Digital Performer and OasysPCI

I've spent quite some time trying to get Digital Performer to work cleanly on a PowerBook, under MacOS 9, driving a Korg OasysPCI card in a Magma PCI Cage. I've had various audio problems, including clicks and pops, buzzing, etc. I have two PowerBooks (a 500Mhz Pismo and a 1GHz Titanium), two Magmas (a 1-slot, and a 2-slot-with-SCSI), and two OasysPCI's. None of the various combinations of bits seemed to quite work.

I'd already noticed that the problem was worse when the OasysPCI was heavily loaded (i.e. a lot of algorithms loaded into the DSP's), so I decided to configure a two-PowerBook setup: the Titanium would run Performer, and use its OasysPCI purely as a multichannel sound card, whereas the Pismo would run purely as an OasysPCI host, with a lightpipe connection between the two cards. Getting real-world audio into and out of the system would be via analogue breakout on the Titanium's OasysPCI.

This almost worked; with the first OasysPCI effectively "empty", the audio artifacts were almost gone; however, "almost" isn't good enough.

I wondered whether the OasysPCI editor program was part of the problem; so I stopped running it on the Titanium. Voila: end of problem, clean audio throughout.

The only remaining issue was one of monitoring: how to monitor audio being generated in the "slave" OasysPCI as well as recorded into Digital Performer. Answer: the OasysPCI's internal "zero-latency" hardware mixer, which can be controlled via the ASIO control panel without the editor running. Whenever I've used this in the past I've had stability issues, but I tried it on the Titanium and everything seemed fine.

I'll do some more tests and report back.

I suspect Digital Performer's crash-on-quit problem remains.