[linux-audio-user] Interuptions While Recording

[linuxmedia4 at netscape.net]

Greetings,

I was having interruptions when recording with ecasound. Someone at
the ecasound list suggested that it was because my Hard Drive was
slow. I upgraded from a 5400 RPM Drive to a 7200 RPM Drive and it
did help. The inturuptions are less often and shorter. They're
usually just an occasional click, and at times can be about a half
a second of silence (while recording).

When I listen to the recording, at the spots where the interuptions
happen, the parts are edited out. In other words, there is __no__
silence (in the file) where the interuptions happen, but it's as if
someone just cut those parts out of the recording and pasted the
remaining file together.

I found several tutorials on hdparm on the internet. I used it to
check my Hard Drive's capabilities and carefully made adjustments
accordingly. Nothing worked. In fact most of the time the -Tt flag
showed that the Timing buffered disk reads went down considerably.
And, of course the interuptions kept happening.

Here is the output of hdparm -Tt /dev/hda:

Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.97 seconds =131.96 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.35 seconds = 47.41 MB/sec

Is this considered slow (when it comes to doing 16 bit 2 channel
44100 Multitrack Recording)?

I did the command "dsmeg" and found the line:
"SiS730    ATA 100 controller"
And the Mother Board Manual says:
"The PCI IDE also supports PIO Mode 3 and 4, UDMA33/66/100 IDE"
Does this means it only capable of 100 MB/sec Data Transfer Rate?
And does this even have much of a bearing on the interuptions I'm
having?

I installed an ATA/133 PCI Adapter Card and did the command
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda and got the following output:

Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.95 seconds =134.74 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.19 seconds = 29.22 MB/sec

I'm not sure why it produced lower numbers. This could be a
configuration problem. But I'm not even sure if the card is
nessesary.

My Software/Hardware:

SuSE 8.1
k7SEM Mother Board
AMD Duron 1Ghz Processor
256 Megs Ram
Soundblaster Live! 5.1
alsa Version 0.9.0.cvs20020903-13
(That's the Alsa that installed with SuSE 8.1 - It
hasn't been altered in any way)

Anyone have a clue how to stop these interuptions?

Any help would be appreciated
Rocco



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