Having Problems With X1 and Dell XPS

B

BigEZ

The Devil Has Blue Eyes
Hi All,

I purchased a top of the line Dell XPS system about 6 months ago. It has the Intel i7 processor with 12GB of dual channel memory. I also have two hard drives running as a 0+1 raid to increase speed. I'm running Sonar Producer X1.

I'm working on a project that I'm sure uses quite a bit of memory. I.e. 75 tracks, many of the tracks have automated effects on them as I'm not ready to write them to the tracks in case I want to make changes down the road. Because of this I'm having playback issues.

I understand that this might be a high work load for a computer...am I crazy to think that my new comp should be able to handle this with ease? The only other thing I use this computer for is surfing the net.

My question is this...does anyone out there know of any tweaks or changes I can make to my system to ensure the largest portion of my memory, processor usage and hard drive size are being assigned to Sonar?

Thanks,
 
Start HERE. If that doesn't get you working, go to Black Viper for more tweaking.

Your i7 is way capable of keeping up. It just needs to be optimized for audio recording. I am still connected to internet on mine, but there are things you need to get rid of to make it stable for recording.

I am tempted to recommend getting an $100 OEM copy of W7. You surely have a bunch of bloatware included with your Dell W7 install. That stuff can be hard to pinpoint as to what is what when trying to streamline your PC.

And make sure you record audio to a drive that is separate from your OS/program software.
 
Thanks jimmy. Unfortunately I already completed the tweaks on both pages when I first purchased my comp.

I ended up writing the effects to the tracks that I am sure I'm happy with. That solved the problem for now. But it's very upsetting that I need to do this when I've spent so much money on this comp. I must be doing something wrong.
 
I'm not sure if this is what you're referring too but I only have a C: drive on my comp for everything.
 
Then you should either add an internal, or external drive for audio only. When dealing with the amount of tracks you are, you are overworking a single drive. Think about it, every edit, effect, and software is running from your C drive. All the while, trying to stream audio from the same drive. Recording to a separate drive, allows for seamless playback. I have tried running some of my 60+ track stuff on another computer that has only one drive. The result was just about like trying to get pole position at Indy with a Big Wheel.

Drives have become more expensive lately, but your best bet would be to get an external USB or firewire hard drive case (if you do not have space in you Dell for another), and a 7200 RPM drive. I use 1TB Seagate Barracudas. It was less than $100 when I got it. Think probably closer to $160 now, due to the flooding that destroyed the drive factories.

I can easily run 70 tracks with extreme amounts of VST and VSTi's, and still record with under 10ms of latency with my i7. If your system is setup correctly, then I can only guess that the separation of audio from OS is the answer.
 
I have two internal drives set up as 0+1 raid to make the reading and writing very fast.
 
I'm not clear on what RAID 0+1 is. I run two drives with RAID 1. This just mirrors the drives in case of drive failure. RAID 0 improves bandwidth, but that does not mean it is necessarily capable of streaming audio and running software at once. Possibly better than one drive alone.

I am just giving a suggestion, as I have no issues like you describe, with my i7 and external audio drive. Take it for what it's worth. You have issues, I don't. Just giving the different setup I have as a possibility. :)
 
RAIDs are inefficient for recording on desktops. Separate drives are better.

Best setup for any daw:
OS, apps and plugins on boot drive
Sample libraries on secondary drive
Audio projects (tracks) on another drive.
 
TimO'Brien is spot on with daw drive set up

Even if two drives are used, audio and samples still do better on another drive.

Windows 7 you can keep an image file of your operating system should your system fail on C and image your second drive on an external every know and again and your data is backed up and safe
 
Hey jimmy, I meant no ill will...just a quick response. From what I understand a raid 0+1 writes and reads different info to two drives at the same time, thus twice the speed.

Thanks for the tips from everyone. Unfortunately I'm not that computer savvy and don't want to mess with the current raid setup. I wrote the effects to te tracks I was happy with and all is good now.
 
I can help you out, but need to gather more detailed information from you on your hardware/software specifics, such as startup programs and services. There are lots of tweaks I can give you, based on your supplying details. If you run services.msc it will open a window with all of the defined services on your system. If you click on the tab at the top that says Status twice, it will display your actively running services. Theses are the ones to evaluate for either removing entirely (bloatware) or optimizing what it loaded into memory in a balance of things tilted toward audio performance. In addition, I have been a computer programmer for 38 years, and when I had XP Pro I wrote a couple of programs that make it super simple to create profiles of services and start items that you can disable or enable to optimize memory utilization for music production - and restoring things back to normal for regular computing needs you may have. I freely send these programs to anyone who needs them - they are nice little utilities that with a couple of mouse clicks allow you to really get things working as best as possible for audio production. By the way, do you have an external audio interface? (ASIO?). This makes a big difference. SOOOOO - sorry for the long reply - I have been through the whole optimzation process many many times and can guide you through it.
 
When I first started on computer DAW's I had this same problem. It was solved by hard drives. As others have already stated. I now rock a main drive for my OS and DAW , an audio drive, a sample drive and, a back up drive. none of them are in a raid configuration.

It sounds more confusing then it is if your new. First you need fast drives for your audio. I would suggest either internal SATA drives or external eSATA drives, or firewire drives for this. Then you need to move all your recordings (Cakewalk Projects folder) to this drive. Then in the setup menu you need to tell Cakewalk to look there to find your Projects.

It's all fairly easy to do. I'm not that computer literate really but I managed to do it and it solved all those problems your having. Cost a chunk of change to buy all those damn hard drives but it was total worth it.
 
The only thing you might have trouble moving is where Sonar expects to find Dimension Pro - this requires a registry edit
 
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