ASIO4ALL and Vista- anyone else with BSOD problems?

[koolkeys]

Ok, so my switch to Vista, although unexpected, has been quite pleasant. I've found lots to like in Vista and have no complaints. Except for one thing: ASIO4ALL gives me blue screen of death crashes frequently.

The crashes happen most often when changing settings in the ASIO4ALL control panel. However, there have also been crashes when not changing settings.

I have an HP dv6833us with Core 2 Duo 1.83gHz Centrino processor and 3GB of RAM(not that the RAM will matter much). I'm wondering if anyone else is having these problems or would have any suggestions. I use ASIO4ALL whenever I don't have my interface with me and so it would be nice to find out why it's not stable.

Any ideas are appreciated!

Oh, and since I'm sure it will happen, PLEASE keep the anti-Vista junk out of this. I'm perfectly happy with most of Vista and outside of this problem, it's been great. I don't wish to invite the topics of how Vista is the devil. So don't bother.

Thanks!

Brent

[Stupid American Pig]

the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he wasnt vista.

heh ok sorry now that that is out of my system- doesnt ASIO4All just wrap yer WDM driver to make an ASIO driver? If so, I would suspect the WDM driver is at least part of the issue, since ASIO drivers arent really drivers and its pretty much a driver that would BSOD a computer. what sound device are you using?

[koolkeys]

It's just the Realtek HD Audio drivers that came on the laptop. I believe they are WaveRT based, but I don't know how to tell or if that is an automatic thing with newer laptops. I'm not saying that the original drivers aren't the problem, but I only get the issues when either changing ASIO4ALL settings or using an application that uses the ASIO4ALL drivers.

Of course, if there is a better way of getting to the bottom of this, or any suggestions, I'll be more than happy to investigate.

Brent

[koolkeys]

Hmmm, something curious here. I went to the HP website to check for the latest drivers for my soundcard. I check there because if you get the drivers direct from Realtek, they warn that the drivers may be missing features that are manufacturer-specific. So I usually go directly to HP.

It turns out that I have the NEXT to latest version. The newest version has one enhancement:

Adds support for Microsoft Windows Vista Operating Systems with Service Pack 1 (SP1)


My laptop IS Vista 32 bit with Service Pack 1. Could it be possible that HP didn't ship with a compatible driver for the OS they had on the machine? Here is the drivers page for my laptop:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/soft ... 785&dlc=en

Any ideas? I'm downloading the updated driver right now, but wanted to ask if this is common?

Brent

[koolkeys]

Ok, I uninstalled ASIO4ALL, then uninstalled my audio drivers(well, the installer did that first), installed the new drivers, making sure to restart every time it asked.

But it seems to have not worked. I still got an immediate BSOD crash when changing buffer size. I was able to make changes once just a minute ago without crash. But I've had two or three during my testing in the past half hour or so.

Brent

[koolkeys]

Any other ideas?

Brent

[eduardo_b]

Any other ideas?

Brent

No, but I'm shocked...shocked...that Vista even has a BSOD.

Does sound like a driver issue. Perhaps you need to contact HP tech support and see if they either have a solution or can point you to the actual producer of the sound card and thus the drivers for it.

[MelodyMan]

Do you change latency offline or within your host? I always do it offline and never had BSOD's. As said, it sounds like a driver issue.

And do you have the latest version of ASIO4ALL?

[koolkeys]

I have the latest version of ASIO4ALL, 2.8. I also have the latest drivers from HP. The Realtek website says to get them from the manufacturer if they are available since each manufacturer usually adds features or settings. So that's what I did.

When changing the buffer size, I've done it outside of Sonar AND inside of Sonar. Even after first installing ASIO4ALL and going to the offline settings immediately to change them, it crashed.

Brent

[MelodyMan]

I have the latest version of ASIO4ALL, 2.8. I also have the latest drivers from HP. The Realtek website says to get them from the manufacturer if they are available since each manufacturer usually adds features or settings. So that's what I did.

When changing the buffer size, I've done it outside of Sonar AND inside of Sonar. Even after first installing ASIO4ALL and going to the offline settings immediately to change them, it crashed.

Brent

Does Tracktion crash too?

[wuschel]

I have the latest version of ASIO4ALL, 2.8. I also have the latest drivers from HP. The Realtek website says to get them from the manufacturer if they are available since each manufacturer usually adds features or settings. So that's what I did.

For audio production work, you should generally be fine with the Vista in-box HD Audio driver. You can switch between drivers on the fly in Device Manager - using the "do not search...do not phone home...I'd rather pick one from the list" - path.

Should Vista now fail to display your audio jack types, locations and colors correctly, your BIOS is broken and you should yell to HP for an update that has the verb table fixed.

Should you still get the crash with the in-box driver, that would be something breaking which otherwise has been tested before extensively and I'm afraid you'd have to go the "run memory test...check CPU temperature..." route.

Something else you might be interested in knowing about Realtek HD Audio drivers:

http://www.wintercore.com/advisories/ad ... 10408.html

[Stupid American Pig]

brent- when I had vista I found the WAVERT drivers to FAR surpass ASIO in terms of performance? why are you using ASIO for all? I had a realtek chip on my old PC and was able to run it pretty solid in the 3-5 ms range. have you tried that?

[koolkeys]

Wow, sorry I didn't see the last two posts. Don't know how I missed them.

It's definitely an issue with ASIO4ALL because using the onboard drivers doesn't create any crashes. It's ONLY when using the ASIO4ALL drivers and especially when changing ANY setting on the ASIO4ALL drivers, I have to cross my fingers and grab my rabbit's foot and hope it doesn't crash. Usually, it does. Sometimes just STARTING an application(like Sonar) that is using the drivers will create a crash.

SAP, I'm using ASIO4ALL because I guess I've just assumed it was ideal. I think I will have to admit that I don't quite understand the Vista driver structure though. In Sonar, nothing SAYS WaveRT, so which driver should I be running to use it? I know one of the onboard drivers, when trying to use it, gives me the popup box to say that it's already in use and asks if I want to use it anyways or disable it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Brent

[wuschel]

Wow, sorry I didn't see the last two posts. Don't know how I missed them.

Have you tried the Vista in-box HD audio driver, as I suggested?

It's definitely an issue with ASIO4ALL

If a piece of user mode software - runnable even from the "guest" account - can bring down your system in this way, you can be absolutely sure that such a system has quite a bit of a problem somewhere else.

Have you tried to disable automatic restart at BSOD and document the actual BSOD information? This might give you a hint as towards the faulting kernel mode component - and only kernel mode components can be causing a BSOD.

[Stupid American Pig]

I seem to remember that I had to go get the realtek waveRT drivers from my motherboard vendors site- in my case evga. However this was early days of vista (around november/december when it was RTM'd) so I dont know if its part of the OS now or what. As for Sonar, I dont remember if it shows up as a new driver model in the audio options or if I just set it to WDM and then selected the waveRT from the available drivers. PM me if you have any further questions, I have had a lot less time to browse lately so I will see it quicker that way