Before you go and reinstall because of the "reserve range exhausted", read throught this thread:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...threadid=12357

Well, if its not software related like the OS, applications, or data, then its probably going to be the main logic board, except you have added a pci sound card correct?

i have a m-audio delta 2496 sound card, firewire card and the ati 9000 pro agp card in the pci slots. i have 1.75 gb ram and 4 internal 120 gb ata drives and a lacie d2 120 gb external firewire drive. the firewire card is from a umax scanner i used to have, but i think it is for pc's, but it worked in my g4, so i kept it in. do you think that could cause problems?

the computer is 6 months old without applecare and it has been nothing but problems. sometimes i get home from work and it is shut down. i replaced the power supply and fan with the apple program to make it quieter, but the first power supply died in one day. i forgot to mention that this is the second dual 1ghz from apple, the first was doa.

i always have such a bad experience when i call apple and i thought i might find some help here. i guess i will call, but if i tell them that i am having problems with sound, i am sure they will blame it on the third party device.

what makes you think it might be the logic board?

Well, typically the sound controller is on the logic board. Since you have an m-audio card, I doubt this is the case. Do you have any 3rd party utilities like disk warrior? If you do try running those, a lot of times diskwarrior can fix tons of software problems.

i have diskwarrior 3.0 and have rebuilt the directories numerous times since i have been having these problems.

as it is now, i am having two major sound problems.
the garbeled distortion when playing through the m-audio card to my receiver, but this only happens once in a while and is easily fixed by stoping itunes and starting it again. i am more concerned with the pops and poor sound i get coming from my soundsticks, this happens constantly and it gets really annoying! i tested the soundsticks with a powerbook g4 and they seem to be working perfectly.

i suspect it having something to do with the sound controller and i will call apple to assist me.

i appreciate all of your help and if you hear back form the guy about the m-audio card let me know.

thanks again,

charles

Yeah I just checked my email. He said that by messing with the sound cards buffer settings he was able to fix his distorted sound/latency problems. He said set the buffer on the card to a lower setting and see if that helps at all. This may not be the case with your situation, but anything is worth a shot at this point it looks like. He also mentioned m-audio's phone support is really good. Its free, but long distance charges may apply depending on where you live. That is how he fixed the problem. He ended up calling m-audio and a tech on their end helped him figure it out. Apple may not be able to help much since there are some third party devices involved. It would be 1000 times easier if I could sit in front of your computer and look at it heh. Well, try that buffer setting thing and if that does not work, maybe try calling m-audio. Hope this helps out a bit.

so i have another clue of why this might be happening when playing through my soundsticks using itunes 4.0.1.

i am working on a clean install of 10.2.6.

last night, my girlfriend was connected to my g4 over my airport network. (she has a 400mhz powerbook g4) she was working on a large photoshop file off of one of my internal ata drives in my g4 and the sound coming from itunes started getting really muffled and i heard loud pops and the sound would just cut out, really bad, until itunes just quit.

i reinstalled itunes, trashed the prefs, and rebooted, nothing fixed the problem. later last night, my friend was downloading a 400 mb file from my pure-ftpd server on my g4, same itunes problems.

it seems as if itunes cannot play when the computer is being used by another background task??? it's funny that i have dual 1ghz g4.

i know something isn't right.

Interesting, you may want to monitor your resources when playing itunes. Launch itunes, and use your computer as normal. But this time open up the terminal and type this:

For more info on the top command type:
This will show you what each process is taking up what resources. Monitor it as you go. To quit out of the top command in the terminal hit ctrl+C on your keyboard. Maybe something is taxing your HD, or RAM, or processor at certain times and causing the poor performance. Also copy/paste your results on the forum so we can get a better idea. Typically on my G4 (its a 500Mhz) itunes will take from 8 and sometimes up to 20% of the system resources. It all depends on what I am running on it. Hope this may help you figure out your problems.

this is what i got when copying a 11.9 mb file across my airport network to my ti 400 mhz powerbook. i was listening to itunes and got the muffled sound and very loud pops, it also cut out a lot. i am able to re-create this everytime and seems to happen from time to time during other background processes.

i have 1.75 gb ram, 4 120 gb drives, sound card, firewire card, old airport card. i just reinstalled 10.2.6 and the system seems to run better, except sometimes it just chooses to shut itself down.



Processes: 65 total, 2 running, 1 stuck, 62 sleeping... 195 threads 15:00:38
Load Avg: 0.50, 0.54, 0.56 CPU usage: 10.7% user, 19.8% sys, 69.6% idle
SharedLibs: num = 102, resident = 24.9M code, 2.92M data, 10.4M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 7302, resident = 111M + 19.1M private, 198M shared
PhysMem: 96.7M wired, 114M active, 763M inactive, 974M used, 818M free
VM: 5.54G + 64.3M 10726(1) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
0 kernel_tas 25.1% 0:33.93 32 0 - - - 82.0M 663M
178 Window Man 7.5% 0:30.94 4 277 698 5.30M- 53.1M 58.4M- 220M-
584 Internet E 6.9% 0:31.98 12 118 230 5.87M 13.3M 24.6M 209M
523 iTunes 6.7% 0:22.52 10 213 552 13.2M 15.8M 30.8M 222M
588 Adobe Illu 3.8% 0:14.67 4 91 429 19.4M 46.2M 56.6M 264M
632 top 3.0% 0:01.53 1 14 18 328K 348K 624K 13.6M
475 Finder 1.9% 0:18.74 6 113 231 5.45M 16.2M+ 30.5M+ 204M
174 ATSServer 1.3% 0:05.73 2 46 151 716K 4.80M 3.45M 64.9M
585 Adobe Phot 1.1% 0:09.99 5 92 637 26.1M 36.7M 52.9M 271M
553 Terminal 1.1% 0:06.34 4 98 213 1.72M 9.42M 18.3M 190M
591 Synergy 0.5% 0:03.29 2 73 189 2.57M+ 9.55M 19.6M+ 206M
495 X-Assist 0.1% 0:01.84 2 67 194 4.23M+ 9.25M 16.9M+ 191M+
476 fix_prebin 0.0% 0:35.77 1 17 564 936K 35.6M 2.22M 335M
583 Safari 0.0% 0:03.63 6 125 225 5.09M 9.49M 21.8M 195M
466 pbs 0.0% 0:03.48 2 44 31 1.12M 852K 1.94M 15.1M
474 SystemUISe 0.0% 0:02.02 4 201 255 1.98M 7.15M 19.5M 189M
576 System Pre 0.0% 0:02.28 2 91 192 3.69M 9.57M 19.4M 192M
51 kextd 0.0% 0:02.22 2 18 20 788K 676K 556K 14.9M
581 Mailsmith 0.0% 0:02.93 12 152 264 13.5M 16.7M 35.5M 221M
582 iChat 0.0% 0:01.68 2 99 165 2.02M 6.41M 16.6M 186M

one sample from top isn't very useful, overall, for pasting in here, but this one captured something disturbing...
kernel_task at 25% is never very good for prolonged periods of time. and fix_prebinding is in there (momentarily idle), too.

you should learn to observe the top report and draw conclusions about the profile of your rig (which is alive) at that particular moment.

then, examine the logs to determine what fix_prebinding is doing. i always suspect that sucker in exams, tho the load avg values don't reflect it, so i can't ascertain the veracity of this report's connection to your issues.

consider staging a test of the problem, create an account for one to remote ssh in and examine the rig while the test runs?

that a little over my head, can you tell me what a fix_prebinding and kernel_task is?

why is this happening? is it a hardware problem?

you can search here for prebinding threads.

the kernel is the OS traffic cop, the master scheduler, mother of all processes, PID 0.

don't know why it's happening, or if it's hw related. that's what we're digging about.

even on a fairly saturated rig, kernel_task usage shouldn't be that high.

like i said, you happened to "catch" something interesting in your one top capture. whether it's endemic to your reported issues remains to be seen.

repeat: consider staging a reproducible test of the problem, create an account for one to remote ssh in and examine the rig while the test runs?

[edit: the top you reported was from a fresh boot, eh? prebinding runs for several moments after boot, and that is prolly the reason for the odd top report. so, disregard this stuff and capture good data during a test of your problem]

Hmmm but would it still do that even after a clean install of 10.2.6 Merv? That is what kinda confuses me. I did some searching on why that the kernel_tas maybe hogging up resources and the only related article I could find was one about a video card driver problem that caused it. However, I do not think this problem is the same. If you reinstalled 10.2.6 clean and the problem is reproducible in a new user account, I would start testing hardware. You could also try resetting the firmware I guess as another troubleshooting step. At boot up hold down these keys cmd+opt+O+F and then type:
The system should then reboot, and all your firmware should be reset to factory default. Also did you mess with the buffer and latency settings with your m-audio card? That guy I know said thats how he fixed his problem, he lowered the buffer and his audio sounds fine now.

i have reset the nvram and reset-all a couple of times over the last weeks. i ran fsck and zapped the pram. i run disk warrior once a week on all of my drives.

i have lowered the buffer settings in the m-audio control panel and have contacted m-audio support. they may take the card back, but this is the least of my worries at this point. i use my soundsticks 90% of the time and can reproduce the problem when coping large files with afp and ftp. it also happens from time to time when i am just using adobe illustrator.

i found that disk warrior will repair my startup disk, then when i reboot i find a couple hundred files out of wack again in the graph, is this normal?

i am running top from work in a newly created user account.
i think my girlfriend is working in photoshop on my machine now, but this is what i'm getting:

Processes: 62 total, 3 running, 59 sleeping... 176 threads 11:44:51
Load Avg: 0.33, 0.52, 0.55 CPU usage: 11.9% user, 4.4% sys, 83.7% idle
SharedLibs: num = 110, resident = 26.8M code, 3.07M data, 10.7M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 9627, resident = 288M + 17.5M private, 197M shared
PhysMem: 115M wired, 135M active, 716M inactive, 966M used, 826M free
VM: 5.43G + 66.2M 13067(0) pageins, 1(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
506 iTunes 8.7% 7:56.76 11 218 606 18.8M 17.8M 37.1M 227M
527 Adobe Phot 8.1% 20:19.61 12 154 2958 184M 73.6M 230M 520M
178 Window Man 5.4% 15:23.55 4 284 874 8.52M+ 67.5M 75.1M+ 240M+
528 Adobe Illu 4.0% 18:35.46 4 91 427 19.1M 46.9M 46.7M 264M
727 top 2.7% 1:37.34 1 15 18 344K 348K 432K 13.6M
522 Internet E 0.7% 3:22.52 8 104 239 9.74M 16.1M 22.4M 214M
0 kernel_tas 0.5% 6:39.29 32 0 - - - 99.4M 689M
456 SystemUISe 0.3% 0:14.57 4 208 248 2.20M 7.84M 14.6M 189M
540 Synergy 0.1% 1:42.30 2 76 232 9.62M 11.8M 23.5M 214M
688 EPSON Prin 0.1% 1:10.84 3 101 529 3.53M 16.1M 21.6M 208M
174 ATSServer 0.1% 0:50.09 2 45 185 680K 6.86M 2.89M 107M
457 Finder 0.1% 0:43.35 3 110 186 4.55M 29.8M 35.7M 214M
515 System Pre 0.1% 0:16.47 2 96 215 4.00M 13.0M 18.2M 195M
80 update 0.1% 0:04.74 1 7 13 52K 316K 104K 1.26M
454 Dock 0.0% 0:38.69 3 125 167 1.34M 16.7M 17.9M 195M
544 httpd 0.0% 0:22.76 1 8 79 184K 2.76M 696K 19.5M
477 X-Assist 0.0% 0:11.15 2 69 274 10.0M 9.69M 18.5M 196M
535 SpamSieve 0.0% 0:10.52 2 90 189 4.07M 7.37M 12.3M 188M
476 Default Fo 0.0% 0:07.11 2 127 154 1.75M 10.2M 8.68M 197M
368 coreservic 0.0% 0:07.64 3 102 101 2.50M 19.0M 20.4M 37.0M