this time i tried to record/play guitar through my axe fx ultra. i use the spdif input at 48khz. no matter how much samples, i always have little cracks (no dropouts actually).

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Unfortunately the problem's still happening.

I'm running out of trouble shooting ideas...

I tried what was done there, removing the Nvidia installation and leaving WIN7 to install the driver automatically. This is bothersome to begin with since this way I lose the NVIDIA settings app, and consequently the ability to tweak every single graphic property. Either way, it didn't work. As soon as I played an MP3 and loaded up the DPC Latency Checker I got a big red 27184?s bar just by messing with the DPC Latency Checker's own window size, as well as many other yellow 1500-2000?s bars randomly. The clicks are still audible, both when these bars appear, but also when they don't sometimes.

Anything else? Any specific BIOS setting I might've missed? ie. the 'PCI Latency Timer' is set to 32 right now. It was at 64 initially but the change didn't help.

I'm monitoring the DPC Latency.

It's usually at 300-360?s. When a click/dropout happens I'll get a single red bar at around 25000-35000?s.
I have heard clicks without having it reflect as a red bar on the DPC Latency monitor though...

Any idea how I can debug what's causing these occasional peaks?

I had been using my FF400 successfully for almost an year under Windows Vista x64.

Today I moved on to Win7 x64 and had a hell of a day trying to get the Fireface 400 to work as smooth as it was under Vista, with no luck.

I'm getting clicks and dropouts with playback. I didn't even get into recording, I couldn't even pass listening to an mp3 file without these issues.

It happens in one of 3 ways:

- 3 Clicks/beeps spaced evenly and shortly one after the other (as if it were a single click with a feedback of 2 echoes)
- a short dropout/moment of silence (few ms)
- a duck in volume when another app (like an IM receiving msg) plays a sound. As if it had a master compression that lowered the mp3 song playing to 'make room' for the IM sound.

I've tried the following already:

- installed the latest FF400 driver and firmware
- updated Win7 til the latest patches
- setting windows for performance (no aero or anything)
- changing to the FW legacy driver (went back and forth with the different drivers a few times)
- different buffers (from 256 to 1024 samples)
- different rates (44, 48, 96)
- enabling/disable "Allow applications to take exclusive control..." on the playback settings of windows sound properties.
- installing/reinstalling latest and previous NVidia Geforce drivers for the 9800GT
- disabling write cache on the hard drives
- setting all power options to performance (never turn off anything)
- disabling Realtek HD audio (on board sound)

My system:
- MSI P35 Platinum Combo motherboard
- Quadcore @ 3.0ghz
- 8gb ram ddr2
- Nvidia Gforce GT9800

Help would be greatly appreciated, as right now I don't know what else to do.
I'm kinda bummed out that everything worked nicely in Vista, an OS most people badmouthed, and yet doesn't work on Windows "the miracle" 7.

Anything I might have overlooked?
If I need to supply any other info just let me know and I'll reply ASAP.

Thank you for your time.
Thiago.