Is it worth recording on a plane-jane Vista laptop?

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vferdman

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Hi, I have an Acer Extensa 5420 laptop with dual core AMD, 2GB of memory running Vista with latest service pack. I use a simple ART USB PRE box to record two channels (two mics in a stereo pair). I just want to capture some home jam sessions with friends, but would not mind doing multitrack also. I've been using Audacity, CoolEdit 2000 and CoolEdit Pro. A constant problem on all three pieces of software is an occasional crash in the middle of the session. I assume it's Vista drivers (I may be wrong). Also there's lots of latency when trying to do multitrack.

My question is this. Should I bother solving these problems on this laptop or am I SOL until I get something like a Mac? I can dual boot this machine with XP (I think, I haven't tried it). Will XP be better than Vista for home recording? What about Windows 7? I am nt against buying a Win7 license if that's going to solve the problems.

I am a newbie in home recording, but am also an experienced DSP software engineer with lots of audio processing experience in computer telephony. So, I don't mind some technical advice.

Thanks in advance!
 
CEP was prone to crashes. Adobe Audition is much less so.

I use a laptop similar to yours with Audition and a TASCAM 1641. It works OK, I use it to go out and record live, so the latency isn't much of an issue, but generally you can tweak that somewhere in the settings. I know CEP had a good facility for solving that issue with my MOTU drivers.
 
LDS said:
CEP was prone to crashes. Adobe Audition is much less so.

I use a laptop similar to yours with Audition and a TASCAM 1641. It works OK, I use it to go out and record live, so the latency isn't much of an issue, but generally you can tweak that somewhere in the settings. I know CEP had a good facility for solving that issue with my MOTU drivers.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I am not sure if it's the CEP (I had the same problem in CE2K) or the underlying Vista system. I am ready to drop some cash on a Win7 upgrade if that will solve the problem (also would like to finally ditch Vista), but if it won't solve the crashing, I will probably just stay with Vista for now. What other programs that are cheap/free will work with my setup? I am mostly not concerned with latency, but I would like to have the ability to lay multiple tracks.
 
Cheap/free? Reaper!

I tried it, but was so used to working with CE I went ahead and upgraded to Audition 3.0. IMHO Audition is fantastic, and if you're used to working with CE, you'll find the transition painless. It's well worth what it costs. Cool little stuff like automatic on-clip fades are the cat's nuts for fixing little timing glitches and splicing takes together. The VST plug-in support is very nice, also. The only issue I've had with stability is when importing sessions recorded on other systems with different interfaces with a lot of tracks (over 10). Evidently it will try to write to some buffer somewhere that existed originally then just kind of give up and go home. It's really good about saving any changes to the session when it crashes, very unlike Cool Edit.
 
Very useful info, thanks. What I am still wondering, though is if my Vista laptop will do well with recording or will I constantly be battling crashing issues? This is a separate question from the DAW software. I am just not all that confident in Vista being a good recording platform. Any wisdom on that? Should I go to XP, Win7 or stay with Vista? I'd rather go forward than backward as far as the OS goes, so Win7 makes more sense than XP for me. If Vista can be beaten into being a good little OS for recording I will stay with it for now as I really want to make this as inexpensive as possible for now.

Thanks!
 
If you can (at not cost, with a bit of work) try it with Win XP. it is pretty much more stable than either vista or 7. It has been around since 2001, so most of the bugs have been worked out.

for what it's worth... i record with and use XP, and avoid vista and 7 like the plague
 
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