Major clicking popping and distortion in cubase vst/32 5.1

[MuZiKUnHeRd]

Ok, for starters, i just recieved my cubase, halion, and wavelab. Right now i'm just using a shure 58 and direct-pro lx6 card and box all running into my computer, which is a Dell dimension 8100 series. It has a pentium 4 1.3 gig, 128mb of ram (booooo) and a 20 gig harddrive (looks like i have a lil upgrading to do, huh?) running on Windows ME.
Anyways, (i'm sort of new at this DAW thing so bare with me) when i try to record or even hear anything through cubase using my direct pro as the output and input it gives me a crazy amount of crackling and popping to the point of where it sounds like massive distortion. What's up with that. I'm pretty sure that it's not a card issue because when i go through the ASIO panel it sounds crystal clear. It's gotta be something in the way that my audio and midi are setup. I ran through installation instructions about a million times (exagerated) to see if i might have skipped anything but i didn't. I setup everything the manual told me to. I don't think it's anything too big. I just wanna know how to set this up. I know i'm not the only one using Aardvark cards with cubase. If any of you have any kind of idea what this could be please help. Maybe i'm not doing something right, like i said, i'm knew to this stuff. Are there any other options i should be doing. I can't even play samples in my halion! aargh!:D

[Greg Ondo]

You should probably get more memory for starters. 128 megs is almost at bare minimum. Memory is so expensive tha you should stock up. I have seen 1 gigabyte of PC 133 SDRAM for $80.

In regards to the clicking and popping that you are describing where do you have the latency set for the ASIO buffer sizes in the Aardvark control panel. You may want to try to raise the latency to see if that make a difference. The latency that an audio card can produce is determined by a number of factors including, CPU speed, memory and quality of the driver.

Give those suggestions a try and let me know how it works for you.

Greg

[MuZiKUnHeRd]

Hey Greg,

Thanks for the reply, i've already found the problem. I called up sweetwater tech support and they got in touch with Aardvark and said it's something with the soundcard conflicting with my Dell ethernet card. For some reason Aardvark cards are like that with the ethernet card dell computers have. I'm going to a computer store tomorrow. I don't think for my setup i'll need anything more than half a gig of ram so i'm gonna go pick up 2 256's and add those to my previous 128mb and see how that works. SHould be more than enough. Also i'll add a different ethernet card (for now i'm just disabling it in the bios when i use cubase) and also an additional 40 gig hard drive! Should be a beast of a home setup don't you think?

Thanks, justin.