Finally going PC...

G

gordone

Well-known member
Hello all,
Well I made the leap from analog (style) recording to full-blown PC recording. Was using a Yamaha MD4S for my acoustic stuff. I just purchased a Delta 44 (I hope I don't need SP/DIF later on!). Played around a bit over the weekend. I use N-Track and I love it, it remembers your mixdown settings, it is colorful, and my girlfriend thinks it looks neat! Recorded a simple 2-track folk song, vocals-AT4033, guitar KM184, both through my Great River into the Delta 44. Had some intial problems routing the inputs to tracks in N-Track, but I finally got it and recorded a nice song at 24bits/96kHz. Problem is that I actually run out of resources after just 2 tracks, each with a few effects (mainly N-Track reverb and a parametric EQ) and then DB-Audioware Mastering Limiter on the master track (which I love, no more clipping the master channel!) I have a Dell PIII 450, Win98, 128 Megs RAM. I believe that the 96 kHz is killing my CPU (I notice the CPU usage in N-Track is ~ 30% when I get that "Stopped playback, out of resources" dialog window.) I did some BBS'ing last night, and people seemed to think 96K might be overkill. Also, according the liner notes on the 3-D pre-party CD, Lynn Fuston notes that all tracking was done at 24bits but still at 44.1 to avoid downsampling later on. I'm going to try this this week (24 bits, 44.1kHz tracking) Any thoughts on this? My harddrive will also be much appreciative of using 44.1 (or maybe 48?) as I only have 4 gigs left of an 8gigger. Once I'm done paying off the Delta (and a bunch of plug-ins) I'll buy a bigger drive. BTW, even though the 24/96 song almost took down my PC, it sounded amazing! When I'm fingerpicking my guitar (a Martin D16), and I thumped the low E doing a walkdown from G-Em, it gave me goosebumps...
Thanks for any thoughts on the subject from you PC recording veterans.

-Evan Gordon
 
I would think that a PIII-450 with 128 MB RAM would allow you more than a mere two tracks of audio even at 24/96. What's your hard drive situation?

-AlChuck
 
I have a 8 gig drive that came with the Dell. My dell is the XPS version so I'm guessing it's somewhat high performance, but I'm not too sure about any details of the HD.

-Evan "Wishin' I was home to play with my new toy"
 
Wow, an 8GB drive isn't going to get you very far with serious recording. Even at 24/44.1 I've got songs getting close to 1GB of wav files, and all of 'em are at least 500MB. An "out of resources" error would indicate that it ran out of memory, or probably more accurately *virtual* memory that it's trying to use on the hard drive. The small drive could very well be the problem, and I hope it is because otherwise N-Track is a resouce hog (never used it myself). I just got Logic Audio and I ran a little test session playing back 8 tracks with one or two effects and EQ on every track with no problem, and I only have a Celeron overclocked to 375 with 128MB RAM.
 
I used some of the earlier versions of N-track, and it tended to bog my system - not sure about the newer versions.
There is probably a primer posted to this site about how to optimize your PC for recording - check into that - you should be able to get more than 2 tracks even if it is @ 96kz - If your CPU usage is only @ 30%, take a look the hard drive.
 
I know that this may be trivial but try defragging a couple of times. I have never gotten any 'Out of resources' messages in N-Track when I used with my old PIII500/256RAM but when I tried to find the limit, I noticed that the recorded tracks were shorter at playback when I played many tracks at once. It sounded like it didn't have time to play all samples and simply skipped them. When I defragged, I saw that my data was split up in atoms. After a few runs with diskeeper, the problem was gone. I had no problems with over 10 tracks in 24/96. That was on a 7200rpm IDE disk but even if you have a 5400rpm disk, I cannot see how it could make that much difference.

Try these two articles and see if you can find an answer:
http://prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles/9DC930FCE2658C6F862565ED0078AEF1
http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles/37CF0883DA091849862565D300788E6E

Good luck

/Ola
 
Thanks for all your replies, I'm going to work on cleaning up my HD. I did seem to have better luck last night with 24bit/44.1kHz, and it still sounded really good.

Later!

-Evan
 
Try checking your hard drive's performance. I had similar problems last year on my 200 MHz Pentium MMX with Cakewalk. Cakewalk in their tech supoport FAQ says, "your audio hard disk must have an "uncached" or "sustained" transfer rate of 3.1 MB per second or higher. A free program called WinTune is available from http://www.winmag.com that will test your hard drive performance and report your uncached transfer rate." I used that and discovered my machine was giving me well below that. I had a UDMA33 drive so I bought a Promise Ultra66 drive controller and I had much better results (though not better enough to stop me from rebuliding the whole box into a PIII-700 several months later...).

Another way to test your sysyem is to use the Echo Reporter software -- similar to Wintune but more specifically tailored for DAW purposes. You can get this from http://www.echoaudio.com/ -- click on Downloads, scroll down and look for Echo Reporter.
 
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