Tascam US-800 and Cubase LE 5 on Mac OS X: No recorded sound?

So a couple nights ago I tried to use my new Tascam US-800 to record alongside a Tascam 2488.  Would have been great to get the MIDI control from the the 2488 to help sync up the recordings and get some good audio across both.  I installed Cubase LE since GarageBand doesn't seem to support MIDI control for transport control.  Too bad I couldn't get any audio to record.

I followed the QuickStart guide:

1. Go to Devices > Device Setup...
2. Under "VST Audio System" make sure the US-800 is selected as the ASIO Driver.  You can also select the US-800 in the left panel and make sure all the ports are listed as you want them.  Note that Ports 7-8 are the digital input ports for the SPDIF in jack on the back of the US-800.
3. Then go to Devices > VST Connections (F4) and make sure that on the Inputs tab you have a mono bus for every channel you want to record (unless you have some stereo recording going on) and that you assign a "Device Port" from the US-800 to the Bus.  You can also set a nice name for the Bus like "Mono 1".
4. Create or select an Audio track.  Clicking on the track will yield the "Inspector" which includes two lines, one for input source and output destination.  Both of these refer to busses setup in the VST Connections screen.
5. Arm the track for recording or monitoring with the buttons on the Track.

Too bad that didn't give me any audio!  The short of the story is go download the CoreAudio2ASIO update from Cubase's website:

http://www.steinberg.net/en/support/downloads/downloads_cle5.html

Also, if you haven't already, go download the updated Control Panel from Tascam:

http://tascam.com/product/us-800/downloads/

Choppy audio on Cisco Smartphone

UPDATE: After a couple hours of work, I now have a smoothly running system.  Performing the below tasks to identify the cause of the DPC latency I was able to discover that it was USBPORT.sys and NDIS.sys.  This means USB chipset and Network card in case you're wondering.  So I set out on a quest to find updated BIOS, drivers, and firmware for my motherboard, PCI network card, and Video card.  I managed to find a newer BIOS, newer chipset INFs, updated network driver, and updated video driver.  After this and a few reboots, I have success!  Check out the results on the DPC Latency Checker now:

You can't even tell where the call begins!

The Issue:
I'm getting some pretty poor quality audio when I use my USB headset (Tritton AX720) on my computer.  I've learned of some tools, and here they are:

DPC Latency Checker clearly shows the issue.  You can find this tool here: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Here's a screen shot of what I see:

Notice the jump up to yellow when the call starts.

Here is the process for finding out what is causing the DPC latency:
(Originally written by MagicAndre1981 on MSFN)

To get started you need the Windows Performance Tools Kit. Sadly Microsoft removed the stand alone installer from download. To get the installer, you have to install the Windows SDK.

Download the Web Installer and select the Win32 Development Tools and install them. Now go to the path:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\bin

and look for the 3 files wpt_ia64.msi, wpt_x64.msi and wpt_x86.msi. Now install the MSI which matches your Windows (IA64 if you're running an Itanium Windows, x64 if you run a 64Bit Windows Vista/7/Server 2008 (R2) or x86 if you run a 32Bit Vista/7/Server 2008).  (Francois' note: In my case it was C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Bin\wpfperf.msi)

Now open an elevated command prompt and run the following commands:

xperf -on latency

Now cause the issue (in my case initiate a call) and wait a while to record the high DPC and interrupt activity.  To stop the trace run the following command:

xperf -d DPC_Interrupt.etl

This closes the trace and writes the result to the file DPC_Interrupt.etl.
In the next step, double click on the etl file to run the Viewer.

Now wait until the 2 passes are over.


Go to "Trace > Configure Symbol Paths" and type in the following:

srv*C:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Click ok, to close the dialog.

Now go to the graphs "DPC CPU Usage" or "Interrupt CPU Usage" (depending where you see high CPU usage) and select the interval, right click and select "Load Symbols" and next click summary table.

Now, you have to accept the license agreement to download the public debugging symbols.

(NOTE, THE PDBs ARE SOMETIME VERY HUGE. BE AWARE THAT IT MAY TAKE SOME TIME IF YOU HAVE A SLOW INTERNET CONNECTION.

For me the cause is the NDIS.sys. This is a part of the networking system. The usage comes for me, when I have nearly 100% network speed usage on my 100MBit LAN adapter of my notebook.

In your case, you should see the driver which causes the issues.

For NDIS.sys, check your (W)LAN drivers for updates.
For usbport.sys, check your chipset drivers for updates.

Ok, I hope, this helps you to determine which driver is causing high DPC and interrupt usage.

Extra Line Breaks Removed in Outlook

Ever get that subtle message that Outlook has changed the contents of an email you may have received?  It looks like this:

This causes a big problem for things like automated email alerts.  There is a way to prevent your Outlook from messing with your text-based email messages.  See Microsoft's KB article: 287816.  It's pretty simple, really, but difficult to find:

1. Open up Tools -> Options
2. Click the "E- mail Options..." button on the "Preferences" screen.
3. Uncheck the box labeled "Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages
4. Click OK twice and then next time you view a plain text email message the message should be gone, and the message will be formatted as it was intended.

Another place where this can be fixed is on the sending end.  Basically, if you add two space characters as the beginning of every line before you send the message, Outlook will not trim the line breaks.  See here for more details:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/newsletter_publishing/newsletter_formatting/remove_line_breaks_issue_Microsoft_Outlook_2003_when_publishing_text_newsletters_20051217.htm

Slow browsing in Explorer

Sometimes you'll find that browsing through explorer can get really slow.  Especially on network drives.  One reason may be that Explorer is trying to expand zip files to get you the list of files in there.  In Vista you'll recognize this by the magnifying glass circling the folder in the tree view on the left of an Explorer window.  Here's an article that shows an easy way to disable the zip folder expansion:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/prevent-explorer-from-freezing-with-large-zip-files-on-vista/

Make sure that you do have a zip file manager.  I recommend 7-zip for it's speed and file format flexibility:
http://www.7-zip.org/

The other one I use is ZipGenius.  There are a few things I particularly like with ZipGenius:

• Command line interface is pretty good
• Ability to create self-extracting archives through command line.  Great for automating tasks or making them repeatable
• The ability to fix broken zip files and extract usable files from them!

You'll find ZipGenius at: 

http://www.zipgenius.it/ or on Cnet's Download.com

System (BIOS) Beep

So there are the Windows sounds in Windows.  They can get annoying, but you can usually affect the volume with the Windows volume settings to make it better.  Vista helps a lot here by providing a "source" mixer.

There are some beeps, however, that are not Windows sounds.  This beep may happen to you, for example, if you hit more than 2 or 3 keys at the same time.  Here's how you can disable it:
(From: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/turn-off-the-annoying-windows-xp-system-beeps/)

Disable Beep in Device Manager

Open up Device Manager by right-clicking on Computer and choosing Properties, then on the Hardware tab you’ll find the button for Device Manager.

Select View \ Show hidden devices from the menu.

Find Non-Plug and Play Drivers in the list, and then right-click on “Beep” and disable it:

When it prompts you to reboot, select no, and then right-click again and choose Properties this time. On the Driver tab, change the Startup type to “Disabled” and then click the “Stop” button if you are able to.

This should disable the system beep speaker, but it probably won’t change the volume control beep, so continue on.

What happened to "mstsc /console"?

Those of your more geeky folks may have been used to connecting to a remote computer using Remote Desktop (RDP) and connecting to the console session so you can see the programs running there.  In an update to the Terminal Services client available from Windows Update the command line parameters have been changed.  You now need to use:

mstsc /admin

For those of you using Vista thinking that you'd lost all access to the console session on remote servers, use the same command as above.  You can always find out the right option to use if you're borrowing someone else's computer by running:

mstsc /?

Got an AMD Dual Core?

If you do, then try this:
ping 127.0.0.1

Take note of the response times.  See anything odd there?  If your computer has been on for any length of time, and you've got an AMD Dual Core processor you might see some negative values.  This indicates your computer has beaten the laws of time and space to get a reply before the request was sent!

Unfortunately that's not exactly the case.  There is a problem with how software interacts with the processor timers.  Here's a description from HP on the problem:

"This condition affects operations such as network communications and performance monitoring tasks that are sensitive to system time."

Here's a link to fix the problem:
http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/dynamicDetails.aspx?ListID=c5cd2c08-1432-4756-aafa-4d9dc646342f&ItemID=153 (If that doesn't work go to AMD's support site and search for Dual Core Optimizer)

Here are a few posts with people having problems as a result of this processor issue:

• http://www.paessler.com/blog/2007/08/29/ipcheck-server-monitor/negative-ping-times-in-amd-dual-core-processors-solved/
• http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=430695
• http://wiki.ljackson.us/Negative_Ping_Time
• http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=446006&prodTypeId=15351&objectID=c01075682