Tascam US-224 owner manual

Certain devices, such as network cards and WinModems, can cause conflicts with the native handling of USB. Should you experience such conflicts, the offending device can usually be temporarily disabled in the Device Manager. Refer to your Windows manual for detailed instructions on how to resolve conflicts.

Assuming your computer has an IDE hard disk (most do), enabling Direct Memory Addressing (DMA) on will improve performance. Some programs (such as Cubase VST) allow you to configure the DMA as enabled on install. If you’ve not already done this, here’s how to configure the DMA transfer mode: On the Windows desktop, go to the Start menu, Settings, Control Panel, System. In the System Properties window, select the Device Manager tab. Click on the plus sign next to Disk Drives, and highlight the IDE disk listing, then click on the Properties button. Check the DMA box under options. (see illustration 3.03)

Illustration 3.03 - Enabling DMA on your IDE drives

In addition, a number of simple hardware modifications and enhancements can substantially improve your computer’s handling of audio, as well as your track count and DSP capability:

Increase the amount of RAM in your system. While most digital audio software will function with a minimum of 32 MB, increasing your computer’s RAM to 96, 128 or even 256 MB will markedly improve performance.

Consider the addition of a dedicated hard disk for audio; preferably one with a high spindle rate (over 7200 RPM is recommended for most audio applications). Using different drives for program and audio data speeds up the seek time for the audio track data. (Note that simply partitioning a large drive will not have the same effect, as the computer will still be accessing the same physical drive.) For best results, add a SCSI or Wide-SCSI drive and SCSI controller card. SCSI (and particularly Wide and UW-SCSI protocol) are capable of considerably higher data transfer speeds; you’ll notice a dramatic increase in track count and in the amount of signal processing plug-ins your computer can handle. Note that some of the recent UDMA-66 drives have proven to be almost as fast (and certainly cheaper); however, they are still limited in the amount of physical drives allowed and the bus length.

If you’re presently using a PCI-based graphics card, and your motherboard has an AGP slot, consider getting an AGP-based graphics card. This will decrease traffic on the PCI bus and allow for faster screen redraws.

Special Note: For even more detail on optimizing your PC for audio, please refer to the PDF document PC_Optimization.pdf included on the US-224 CD-ROM. This document is also available on the TASCAM website.

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