audio software on eee and other netbooks (user reports)

[Mushy Mushy]

Hskovlund, excellent post mate.

Thanks for sharing. I think you're spot on - people are very quick to judge on new products before they try them.
Now it's been proven they're acceptable for music production people are having to eat your words a bit.

[_starcraft_]

Secondly: Making music with this performance is solely for programming music, not recording it with low latency. record elsewere and import your waves. Drop the ASIO driver and use MME instead and experiment to get the right settings no matter at what latency. Anyway my RealTek HD card works lousy with a ASIO4all driver and even if it did work, it would take up a good deal of resources forcing the system to work at low latency.

your super tweaked system cant even run asio4all decently ? thats epic fail



i run asio4all just fine on my 901 and at 1024 without any extra cpu hit than MME (i used the MME before the bios update )...so i guess u still have a lot of tweaking to do.....or simply wait for you manufacturer to provide the same fix for the realtek card. it all boils down to that really....

if u plug an external soundcard u see that this system is capable of stable asio. so its just a question of gettin the internal soundcard to do the job.
asus got it working fine in the end.(i bet they had the soundcard sharing irqs or shit like that before)


i had stable asio since my pIII600mhz days...so i knew that the 1.6ghz atom (equivalent to a pIII900 performance wise) would be up to the job at least spec wise.

[Locus M]

your super tweaked system cant even run asio4all decently ? thats epic fail

I have just got the BIOs and driver update for Medion but have not installed it yet. It seems to have arrived in the middle of january, which I was not aware of, so my adwise would be directed at those who do not have the update for whatever system they are using. However I have no use of it, the MME works fine for my purposes, but I am glad if it works at low latencies for you if you use it for recording. So I am afraid the "epic fail" was contemporary. Anyway I did not post to show off my super tweaked system but to help people who want to make music on netbooks, so you can take your Willy inside again my friend.

[Locus M]

Hmmmm...now I have installed the new BIOS and sound driver update for my system and it works with ASIO4all but still at some very specific settings for both Orion and Sonar 8 that makes it doubtable whether this really can be considered "low latency":

ASIO buffer size: 1024 samples

Latency Compensation: In: 192 samples Out: 192 samples

Kernel Buffers: 4

No oversampling

I go at 16 bit/44,1 Khz btw.

I do also think that I can see a little extra CPU efforts on the ASIO driver, but it is hardly noticeable, just about 3-4%.

It is great if other netbooks can do better than this with the same or other software, and I'd sure appreciate your reports if that is the case.

System wise the Medion E1210 should be compatible to MSI Wind and it's 12 other clones.

[brambos]

I do also think that I can see a little extra CPU efforts on the ASIO driver, but it is hardly noticeable, just about 3-4%.

It is great if other netbooks can do better than this with the same or other software, and I'd sure appreciate your reports if that is the case.

System wise the Medion E1210 should be compatible to MSI Wind and it's 12 other clones.

As mentioned earlier, I saw huge improvements in sound stability on my EEE 4G 701 (the stock underclocked 630MHz version) when I switched off the WIFI and closed my firewall. I'm running XP nLited, so I probably have less services running in the background anyway.

[Locus M]

As mentioned earlier, I saw huge improvements in sound stability on my EEE 4G 701 (the stock underclocked 630MHz version) when I switched off the WIFI and closed my firewall.

Sounds very plausible! Wireless network units and sevices has been reported elsewere to somehow intervene with soundcards (for reasons too techy for me, though) and in general network related win-services of various kind will take some power. I have tweaked XP to almost bare bones for the same reasons.

[_starcraft_]

Hmmmm...now I have installed the new BIOS and sound driver update for my system and it works with ASIO4all but still at some very specific settings for both Orion and Sonar 8 that makes it doubtable whether this really can be considered "low latency":

ASIO buffer size: 1024 samples

Latency Compensation: In: 192 samples Out: 192 samples

Kernel Buffers: 4

No oversampling

I go at 16 bit/44,1 Khz btw.

I do also think that I can see a little extra CPU efforts on the ASIO driver, but it is hardly noticeable, just about 3-4%.

It is great if other netbooks can do better than this with the same or other software, and I'd sure appreciate your reports if that is the case.

System wise the Medion E1210 should be compatible to MSI Wind and it's 12 other clones.

eeepc 901 stable @512 asio4all 48.00khz. till 70% of cpu usage no notable difference with running it at 1024 or MME.....1024 makes it go stable up to 85% though. (as cpu spikes are contained by the larger buffer).
no specific settings . i use the default ones in asio4all.
i use energy XT .

your asio situation was similar to mine in august/september before asus released a new bios.

[mateo]

I'm curious, have any of you tried running your systems with external usb sound cards? I imagine this would give better performance than the built in cards and asio4all...

[buscemi]

I'm curious, have any of you tried running your systems with external usb sound cards? I imagine this would give better performance than the built in cards and asio4all...

I've been meaning to do so with my Acer Aspire One but haven't yet. I'll report back when I do. I wanted to get a small USB interface since the one I have is bigger than the netbook itself.

[_starcraft_]

I'm curious, have any of you tried running your systems with external usb sound cards? I imagine this would give better performance than the built in cards and asio4all...

i allready answered that question....

if u plug an external soundcard u see that this system is capable of stable asio. so its just a question of gettin the internal soundcard to do the job.
asus got it working fine in the end.(i bet they had the soundcard sharing irqs or shit like that before)

now that the realtek is properly supported by asus...i get roughly the same asio performance as on my external edirol.


btw this thread should be in the "computer setup and configuration section"

[boxatoys]

Hi Mushy Mushy.

Cheers, was worried as this thread was for the asus and I posted about the MSI-Wind clone.

Some more info.

I thought the sound crackling may be happening because of shared irq's but the table below shows otherwise. Still, there seems to be many bits sharing IRQ 16


Advent 4211 IRQ's
(pci)16 Intel(R)80201g(IC7H Family) PCI Express Root Port - 27D0
(pci)16 Intel(R)80201g(IC7H Family) USB Universal Host Controller - 27CB
(pci)16 Microsoft UAA Bust Driver for High Definition Audio
(pci)16 Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family
(pci)16 Realtek RTL8102E Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC

*(pci)17 802.11b/g Mini Card Wireless Adaptor* (Realtek RTL8187SE)

*Not supported in Linux Ubuntu yet but on the MSI Wind forum someone has posted the latest drivers in a deb package.

What's running on mine with 2gb ram.

win-tv digital tv usb stick---AVS DVD player--Firefox--Magic Disk--Reaper--Winamp--Gimp--Doom64 --Free Video Converter--Abiword 2.6--Spybot--Avast--Stardock-MyColors(before install set screen res to what it requires then reset to 1024x800)

[whyterabbyt]

Cheers, was worried as this thread was for the asus and I posted about the MSI-Wind clone.

ive updated the thread title to cover netbooks in general...

[zeoy]

since it's about netbooks in general ...2
I've bought the Advent 4211 (MSI Wind clone) for 300 Euros. All the usual stuff there (Atom 1.6, 1GB RAM, wifi, bluetooth, intel 945 chipset, etc) plus a 120GB HD. Same quality as the MSI (that means very good; has already survived two falls )
The interesting part of the story is that you can flash the MSI latest Bios which allows a 24% overclocking. That means CPU clock goes at almost 2GHz (if and when you think you need it)
I did it with mine and everything went fine. No problems with temperatures either.
I also installed 2GBs of RAM and now everything feels smoother.

Haven't done much tests with music applications but Reaper, Live 4 Lite and Tracktion 2 run all their demos fine. Didn't see much difference between DirectX and Asio4All in terms of CPU consumption but I gotta check it further.


EDIT: Reaper played fine with asio4all @128bytes buffer with
a) the "making me nervous" demo song at its busiest part looping (12 audiotracks
+ 12 FX, mainly eqs and comps)
b) jamstix 2
c) synth1 holding 3 note chords with the first preset of the first bank

I had also good results with the WDM driver in the same host (same as above with 4x128bytes buffers)

regarding cpu performance the same reaper demo tune (without jamstix and synth1) and the asio4all @128/44100 was at about 50-55%

all these on a minimally tweaked XP installation + AVG free running + wireless on + lots of crap running the background

[chrisby]

I'm curious, have any of you tried running your systems with external usb sound cards? I imagine this would give better performance than the built in cards and asio4all...

I have an acer aspire one that I've run with a line6 DI and the IK stealth plug. Don't remember exactly what the results were but in general just running an amp sim using Console (a mini vst/vsti host) I get performance just in the acceptable range latencey-wise. Using the line in for the (realtek?) internal card I got decent latency but the audio-in quality sucked and was essentially unuseable. Using asio4all (or any of the above interfaces) with softsynths again gave just acceptable results as far as latency.

Not exactly on topic but I'm also have it set up using EWF which works pretty cool (for general use, maynot for audio).

[Locus M]

i use the default ones in asio4all.
i use energy XT .

That would be a latency compensation of 32 samples in and 32 out and 2 kernel buffers?

Not bad!

Do not know what it is with my system, but its the same deal when I use MME and DirectX. It works at one and only one specific setting, but at least it make rock-steady power-performances at this setting. Must check out the Energy XT demo to see if it is the same deal.