Audigy 2 ZS Platinum - Midi, Soundfonts, Squeal of Death

Question

Hi, I bought the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum to get professional Soundfont playback triggered by an external midi keyboard, Soundfont creation using Vienna, and ideally Cubasis with ASIO.
I'm having major problems: When I try and play Soundfonts from either the SoundFont Bank Manager or Vienna, after a couple of minutes I get a high-pitched tone and the computer locks up. I've heard this is the infamous "squeal of death," but am unsure of the fix on my particular machine:
Gateway V800CSE computer
Windows 98 SE
Intel Celeron 800 MHz processor
Intel Santorini motherboard
Intel 810e chipset
BIOS update to P05
192 MB ram
Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver 620
DirectX 9.0c
2 PCI slots
Power Supply: Astec ATX90-3405 (90 watts)
The computer is generally rock-steady - I can spend hours using applications like Firefox, Wordpad, Acrobat Reader, etc. with no crashes. Audio CDs seem to play fine for hours through the Audigy 2.
I've done the equivalent of a clean sweep: wiped the drive and restored from backup to a pre-Creative state, then reinstalled the Creative stuff. No help.
The squeal/lockup happens whether I use the on-screen keyboard or an external midi keyboard, and regardless of what banks are loaded - even small banks like the default 4MB GM presets. It seems to happen at some random point during Soundfont usage, anywhere from one minute to 30 minutes into a session - but it always happens.
I'm not playing difficult passages with a lot of polyphony. In fact the squeal of death sometimes happens when playing just a simple melodic line. I tried allocating more ram in Soundfont Bank Manager, but this didn't seem to help. Creative Diagnostics shows no problems.
I've heard that turning off ACPI sometimes eliminates lockups with Creative cards. However, Windows 98SE installs ACPI by default, and my BIOS doesn't let me turn it off. I understand that by installing from a command line and using a setup switch I can install Win98SE without ACPI. But although I'm handy with computers and good at following instructions, I don't know command line syntax.
Could someone please walk me through the steps? Let's say I boot from a floppy, activate CD-ROM support, get the A-prompt, and put the Windows 98 SE CD in the drive. (Are those the initial steps?) Now what are the exact command lines I would use to run the setup switch, which is something like setup/pi ?
Please help. The card is of no use to me if I can't get professional Soundfont operation. I will have to return it.
I've tried uninstalling the WDM drivers and installing the VXD drivers using Creative's CTZAPXX. That seemed to stop the squeal of death, but greatly limits midi functionality. For example, the WDM drivers recognized that my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum has two sets of midi inputs/outputs: one on the gameport, and one on the platinum drive. It's the platinum ones you can use out of the box, because the adapters are included. Under the WDM drivers, I could choose the second midi port and my external keyboard would trigger the Soundfonts. But under the VXD drivers only one midi port appears in Control Panel or midi apps, and I guess it's the gameport, because all notes from my external keyboard hooked up to the platinum drive's midi input are now ignored. I reinstalled the VXD drivers, but same result. The platinum drive is definitely hooked up; the audio inputs and outputs are working, and my external midi keyboard is definitely sending midi notes.
Could Creative or anyone please confirm that the VXD drivers don't see the platinum drive's midi port? Is there a workaround? If the WDM drivers are unstable, and Win98SE users have to fall back to the VXD drivers to get reliable operation, then could Creative please include a gameport-to-midi adapter in the box, so platinum customers can still use midi?
Are there any other reports of the squeal of death with the 810e chipset?
I'm using DirectX 9.0c. Is this appropriate, or should I be using an earlier version?
The power supply on my machine may be a bit wimpy. Could that be a problem? The published specs are:
Wattage 90 watt
Input 90 - 135 V, normal 115 V
180 - 265 V, normal 230 V
# Output + 3.3 V (0 A min, 6.0 A max)
# + 5 V (1.0 A min, 10 A max)
# + 12 V (.02 A min, 1.5 A max)
# -12 V (0 A min, 0.2 A max)
# + 5 VSB (0 A min, 1.4 A max)
Finally, how often is the squeal of death solved by simply exchanging the card? (It's only a week old.)
Thank you in advance for any help you can give me. Best regards.
M_Harrisson

Answer 1

M_Harrisson wrote:
- No, my BIOS doesn't have "PCI Config 32 Clock Retry."
I took some time to look back in my archives. The canonical SOD problem was seen on WinXP on certain Dell systems using Intel motherboards incorporating certain new (at the time) Intel chipsets. I have the i815 chipset referenced in my archives, though not the i810. Dell systems, such as the 8100, did not have access to said BIOS setting, and needed a BIOS update enabling the bit to resolve the SOD problem.
The main variant of the problem did not occur with the VxD drivers at the time, because those drivers were able to enable BIOS settings. WDM drivers were not permitted to change BIOS settings, so the problem did surface with them on susceptible chipsets. Unless there has been a change in this area to the VxD drivers, your reporting hangs with them implies implies a different problem.
- My other PCI slot was occupied by a Rockwell 56K modem, but I've done a clean reinstall (WDM) without the modem card. I haven't done enough testing to fully report on results. I did get the squeal of death after an hour, but it could be related to a public domain soundfont that was not well-behaved. (Or maybe the Audigy 2 ZS is not well-behaved!)
I really don't think there's a way a soundfont can cause the PCI bus to seize up. I think it would be a good idea to try moving the soundcard to the slot the modem was in, if you haven't already.
In mentioning my computer's power supply, I was relating this to the squeal of death, not the midi port on the platinum drive failing to appear under the VXD drivers.
So was I, although I was keying on your use of an external keyboard, probably incorrectly. You are describing your system as very stable unless the soundcard is used a specific way, and I didn't get the sense that there would be much difference in power requirements involved in that.
I'm thinking that PCI systems are designed to function within certain tolerances. A 56K modem card might make lighter demands on PCI resources than an Audigy 2 card. The modem's handshaking protocols might make it oblivious to momentary timing errors, while the Audigy 2 card might be less forgiving of a wimpy power supply or a PCI subsystem that's not quite up to par. Just a theory. Anyway, I may try the card in another machine and see if it fares better. Wish it weren't so finicky!
That's not bad thinking, and trying it in another machine is a great idea, though one often not very practical for customers who may only have one machine available.
Last night I was noticing that with my external keyboard driving the platinum drive's midi input, there are random delays. The notes will be tight for a few seconds, but then a couple of notes that were played cleanly on the keyboard will spill over each other like dwarves tumbling out of a silly car. Is this a known issue with the platinum drive's midi port when playing soundfonts, or could this be a symptom of an underlying timing issue with my PCI subsystem? (I know there may not be an easy answer to questions like this.)
Has anyone compared the "tightness" of gameport midi vs. platinum drive midi? Is gameport midi any tighter? (I'm on a budget, and don't want to shell out for a gameport-to-midi adapter only to get more of the same.)
I've not heard of this particular complaint before and I have listened a lot. PCI-level problems tend to be of the nature of snap-crackle-pop symptoms (or hangs). What you describe sounds more like a problem with something like interrupt lockout. Without knowing Windows internals very well, a driver coping with lots of recoverable errors might cause that, or if a device causing lots of interrupts is sharing an IRQ with the soundcard, or sometimes multiprocessing support has weaknesses which lead to interrupt latency issues.
When loading and unloading different soundfonts, is memory fragmentation much of an issue? (either PC memory or the Audigy 2's internal memory?).
It can be an issue with being able to load very large soundfonts, but not really much otherwise. The A2 doesn't really have internal memory.
With the Audigy series you're no longer limited to 32 MB soundfont banks. You can load much larger banks into PC memory, but the PC has to send chunks of sound data to the Audigy as needed. I'm wondering if this has impacted stability. Maybe it requires some intensive bursts of data to be sent from PC memory over the PCI bus to the Audigy 2 card.
That part is done on demand, and is driven by what you are playing at the moment rather than everything in the soundfont. If the system is sufficiently memory-tight, allocating more system memory to soundfont storage might lead to excessive paging activity (which could also be behind erratic sluggishness in the system's response to MIDI keyboard events). (In fact, 192MB of system RAM doesn't sound like a lot, even for Win98, when you need to dedicate MB's of it to soundfont storage.)
Does anybody know if there are things you can do during a long session to defragment memory so that no holes develop?
Problems in that area are far more likely to be expressed as dropped notes that to be behind system hangs.
Vienna reports that the Audigy 2 ZS has 12 MB DRAM in Synth A and 12 MB DRAM in Synth B. Does that mean it has a total of 24 MB onboard RAM?
It probably means that 12MB of PC system memory has been allocated to shared use by the two virtual synths. If you have set soundfont memory larger than that and Vienna still says 12 MB, it's probably simply a bit confused in its assumptions. The soundcard doesn't have onboard RAM, although the soundcards Vienna was written for do.
-Dave
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