HDs and Track Limit

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bdemenil

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I'm wondering what kind of limits people are running up against in terms of HD i/o. On a standard 7200 RPM ATA drive for instance - how many tracks of 24bit/96K can be recorded? - Practically speaking, not hypothetically. Let's keep plugins/processing etc out of it.
 
How many do you need?
If you are using 2 drives .... one for OS and proggies and one for audio data streaming only, and DMA is enabled .... if your CPU can handle it you could get 100+ tracks.
YMMV

-Ken
 
100 tracks of 24bit/96K on an ATA hard drive - this seems like alot... I'd like to know what are the maximum numbers people have actualy worked with.
 
My last project I got to 24 tracks @ 24/88.2 no problems at all.

What did start to impact playback was the number of plugins I added, which got to about 24 as well. Actually it wasn't so much the number of plugins, it was particular ones like Drumagog triggered samples, and amp modelling, which caused glitches on playback.

Edit: That project got up to over 1GB in size. I've gots a 2.8 P4, 1GB ram & 2 120GB Barracuda drives
 
Bulls hit, I'm interested in what software, soundcard, and OS you use. Have you tried to push how many track your system is capable of before it starts choking - without plugins?

just interested in disc i/o, and whatever cpu overhead in managing the whole thing.
 
Well, I was getting dropouts now and then with a couple of tracks for my (old) band's demo, mostly where different clips were overlapping. I am running:

AMD XP 2000
512mb 333MHz DDR RAM
40gig seagate 7200rpm os drive
80gig seagate audio drive
Gigabyte GA7VA board
Hoontech C-Port
Sonar 2.2
Windows XP home

I just went to play back one of the tracks in sonar then. With 2 IE windows, winamp and sonar running, Only playing back 11 tracks (the others are archived). I've got the Cakewalk reverb running on 2 tracks, Ozone vinyl and timeworks EQ on one, and Revalver Amp sim. The CPU is sitting on 27% and the hard disk usage is sitting between 35 and 40%. What also seemed to make dropouts occur was when the playback marker got to the edge of the screen and the computer had to redraw all the waveforms again, it helped if you zoom right out.

Mind you my computer is hardly a dedicated DAW. There's way to much crap running on this machine.
 
bdemenil said:
Bulls hit, I'm interested in what software, soundcard, and OS you use. Have you tried to push how many track your system is capable of before it starts choking - without plugins?

just interested in disc i/o, and whatever cpu overhead in managing the whole thing.
Click to expand...

I use Cakewalk Guitar Tracks 3, and a Delta 44 on XP. I've had GT3 for a couple of months now. This version allows up to 32 tracks with 32 plugins. It would have no trouble playing back 32 tracks with no plugins, even at 24/96. If you work out the math, that's a transfer rate of about 9MB/sec - even an old groaner hard disk should be capable of a sustained 30MB/sec, as long as it's dedicated to audio and not trying to do OS activity at the same time. I have 2 120GB drives - 1 dedicated to audio.

Where my machine hits the wall is cpu when playing back a 24/88.2 project. It will be happily ticking along at 60-70%, then I drop in one more heavy plugin, it suddenly jumps to 95%, then it's all over.
And this is with a hyperthreading 2.8 P4, 800fsb, and a gig of dual channel DDR400 ram.

Hmmm... maybe I need to start thinking about overclocking
 
Drive benchmark for multitracking

Download dskbench , extract it to where ever you like. Read the readme, then double click dskbench.exe.

-Ken
 
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