Troubleshooting – M-AUDIO Digital Recording Interface Delta 44 User Manual

Page 32

Advertising
background image

this were a real recording situation and you wished to add other instruments as
overdubs, you might want to combine recorded tracks to one stereo pair of outputs
(WavOut 1/2 Delta-44, for example). This would ‘free up’ several channels for
monitoring the overdubs.

Troubleshooting

This section addresses potential problems that can occur in all operating system
environments, with emphasis on hardware troubleshooting. Within the PC
environment there are a limited number of hardware resources (I/O addresses, IRQs,
and DMA channels) available for use. Since audio cards require many resources,
most audio card installation problems arise from unavailable or improperly set
resources. This is important enough to repeat:

IMPORTANT: Most sound card installation problems result from
attempting to use system resources (IRQs, address locations)
already in use by other hardware (or software acting as “virtual”
hardware) in the system.

The Delta 44 has been carefully designed to minimize the number of resources
consumed (it requires just one IRQ and does not require any DMA channel
resources). It is also capable of sharing an IRQ in some cases. However, the
possibility of resource conflicts still exists due to the nature of the Windows
environment. Many resource conflicts are automatically recognized by Windows’
Plug-and-Play (PnP) system. When a resource conflict is detected, it is displayed in
the Windows Device Manager. The Device Manager places a yellow exclamation
point on top of the icon associated with the problem device. For an example of how
the Device Manager should look when a Delta 44 is successfully installed, see the
“Verifying Windows Driver Installation” section of this manual. If a yellow
exclamation point does appear over your Delta 44 icon, you may have a resource
conflict. There are several ways to approach this problem.

NOTE:

When resolving conflicts between PnP and non-PnP

devices, it is recommended to re-adjust the resource settings of
the non-PnP device first. Typically, Windows is only aware of the
resource settings of the installed PnP devices and has no
information available to it for adjusting the PnP devices’
resources around those of the non-PnP devices. The exceptions
to this are when: (1) a non-PnP device has a true Windows 95/98
driver written for it, (2) the BIOS setup allows reserving an IRQ for
a legacy device as opposed to a PnP device, or (3) resource
requirements for the non-PnP device have been manually entered
into the Windows Device Manager. In these cases Windows is
aware of the non-PnP device’s resource requirements.

One of the quickest ways to change the resources assigned to a PCI card like
the Delta 44 is to merely relocate the card to another PCI slot. With the
computer’s power off, remove the Delta 44 from its current PCI slot, move it to

32

Advertising