sound skipping and popping

[nolane]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to this whole recording thing (and even newer on this board) so if I ask something in the wrong place or whatever, it's not intentional...

Here's my setup:

Windows XP
Celleron 500Mhz
Sonar 1
256MB RAM
20Gig HD (5400 rpm?)
MOTU896 audio interface thru an Adaptec FireWire card

When I record 2 or 3 inputs at a time (stereo micing a guitar and doing 1 on the vocal) things are fine. However when I try to record using all 7 or 8 inputs I'm having the worst time getting usable tracks. I either get a hiccup/skipping problem at random or the sound will "pop" sometimes.

It *seemed* like the popping was only coming from tracks recorded with a direct line-in (electric guitars and bass, i ran out of mics). And the skipping was more an over-all problem. Like, every track was getting a skipping issue while they were all being written to disk at that exact point in time. Sound would just STOP for fractions of a second. (I hope that makes some sense).

I've tried playing with Read/Write caching, the Latency slider, adjusting the size and quantity of I/O buffers, and I turned OFF the unused input/output on my MOTU (it was set "on" for the ADAT input, i figured that may be using some CPU power).

I've got all the typical settings tweaked for audio performance on the machine. No antivirus software, no other programs running, virtual memory, file IO, swap files, everything is tweaked for maximum power being given to Sonar. So I don't think it's a common thing I'm missing. The drive is defragged, etc.

If anyone has ideas or suggestions, that'd be great. Thanks for the help.

[moskus]

That's not the fastest machine in the world for a MOTU-interface... A new harddrive would be first in line...

But have you disabeled Input Monitoring (Options -> Audio -> Input Monitoring)? Nothing eats system resources like Input Monitoring...

[nolane]

I had input monitoring off for all the channels. Turning them all on didn't seem to make the problem any worse.

When we first started recording yesterday's session, it was good for about 4 minutes solid of all 8 lines going (the song is very long - jam-style band) into the board. Then at around 4 minutes, it skipped once.

Playing with the IO and buffer settings didn't seem to make it any better. If anything, it got worse.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[James Argo]

Yup... You have a very good machine. But I think your task (record 7~8 tracks at once) could require faster HD (get 7200rpm), and more RAM instead of 256. And Celeron... hmmm... I don't think it's half worth than the original PII / PIII, at least on multimedia technology they implemented on the chip. I believe you did a good tweak for the machine But if you haven't heard it...
www.musicxp.net
will help you give a hints on what to tweak...


Jaymz