Dropout after 1 hour with 80% drive space free ? Please help

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In Pro Audio 9.03 using a 1010:

I can record a 1 hour stereo track of 24/96 audio with very low levels in the CPU/disk fill meters. At about the 1 hour mark boom,
DROPOUT.

Hard drive full? No, 80% free after recording.

Background processes? Bare minimum.


If you have experienced the purport of this type of thing or have any info. it would be very helpful if you'll post,

Thanks,
Jeff
 
recording

I am also having troube with Guitar Tracks Pro. Just recently installed.. have 128 mb, 10gig disk free. Will dropout after about an hour or so. Have not yet been successful in recording more than 1 track (but I am a newbie). I wonder if it's a soundcard issue. I'm using the sound card that came with my laptop - ESS Allegro and microphone input. Any thoughts?
 
You recorded a solid hour before getting a dropout? Man I think you're doing pretty well! :-)

Mulling over the reasons why it could be (pure speculation):

1) Your hard drive maybe experienced some fragmentation which grew worse over the period of time you were recording. Eventually it couldn't sustain the throughput while writing to multiple zones of your drive simultaneously

2) Virus software, network connection, screen saver, or some other non-Cakewalk event interrupted the recording process.

3) You ran out of RAM and disk swap space while recording. Check that your swap file is on a drive with at least as much space available as the track file you are recording

4) Your hard drive got hot from the long sustained write and hiccupped

5) Cakewalk hiccuped. Happens. I have a 9GB Ultra-wide SCSI3 drive dedicated to Sonar audio exclusively, on a dual P3-600 system and 512mb of RAM. I still get dropouts occasionally (few but they occur every once in a while)
 
Thanks. Nice problem to have compared to the graphics card and usb hurdles of the past week.

Everything seems to get harder with multiple drives - confusing distinctions in optimizing virtual memory. Windows 98 calls for min max values entered in KB. So I entered 256000 per the instructions in the TASCAM page. My system.ini file has nothing for vcache, etc.

Anyone worked with that using multiple drives?
By the way the TASCAM link I found here at the BBS is:

http://www.tascam.com/support/faq/pc_optimize/6_optimize.cfm

Thanks again,
Jeff
 
Wow... a whole hour!

I have the Direct Pro 24/96 and Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.03 combination, and got a lot of droupouts and sync problems until I updated the 24/96 drivers. Between that and a bunch of system tweaks, I've reduced their frequency (though it still happens from time to time).

I am also using an older computer (PII 333, generic HD), so it doesn't surprise me.

But an hour of uninterrupted recording sounds very good - I haven't had cause to record a track even close to that long yet. :)
 
Are talking about a Delta 1010 soundcard?

If so, can you tell me about it?
I am thinking of getting one.
Does it sound good?
Does it record good?
Do you like it?
What don't you like about it?
Would you get something else if you could?
Thanks alot,
A1MixMan
 
swap file tips

Hey Teacher and 11Meta,

Swap file setup with a multiple-drive system isn't all that different to configure... in fact you get more options.

In a good scenario your swap file is a large permanent file that resides in a whole contiguous (non-fragmented) area of your hard drive. In a best-case scenario your swap file has a dedicated hard drive partition or separate dedicated drive to live on.

On Win98 operating systems you access your swap file setup configuration by right-clicking on My Computer and going to the "performance" tab. Then click on "Virtual Memory" button.

By default, Windows likes to configure your as a "0 byte minimum, no maximum" size. This means the swap file will be variable based on what your system needs up to the entire disk space on the assigned drive if it wants.

That's good for you because it maintains the most amount of free space on the assigned hard drive (usually your C drive). But it's bad for you because your swap file becomes fragmented and disk-writes are not garaunteed to be contiguous. It's also bad because you may not actually have a huge amount of space free on your C drive depending on how you use your system.

So to improve this situation, assign your swap file to reside on a hard drive or partition with a large amount of free space. Set the minimum and maximum size to the largest logical size. Do this so the file is permanent and always stays there at the maximum size. This will garauntee that Windows can freely manage swap operations in the most efficient way.

When you click "OK" to accept the settings, windows will hiccup an warning saying that it doesn't like you changing the swap setup. No biggie, but be sure you didn't assign the file to your cd-rom drive or something like that before accepting. :-)

If you have other data on the drive you want to use for swap, be sure to defragment the drive first before doing all of this. Note that after you reboot you will have a Win.swp file on your disk at it's maximum size for the duration of this config setup.
 
Hmm...I'm not sure of the reason but I have both GT Pro and Cool Edit 2000 (w/the 4-track plugin) and CE just seems to record everything better. It's never once locked up my system (W98 2nd Ed.) I have a sleep disorder and one night decided to try and record myself sleeping (listening for breathing problems) with CE. I made about a 6 1/2 hour recording in mono at 16/44.1 with no problems at all. I promise you'll never do that with Cakewalk though I don't know why. CE's just a more stable program and that's the bottom line. I wish I could have afforded their pro edition but Cakewalk fit my financial needs better, not to mention that it offers real-time effects and CE Pro doesn't yet. And truth be known, Cakewalk does just fine for the most part. I'm like a lot of guys here in that I could record for an hour or so before I'd have to worry about lockups and restarting. I don't think that's bad at all though. I mean how often do you record for an hour straight anyway?

I also don't understand why anyone would even try to record for over an hour at 24/96. Man that's gotta be a helluva strain on your system no matter how you've got it set up.

Also, Heinz; I too have heard the benefits of partitioning the HD w/ music programs and files (and I suppose sound card drivers too) set up on it's own partition. The thing is, CE records great without having to do that so I can't really fault the system for Cakewalk's not behaving as well as we'd sometimes like. The fault must be with Cakewalk. Actually, I think the fault happens in the way Cakewalk sets itself up compared to CE during installation. I haven't compared them in detail but I did notice that buffer settings et al were noticably different in the two programs. Maybe if I go through CE and copy all it's settings and then apply those same settings to GT Pro they would perform equally well. One of these days I'll get around to trying it.:o
 
I had much the same problem with an AMD 1000 GHZ, 384 mb
of ram, winndows 98SE. I changed the virtual memory and
it works great now. I'd work for maybe a half hour to an
hour and get almost no activity on the disk activity monitor
(Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.3).....say maybe 3-5 per cent max.

Then suddenly it would start jumping up to 20 per cent or
more...then, a few seconds later, it would be up above
50 per cent and then I'd get the drop out light.

I told a friend that Cakewalk is like a high maintence girlfriend.

PaulB
 
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