I need advice on a PC recording set up

J

jant

New member
Hello. I have a Celeron 400mhz, 9.6gb hard drive, 96mb ram Hewlett Packard Pavilion PC. I am using the Delta 66 sound card and using Cakewalk 8 as my sequencer. I am getting glitches, pops, and freeze ups using 2-3 audio tracks. I need some advice on optimizing my system for at least 8 audio tracks along with some midi tracks and plug-in effects. Someone suggested a separate IDE drive and more ram. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. thanks, James
 
Jant,
It seems you've got enough horsepower to be doing some decent multitracking. You may want to check your harddrive properties to make sure you have plenty of free space available. In CW go to options/clean audio disk to delete unwanted honkin' wave files. Also check audio options in start/control panel/settings/multimedia for proper config. Go to windows/temp internet files and clean it out. At some point cruise over to http://www.echoaudio.com and download the echo reporter, it will tell you what you can expect of your current rig.
 
hey there B , this sounds stupid , but is DMA checked in your harddrive propertis ???
ive heard a few things about the name brand pc's not being that great , but i cant back that up ...
like B said , seems like u should be able to run a few tracks , not just three... theres a program out there that rates your harddrive , (spparently) lets you know how many tracks your harddrive can handle... Is that three tracks on record ?? or is that , for example , two on playback and one record?? i was just wondering if those soundcards are full duplex??
well good luck with it ..
spider
 
I'm using the Delta 66 also on a Cele 500 with 128 RAM, it is full-duplex and It's worked fine on my machine. Is your hard drive a 7200 RPM? Also, going up to 128 on the RAM might help too.
 
Don't forget to delete any unecessary junk from your system tray. I can't tell you how much more smoothly things ran once I cleaned up my background applications. I have 128 MB RAM, but otherwise a similar set-up. I can get 12 audio tracks and effects in n-track with no problem, so you should be able to get 8 in CakeWalk.

MikeDog
 
That remindes me, if you are running Win'98 do a msconfig command at the run line. Check out the start up group, make sure you have no duplicates or things checked that you dont need. Also right-click on My Computer, click Properties, then click the File System's button. Changing it from a desktop computer to a network server makes it a bit faster and frees up resources. (it will require a reboot - hey, its windows!)
 
What I meant was . . .

Hey Spider,
One should always be aware of the space left on the hard drive. If you are low on free space, your pc will not be running at peak performance level. To check - left click the "my computer" icon on the desktop. Right click explore.
Go to your C drive (usually) and click properties. You should see a pie chart of the disk capacity and available space. Even with my 6 gigger I have to do this quite frequently cause I am running (barely), on about 5% free space or 300Meg.
 
Many thanks for your replies. One thing nobody touched on was how valuable having a dedicated hard drive is. Would you recommend it or is it not that necessary? thanks, Jant
 
yeah - I have a second drive I assign for wavedata and I have'nt done any of the things they've all recommended and it plays back 12 - 14 tracks OK :D
 
scsi or internal ?

A dedicated drive is a high priority on my list. I think scsi is the way to go, not sure though.
 
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