Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 Hard Drive Spinning On Track

[amonte]

I've been recording for the past few years with Cakewalk Professional 7 and recently upgraded to Pro Audio 9. My computer is a bit on the slow side (Pentium 233) and I'm using a SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold Card, but I figured I'd take the plunge. Pro Audio 9 works, with one minor exception - when I first start recording a track and don't begin playing, the sound of the hard drive spinning is recorded to the track. It's down extremely low, but it is noticeable.

I tried adjusting a few settings in Cakewalk, but nothing resulted from it. I also tried this same experiment in Cool Edit 96 to see if it was a PC or sound card issue and I didn't get the hard drive. I tried muting the inputs from the sound card to see if they would still appear and they did. The only other option I can come up with is opening up the PC and moving the soundcard as far away from the hard drive as possible in the PC.

Has anyone experienced this before? If not, does anyone have any other suggestions for getting this to stop? Thanks.

 

[Paul881]

Amonte wrote:

the sound of the hard drive spinning is recorded to the track

You are suggesting that its via your soundcard, sort of internally generated noise. This is a new one on me. I can't see why changing software will suddenly induce this noise to appear. Are you sure its the sound of your hard disk, and not noise from your soundcard?

The most likely explanation is that the AWE 64 is a half duplex card meaning that it cannot record and playback at the same time. It kinda gets over this problem by filling the playback with noise when recording. Usually, when you save the track and then play it back, its okay, the noise is not recorded. But not always, I only noticed this when I went from GT demo to Cakewak Express 8.0.

I had the same problem with my AWE64 before I upgraded to the Live!

You can get a Live! value for around $60, you'll notice the difference.

 

[amonte]

Thanks for the input, but I don't think that's it.

It's definately not the Sound Card producing the sound - it's the actual sound of the hard drive spinning. I know this because if I hit record in Cakewalk, I can here the hard drive churning - this is the exact sound that's appearing on the track.

The AWE 64 is a full duplex card, but as you mentioned, it does drop the quality of audio playback down to 8 bit when recording. When I swich off the simaltaneous record and playback, I still get the noise, so this can't be the problem either.

Again, I don't think it's the soundcard - it works with other digital audio apps when recording. It might just be that Cakewalk is forcing my system to work harder then it can handle.

 

[heinz]

Most likely this is internal noise generated by your pc, a soundblaster is not all that shielded compared to higher end audio cards, and depending on your system setup you will hear mechanical devices like your HDD generate audible noise on your recordings.

It may be that your soundcard is located near the noise generating entity, try moving it to a slot away from any other cards or hard drive (if possible) and see what happens.