PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

So, I've been using Scope 4.0 with
2pulsar cards and a scope card that
looks like they were made around 98-2000.

The program work fine, but any time I load
over 4 reverbs I get a pci bandwidth error.
I am running in win xp sp2 on an MSI K8N neo2 platinum socket 939 nF3 Ultra Motherboard
with a dual core AMD 64 and Nvidia nforce3 chipset.
I have gotten the boards on their own IRQ's and have disabled everything that I have
read of others disabling. I have updated all the drivers.
I can't set the pci latency in the bios. There is no option.
I downloaded a pci latency tool, but that didn't help either.

Are the cards just too old to work well, or is there something else I could try to not
get the pci bandwidth error?

Hello matey,

Unfortunately, the best thing to try would be a new motherboard...

Some mobos handle PCI bandwidth better than others - ie., they actually give your PCI slots something closer to the 133MHz that the PCI protocol theoretically allows, before they let something else (USB, onboard graphics, sound, ethernet, you name it) take up that bandwidth. That's why you'll find so many discussions in the 'Tech' part of this forum about motherboards!

The other thing that's probably worth mentioning is this: why are you using more than four reverbs!?! For post-production I can see that it might make sense (though I probably wouldn't use Scope for that myself), but for music it would seem to me to be a bit unnecessary - even if you were using reverbs in an 'effect' kind of way, rather than to create a natural-sounding sense of space. Perhaps you could try using them as auxiliary effects instead of inserts?

Cheers!

Chris

PS. I should probably have said earlier that Scope reverbs are much more demanding of PCI bandwidth than other Scope devices (synths, mixers and so on).

Thanks
I'll check out the tech forum.

Chris

So, the reasoning of reverbs is that I wanted to shape different subtle aspects of instruments.
But you are probably right, I suppose I could use eq's and delays, ect in front or behind the reverb signal.
I'll see how it goes mixing. I just got excited when I heard you could do all this processing in scope.
I happened upon these cards, because they were sitting in my father-in-laws basement not being used.
When he told me how great they were I tried to get them running. I realize now that Scope is a whole world in itself.
But somehow it keeps sucking me in and my curiosity won't let me rest until I optimally get it running which looks like
could take some time.
Have you found scope to be useful compared to other mediums for recording and mixing?

Chris