PTF on VIA KT133?

[luisi]

has someone experienced a succesful
installation on a mainboard with KT133?

thanx

[sound padawan]

I wouldn't call it "successful," exactly, but after browsing a few posts in this section of the forum it seems that I'm having better luck than a few of the users with "supported" hardware. Here's the setup, plus the symptoms:

Athlon Thunderbird 700MHz
K7T Pro ATX VIA motherboard (KT133 chipset)
w/AC'97 audio controller & integrated SoundBlaster
256M PC133SDRAM
20GB Maxtor IDE HD (7200rpm)
Win98 SE

Where's the sound card? Well (try not to laugh too hard), I've been using the motherboard's VIA AC'97 audio controller for low-end Windows stuff. I enabled the semi-SoundBlaster in the hopes that PTF might like it better, but I get the same symptoms with both it and the AC'97: PTF loads, I get the standard i/o rates out of sync error, I open a session, I import a .wav or two...and they sound wretchedly clipped and intermittently wow/fluttery. (The demo sounds similarly bad.) Sample buffer size is at 8192, and I've tried giving it up to 85% of the processor. Some other things I've noticed upon running PTF:

+ I lose use of the "Windows" key upon activation. The "Alt" shortcuts to the menu bar only (Alt-F for File, for example) no longer work. (Alt shortcuts to other functions seem to work; just not the menu bar.)

+ The system hung on me once when I applied a Reverse to a fairly small region. I haven't been able to repeat this (although with the imported .wavs sounding as they do, I've had other things on my mind than *trying* to crash the app).

Are these all just chipset-based incompatibilities, or do I stand a chance of actually getting this running? luisi, are you having similar problems, or am I alone on this one? Digidesign coders/testers, can you offer some of the problems or errors to be expected from this specific mainboard/chipset? I see from the rest of the board that there are a lot of PTF-hungry Athlon/Celeron users out there, and some have even gotten it to work (albeit not with KT133) -- can those of us in the "unsupported" category expect a more broadly-compatible revision anytime soon?

I've been giving serious thought to setting up a Pro Tools station at home after using Digi's native ones at school and work (and yes, a free and portable Pro Tools would be a great addition as well), but I'm disappointed that so many platforms -- even professedly-compatible ones -- are out in the cold right now.

Many thanks for any and all suggestions from the wiser masses,

sp‡

[Kenn LeGault]

Hi sound padawan,

Thanks for the detailed post. I have a few responses to some of your observations:

1) About the "Windows Key" -- on the Mac, there are 4 modifier keys (alt, ctrl, shift, and "command" or "apple" key). On Windows, there are only 3. Since the original version of Pro Tools was ported from the Mac, and since there are so many keyboard shortcuts that are in the product, we needed to add another modifier key somehow. We decided to temporarily "borrow" the Windows key and make that the fourth modifier. So, while PT is running, the Windows key is intercepted by PT and will not popup the Start Menu like usual. Hopefully this won't be a big issue for most people.

2) About the common Windows "accelerator" key combinations like "Alt-F X" for File/Exit or "Ctrl-X" for exit -- again, since PT came from the Mac world, and since many people use PT on Windows and Mac machines, we decided that it was best to preserve the keyboard shortcuts for PT operations rather than Windows Menu Accelerators. This can take some getting used to since it's clearly not a "standard" windows behavior, but we thought the benefits outweighed the loss of a few common menu accelerators.

I've seen a few reports of crashes while using AudioSuite (non-realtime) processing plug-ins. We'll look into this problem and try to find a fix for the next release. Thanks for the info.

If you're seeing sync errors/warnings, please read through some of the other posts (do a search on sync). Improper control panel settings are usually to blame and these problems have been fixed by many DUC posters. Wow and flutter or noise are often related to clock problems on the audio card (like if the clock is set to "digital/external" but there is no digital device connected to the digital input.)

I hope this helps. Good Luck!

Regards,
Kenn LeGault
Digidesign

[This message has been edited by Kenn LeGault (edited November 10, 2000).]