A lesson learned - DEFRAGMENT!!

P

Phildo

I heart guitars!
So, we'd networked my shiny new laptop *(1.8GHz, 512meg Ram - nothing special) to the main studio computer and transfered a bundle of Cubase Projects over for me to work on at home. I've downloaded a whole load of VSTis and FX recently, and so I ended up - on the particular song in question - running 28 audio tracks, a couple of instances of Autotune, two VSTis, six (!) instances of Drumagog, various delays, compressors and filters etc and 2 instances of SIR - a convolving reverb. My disk activity meter in the VST performance window was showing 60-80% and weird things were starting to happen.

So I left the machine to defrag overnight, sparked it up again this morning, and disk usage was registering at 0%. No glitches, nothing.

As I say - a lesson learned. Keep yer pooter clean'n'tidy!
 
LemonTree said:
That's Bollox!
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Nope - straight up, and I have a witness who'll be prepared to testify in any...um...internet computer court...thingy.

Which bit's bollox, incidentally???????
 
Phildo said:
As I say - a lesson learned. Keep yer pooter clean'n'tidy!
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I try to keep my pooter meticulously clean....but it has never helped out with the performance of my PC......damn. :p
 
metalhead28 said:
I try to keep my pooter meticulously clean....but it has never helped out with the performance of my PC......damn. :p
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Try a fast spin cycle on 90 degrees and don't forget the fabric conditioner!
 
Phildo said:
Which bit's bollox, incidentally???????
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0% Disk Usage.

That bit!. With 512Meg of RAM there's NO WAY all your audio can be held in the memory so the computer has to read from the disk, resulting in slightly more than 0% useage.

Unless ofcourse your song is like 2 seconds long full of duplicate tracks, otherwise it's just not possible.
 
LemonTree said:
0% Disk Usage.

That bit!. With 512Meg of RAM there's NO WAY all your audio can be held in the memory so the computer has to read from the disk, resulting in slightly more than 0% useage.
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Regardless, Windows, in its infinite wisdom, is always all too eager to toss stuff over into the page file.
 
LemonTree said:
0% Disk Usage.

That bit!. With 512Meg of RAM there's NO WAY all your audio can be held in the memory so the computer has to read from the disk, resulting in slightly more than 0% useage.

Unless ofcourse your song is like 2 seconds long full of duplicate tracks, otherwise it's just not possible.
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just what the VST meter's telling me - I mean, obviously there's got to be some disk useage, but it's not registering on the VST perf. meter



*sulks - only saying what the computer told me, like...no need to have a go...sniff...*
 
If it's a laptop, you only have one disk unless you add an external Firewire or USB2 one (recommended) and that internal disk is a slow one compared to a desktop machine - so yes, defragging is probably very helpful. You might only have to do it once though - subsequent defrags will be less efficient.

Installing Windows and its service packs creates countless temporary files which are automatically deleted but leave holes all through the disk space, it's quite a mess. So after getting a new machine and installing your programs, a defrag is a useful first step before doing any work.
 
Phildo said:
just what the VST meter's telling me - I mean, obviously there's got to be some disk useage, but it's not registering on the VST perf. meter



*sulks - only saying what the computer told me, like...no need to have a go...sniff...*
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no need to sulk, either your computer lied or you have the paradox crack of cubase where the performance meter always reads 80% CPU load and 0% disk useage nomatter what project you have open.

Cracks aren't cool on this forum
 
LemonTree said:
no need to sulk, either your computer lied or you have the paradox crack of cubase where the performance meter always reads 80% CPU load and 0% disk useage nomatter what project you have open.

Cracks aren't cool on this forum
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Nah - not a crack (I don't see the need for cracks when there's so much cool free/donation/shareware out there.) - CPU normally runs at 20-50% for 20-odd tracks of audio - depending on what plugins I'm running - the SIR convolving reverb seems to push it a fair bit higher, though.

Although I'm only running at 16-bit - no doubt 24 would eat up a fair bit of resources.

EDIT: Actually, I'm a bit pee'd off at the implication I'm using cracked gear - I've been a member of this board for a few years now, and find it to be easily the most helpful and useful recording resource I've got access to. I'm also FULLY aware of the prevailing opinion re illegal software on these pages.

I'm new to PC-based recording, and only have SX because (a) my wife got me a laptop and (b) a friend who's moved over to DP on a Mac sold me his copy. I made this post in good faith, because defragging certainly seemed to help my machine a lot, and I thought it might be worthwhile mentioning it - as I'm sure it's a process which is easy to overlook or forget.

And what's a "paradox crack"? Sounds like a Dr Who episode.
 
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