With my new studio setup I decided that my older pc should start to earn it’s keep as an effects farm.
That is to say use either Reaper’s Reamote or FX Teleport.
My older pc is an ABIT AV8 3rd Eye motherboard with a dual core processor and 4gb ram.
It was running windows 7 64bit to address the extra memory.
I set it up as a slave with reaper’s reamote and started reaper on my main daw.
I inserted a slave VSTi – Computer Music’s Dominator – and that’s when it went badly.
It stuttered, it groaned, it crashed.
I checked my network, I checked my lan card, I checked my Main Daw(running windows 8)
I couldn’t figure it out so I turned to google.
Within minutes I’d figured out that one of the PC’s was struggling with something called DPC latency.
I downloaded Latencymon and checked my main daw – windows 8 seems to have very high dpc latency – around 1000us – my Windows 7(older pc) was through the roof – over 30,000us.
I tried everything, checked the drivers, removed my pci lan card, disabled everything – graphics card, sound card, ethernet card – looked in bios.
Nothing helped.
So I decided to get drastic.
I wiped my old pc and installed my original version of Windows, Windows XP professional 32bit.
With my original drivers disc I installed the best drivers for the job.
Run DPC Latency Checker again and it’s working, under 30us and better still it works with FX Teleport.
Not sure about Reamote as I’m not sure 32bit will run as a slave to 64bit – I’ll give that a go at some point.
But it’s fixed and I’m getting excellent results.
Conclusion.
I’m no expert, I just like to tinker and I’m a bit like a dog with a bone but I believe this is down to a driver problem.
My older pc’s motherboard didn’t like Windows 7 for audio – my onboard lan card installed as a different card which never worked properly, this I think then put the hoodoo on my pci lan card.
Now running XP with my onboard I have what I wanted, a fully functional FX farm pc.