cubase...not working. I've got the best results from Reaper. I can actually record and playback although it is very glitchy. Cracks, pops, crashes, etc. I have a tascam US-144. HP Pavilion laptop, 4 gigs ram, 2.0 ghz intel dual core duo. vista 64 bit home premium operating system. I have disabled all unneeded startup services and processes to keep things lean. When I'm adding fx...reverb especially CPU is cranking at about 75% and things don't go smoothly. This is with one track of audio. I only have really simple plans for recording. I don't really do midi, virtual instruments or anything. Just real simple audio. Any advice or thoughts will be greatly appreciated. thanks...seth

Hang on in there sterndrup, there are people here that can get you up and running I'm sure. You should be able to get loads of tracks with what you have, so there must be some malfunction somewhere. That means we have to get a good idea what's gone down. I'm not a vista bod myself, no am I a laptop guy so I hope someone else will chime in. I wonder how your laptop was before you installed any of this stuff, and exactly what you have disabled. Have you tried restoring it to how it was, if not I would do that because you shouldn't have to tweak the system just to get a few tracks running glitch free - that's for getting optimal performance, you can tweak it when you something to go back to. You ought to look at your audio device driver settings, make sure you got the right one. Make sure you have downloaded the latest too. Some plugins can cause problems so check see if you get the same issues with REAPER's own plugs So yeah, some more detail please

What Ted said. Sounds like you have a buffering issue. You're using an ASIO driver I assume - how many samples do you have it set at?

Like Ted and Chris said, plus ... Go to Options, Preferences, Audio Device Select ASIO as driver type. Click on Audio Configuration - this gives you direct access to your sound card's control software. Check the current buffer size and increase it - maybe try 512? Some trial and error involved, but you'll get there.

So are you using the asio drivers in reaper options\preferences\audio\device?

Have you listed all the gear you are using? Try disabling your Wi-Fi and this may require you doing it in the BIOS which is not for the amateur.

Just for kicks and giggles, also try ASIO4ALL. Now, is it possible that another application is forcing your laptop's on-board sound card to remain open? I'm not sure if the 144's ASIO driver shows it, but the GUI for ASIO4ALL will display what soundcard is actually being used and if there are any problems with ports. If you have something like Winamp or iTunes up while Reaper is trying to record, they might be messing with which card is actually being used. Also, are you relatively computer-savvy? Is your laptop free of spyware / adware? Your problem sounds like one not related to laptop technical issues, but just in case, it might be wise to run programs like Spybot and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. Sorry I couldn't think of more specific suggestions.

Good tip eximious Yeah, it was bound to be something like that. Don't worry about the reverb for now because that is confusing the issue. I get crackles with reverb sometimes and there's nothing wrong with my system, so let's do one thing at a time. You should be able to get twenty or so tracks playing back with no plugins no problem, if you can't do that, your system is still way below par. Load up a dozen tracks and copy some audio items in to them all over the place and see what the performance is like Also if you can disable your wifi in the bios it might clear the problem, if you really need it this could be difficult because it seems to be taking priority over the PCI bus when the audio driver needs priority. You can do screen shots with your printscreen key, or Alt + Printscreen for just the window in focus. you could edit them in a program like irfanView, and upload them to Stashbox, I don't have the link handy but a search will find it easy. See how you get on with those things for now.

This helped me a ton on XP. Not sure where it is on Vista but on XP you go to: Control Panel> System> Advanced> Visual effects tab click "Adjust for best performance" Advanced tab click "Background Services". Hope this helps!

sterndrup install shup from and use it to upload a screenshot of options\preferences\audio\device