"I just picked up a new M-Audio Quatro USB audio interface for my PC and have been having some intermittent problems with clicks and pops. What can I do?"

There are a few steps to take to optimize your system for the Quatro or any other USB based audio interface.

Network cards and devices such as print monitors can cause interference with USB audio, the resulting effect being clicks and pops in your audio performance. As stated in the "Theory of Operation" section of the Quattro manual, it requires all of the USB bandwidth, so definitely do not have any active USB devices attached when using the Quattro. If you experience clicks and pops in your audio tracks, consider temporarily disabling network cards or modems. Also, if your system board has an AGP graphics slot and you are using a PCI-based graphics card, purchasing an AGP graphics card and utilizing the dedicated AGP bus may improve performance both in audio and graphics. Additionally, minimizing graphics use in your audio program, such as defeating waveform displays while recording, can improve performance. It is also important that you avoid running applications other than your music program while recording audio, as recording and streaming digital audio is already rather processor intensive.

Here are some other things to consider:

- A hard drive that is dedicated to audio data is recommended. With the operating system and programs on a separate drive, audio data will be placed as close to the "front" of the drive, optimizing performance. Drives with low seek times that run at a minimum of 7200 RPM are best.
- You can't be too rich or have too much RAM. It's a good idea to have at least 128MB, while 256MB or more will greatly enhance performance.