Cakewalk PA6

[Bomber]

Hi Dooders,

Please don't laugh, I bought Cakewalk PA6 off a friend of mine for a £5. To use on my aging P200 with 320MB of ram and a 10Gig hard drive.

The midi bits work fine however I am having some problems with recording real audio i.e. my guitar using my Boss GT-6. I am using a SB 64 gold and I have read that these don't work well with Cakewalk as the drivers are bum.

Any advice on making this setup work would be appreciated as I presently don't have any cash to upgrade to a better system.

cheers rockers

[AlChuck]

The problem isn't bum drivers exactly, they should work OK. The AWE 64 Gold (I hope that's the one you have) can record while you listen back to what you've already played, but only if the playback stream is reduced in quality so the old creaky non-PCI hardware can have a prayer of keeping up with the streams of audio data. Therefore what you hear of what you've already laid down when you are recording sounds like shitola. (If the backing tracks are all MIDI parts, then you don't have that problem).

Another impediment is that the AWE 64's ability to load Sound Fonts is limited by using on-board memory. The out-of-the-box card has -- was it 4 MB? -- of on-board memory, so you can't use a lot of Sound Fonts. It is expandable up to about 32 MB but the memory modules are proprietary and expensive if they are even available any more (though perhaps you might find someone who will give them to you if they no longer use the AWE card). At that point is becomes a much cheaper option to buy the SB Live or Audigy card (assuming your PC isn't so old that it does not have a PCI bus).

Also, if your hard drive is too slow, you might have great difficulty getting any more than three or four tracks of audio. You can always submix erverything you do to a pair of stereo tracks, archive the originals, and continue, but it is a hassle.

And pretty much forget about plug-ins, if they are even available through PA 6's interface (I think maybe not, but it has been several years).

[Bomber]

Thanks Alchuck,

I have and SB live 5.1 that I can borrow, so I'll try that and see what happens.