24 inputs 24 outputs DAW

beatleme

New member
Hi, my name is Salvador Gutierrez and I have 3 824 cards installed in my computer. I am running Windows NT Workstation 4.0 service pack 4. My computer has 128MB PCI 133 ram, 550MHZ Pentium III overclocked to 800,and a ATI RAGE 128 pci vidwo card, all connected to my Soyo 6Y-6BA+IV with the latest bios upgrade installed.I have installed the UDMA drivers and verified this in the registry. My programs hard disk (Quantum Fireball CR) is connected to its own IDE Channel as is my data hard disk (Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 40). They are connected via the UDMA 33 ports. I disabled UDMA66 on both of my hard disks to run on UDMA33, as I was having problems with the 824's when I connected them in UDMA66 mode. The hardisks are formated in Fat16
mode, with 64k clustering for improved sustained speed. I have a Mitsumi CD burner connected to the UDMA 66 port.
Now the problem. I have no problem when I mix 24 tracks in my Cool Edit Pro program and output out of two 824 outputs, and over this mix record 8 824 inputs at once, giving me a total of 32 tracks. No skipping,no noises, no problem. When I send the 24 tracks from Cool Edit Pro without mixing to my mackie 32 channel board INDIVIDUALLY so I can do the mixing on the board and not in cool edit pro, this is when the problems hits. I can play back the 24 individual tracks and get a good mix on my board no problem. When I hit the record button so I can record 8 more tracks at once while I am playing back the 24 individual tracks, that
is when the problem occurs. I adjusted the buffering as best as I could, and I was able to hear the playback without skipping while recording. When I heard the recording, every once and a while there was a dropout....there was no signal present for like a quarter of a second on the 8 tracks that I had recorded.

I went to the performance monitor and I think I found the problem, and I am not sure if I am correct. While I recorded and played back a total of 32 individual tracks (24 824 outputs and 8 824 inputs), I measured
memory page faults/sec, % total proccessor, and % of cpu used for interrupt requests. The % total proccessor would go up 100% then drop to like 90%, then stay at 100% for a second and then drop to 90%...etc. The % of cpu used for interrupt requests would mimic exactly what the % total proccessor time
would do, except it would go from 70% to 80% and then back down to 70%....etc. The page faults per second where an average of 20. I messed with the buffeing a lot and could never get the CPU or Interrupt Request time down.

What do I do to solve this solution? Is there a solution, or is that just the way it is? Do I need to buy a dual 800 Mhz processor system? I beleive that the dropouts are due to the lack of processing power to be able to handle that many interrupt requests, but maybe you know a way around this.
 
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