Help?!? Which program is best for recording on an older PIII PC?

[Justin.Irish]

Hello, I was just curious if anyone can recommend a good multitracking PC program that works well with good sound quality for an older Pentium III 866mhz PC running Windows ME with 384 megs of ram. I purchased Cool Edit Pro and a Delta 44 card a few years ago and I have had problems with Skipping in tracks even with track 2 or 3 and I'm pretty sure now that I should be using a much faster computer with a lot more ram, but being on a student budget I'm forced to make due with what I have at the moment.

I'm just curious should I be saving up for a program like n-track or something similar to it. Any advice is much appreciated.

Cheers, j

 

[manning1]

you could try the demos of ntrack, powertracks (that i use and like),
and magix music studio (ive had it running on an old p3),
and multitrackstudio.com.
but lets not just give up on cool edit as you already have it.
and cool edit IS good.
firstly i should say to be fair ME was never for me. i'm a puter
engr. people have had probs with me.
but lets see if there is a possibilty of getting more tracks running under cool edit.
firstly do you have dma enabled on your hard drive(s) ?
bear with me. pleasse check in control panel device manager. click on your hard drive properties. if you dont have dma enabled get a tech to check that your hard drive can be dma enabled.
also please download diskbench from prorec.com and tell me what stats you get on your hard drive.
frankly it DOES SEEM from my helping of another poster also that CE does like memory. but it might not be worth upgrading an old machine.
a new amd athlon if you shop around will easily do 40 tracks and can cost around 500 bucks.
anyway get back to me with the hard drive diskbench stats
and whether your dma is enabled on your hard drive.
just trying to help.

 

[Strryder]

Which version of CEP do you already own?

Properly setup, that computer should be able to handle at least 12 or 16 tracks with CEP2.

I remember reading on the old Synt. forum that CEP seemed to work pretty well on ME.

Here's a good CEP/AA resource.

http://www.audiomastersforum.org/amforum/index.php

Check out the tips/faqs, there are lots of good setup/system configuration tips.

 

[Sterling30]

http://www.sawstudio.com/

 

[Havoc]

Having recorded 6 tracks 16/44.1 while playing back at least as much on a lowly PII300 with 256MB, it definitly should be possible to do this on your pc.

I don't like ME either, but it worked with W95, so that should work.
- the suggestion of checking if DMA is enabled is an excellent starting point..
- you are using CEP1.2a at least?
- what else is running??
- do you have the correct drivers for your motherboard regarding ide controllers? Via chipsets can react strongly to this.
- your soundcard drivers are OK?
- is your HD defragged or a mess?