pentium 4 ..3GHZ..does nothing

[GoatsTheAnswer]

is this really not good for recording...taken I only have 512 ram ..Which I will upgrade...I can only have up to 9 audio tracks and any plugin effects just cause the program to not respond..is this the processor or the ram.....definitly do not wanna upgrade anything without knowing the real problem..Thanks for the help.....

[sixways]

What software? What hard ware? What Plug-ins?

6

[GoatsTheAnswer]

o sorry..cubase le...firebox....and reverb SIR and those types of plugins

[sixways]

How many reverbs are you using? I learned here that reverbs are really one of the most stressful plug in's you can use. I was putting reverb on 3 or 4 tracks and at 8 or 9, my PC was frozen. 2.8ghz P4 with 512 Ram.

Problem was solved by using the reverbs in an aux track and bussing what needed reverb to them.

To test this, remove the reverbs from every track and see if your PC usage goes back to normal. If you're scared of losing work, just save it as a copy and then try it.

Lemme know,
6

[legionserial]

I think the number of audio tracks you can have is more to do with your RAM.

[Halion]

If you are using a single SIR instance on every of the 9 tracks, you will get problems, since that is a very big load. Usually, I use about 2 to 4 reverb plugins for an entire project (even an 60+ track project), but I never use them as inserts, always sends or on group tracks.

[NYMorningstar]

You didn't say but you probably want to get another hard drive and work off it instead of the one that has your programming on it.

[simc6440]

I would try the freeze effect to pre-process the track , that takes of the load too.

[LemonTree]

I'm guessing it's probably reading from the drive that is your weak link

I have a P4 3.00GHz Northwood and 1GHz of DDR400 ram 800Mhz FSB. Cubase SX. I have no problem streaming 24 tracks at 24/44.1 out to an outboard mixer with 6 to 8 instances of SIR reverb and up to 4 instances of Drumagog on inserts, although those ARE the most CPU hungry plugin I've come across.

I have a seperate S-ATA drive for recorded audio. The machine was built for audio, there is no network connections, USB devices, com port devices etc. XP Pro has been completely stripped down to the bare bones. When I boot up the computer the only thing running in the system tray is my M-Audio soundcard's control pannel

512Meg of ram isn't a lot for a DAW using XP if XP hasn't been stripped down but it should be enough to give you a MUCH higher track count than you have. I definately think your bottleneck must be the drive your audio tracks are on

[studiomaster]

Originally Posted by LemonTree

I'm guessing it's probably reading from the drive that is your weak link

I have a P4 3.00GHz Northwood and 1GHz of DDR400 ram 800Mhz FSB. Cubase SX. I have no problem streaming 24 tracks at 24/44.1 out to an outboard mixer with 6 to 8 instances of SIR reverb and up to 4 instances of Drumagog on inserts, although those ARE the most CPU hungry plugin I've come across.

I have a seperate S-ATA drive for recorded audio. The machine was built for audio, there is no network connections, USB devices, com port devices etc. XP Pro has been completely stripped down to the bare bones. When I boot up the computer the only thing running in the system tray is my M-Audio soundcard's control pannel

512Meg of ram isn't a lot for a DAW using XP if XP hasn't been stripped down but it should be enough to give you a MUCH higher track count than you have. I definately think your bottleneck must be the drive your audio tracks are on

But isnt it hard to keep MSN and other "attractive" applications away?

[staring]

Keep away those IM ....

GoatsTheAnswer, upgrade your RAM to 1G at least! Anyway, what's your CPU speed?

[ErikTheRed]

Cubase SX (any version - but the higher you go the worse it gets) is a bit of a memory hog. I have 1Gb in my 2.8P4 and it works well enough. I am about to go to 2Gb on my new machine. I have a mate who uses a MAC G5 and he has 3Gb of RAM.

I would only ever configure a normal user PC (Word, Outlook, Excel, Ienternet Explorer) with a minimum of 512Mb. Even then I'd reccomend 1GB because it makes the machine run smoother because there is less activity in the swap file.
You can check memory usage and swap file activuty easily on any XP system. Type <crtl><alt><del> and click the Performance tab that pops up. Here you can see CPU load, memory usage and swapfile use. If the PF Usage graph is exceeding the Physical Memory (K) number then you should go and buy more memory.

You should run this little test before and during your Cubase sessions BUT NOT during an important recording session.

[SuicideNote]

Hey DAW users who use Doze XP! If you haven't done these performance tweeks http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.php you are not getting the most out of your workstation.

Of course, you should disable your network controller and run msconfig (Start > Run > msconfig) and disable all startup appz. Also do not run your antivirus appz when recording, actually you should probably uninstall it.

SX should run fine on any P4 machine. It ran it just fine on a P3 600 with 768 RAM before I upgraded to a Athlon 64.

Make sure you defrag all drives at least weekly if not every night, even if the Defrag console tells you that your machine doesn't need it.

[ErikTheRed]

Originally Posted by SuicideNote

Hey DAW users who use Doze XP! If you haven't done these performance tweeks http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.php you are not getting the most out of your workstation.

Of course, you should disable your network controller and run msconfig (Start > Run > msconfig) and disable all startup appz. Also do not run your antivirus appz when recording, actually you should probably uninstall it.

SX should run fine on any P4 machine. It ran it just fine on a P3 600 with 768 RAM before I upgraded to a Athlon 64.

Make sure you defrag all drives at least weekly if not every night, even if the Defrag console tells you that your machine doesn't need it.

I'd agree with all of the above but please do not forget to download the MS updates and to scan your PC for viruses and spyware.

A good strategy is to have 2 hard disks. One is for XP booting and the other is for data.

Now if you also install XP on the data disk, you can use that as your general boot machine with all the anit-virus and auto updates, etc. The other boot volume is a full XP install but only has SX and maybe a couple of other utilities installed. Microsoft will let you do this since it is still installed on the same machine. Now you will have 2 different configurations to boot from. Music production and general PC work.