Pc beginning to give up the ghost?

S

ste20man

New member
Hi all! :)

I've been working on my first self recorded song for about a month now learning a lot of stuff as I go.

I'm coming up against a problem that when I'm using a lot of audio clips plus many instances of different plugins I'm beginning to get stuttering in the sound as it plays.

I think this can only be my PC not having enough power to run what I'm asking it to.

My basic PC specs are:

Pentium Dual-Core CPU E5400 @2.7Ghz @2.7Ghz
4Gb RAM(3.24Gb usable)
1Tb Hard Drive
Windows 32-bit OS

I can't upgrade to more RAM as the OS is 32-bit.

Is this going to be a new computer needed fix?

I'm not sure how to max out more juice.

Cheers for your ideas, Ste.
 
There are some options before you'd need to upgrade.
First off, minimise the workload for the computer.
If you have antivirus running, disconnect the net and completely quit the AV software.

Close everything that's unnecessary. Messenger software, toolbars, anything that's running and doesn't need to be.
Go to start > run > and type msconfig
Go to the startup tab and deselect anything you recognise that isn't essential. That will stop them from loading when you boot.

Same goes for hardware. Bluetooth, wifi, anything like that can be turned off if you aren't using it.

Audio wise, you could render some of the tracks that you're happy with to reduce the number of real time effects.
If you have vsts like pianos or drums you could render those to a wav file and disable the original midi track and vst plug.

If you're done with recording, you can turn up the hardware buffer size. This usually increases performance a good bit but will introduce latency, so it's no good if you're going to be recording some more on the session.

If you have a few instances of the same reverb or eq, you could put that effect on an aux track and bus several things to it.
That way you're using one copy of a plug instead of several.

All these little things help.
A defrag never goes a miss too if you're in a spot.
Is the hdd usb? If it is, consider recording to an internal sata drive or a firewire drive.

Hope that helps.
 
First off, how many is many? There's a limit for every computer.
Seems like you have a fairly decent setup that can do a fair bit though.
Are you using the same plugin on its own channel when you can? Only using another plugin for a different function?
I'd do as Steen said, definitely. Optimising for recording and audio work in general.
 
Cheers guys, some great tips there.

Had totally forgotten about rendering tracks down. Think that will really help out on power terms.

Have been using aux channels for groups like dist guitars. All good stuff.

Thanks again, Ste. :)
 
The above are all good ideas. I'll add one: if your PC has a network card, either wired or wireless, disable it before you start recording.

I would think your PC is plenty fast enough for what you are doing.
 
Hi RWhite.

I can get all the parts in, like guitar and singing. It's just a bit of a stretch when I'm running all the clips together with ezdrummer and other higher end process' plus then EQ and Comp. etc.

Some great tips. I can work around it all.

Come to think of it, I didn't know how to comp together a single track(guitar for example) so I'm running 15(say) insert tracks in the mixer for guitar. That's the same for vox and others so in the end I'm running 90 inserts.

It could have been much easier if I could have permanently comped each together but I didn't know how.

It may be that this wouldn't effect the overall %age workload on FL, as it's essentially the same audio, comped or not. But then again, it may, this is my first ever home recording attempt so obviously a lot to learn!

Cheers for all input, Ste.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top