laptop recording problems PLEASE HELP!

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the froot

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ok so heres the deal, i want to run a moblie studio from my laptop. i upgraded to 1gig of ram, i have a pentium 4.2 ghz processor so i thought i would be fine. come to find out my hard drive speed was a mere 4200 rpms. instead of replacing it i bought a firewire external hard drive that runs at 7200 rpms and tried running audition and all its files off of that. heres the problem: im still getting choppiness and stuttering. my load meter reads through the roof on most things over 10 tracks. ive adjusted the buffers accordingly and it took away some of the problem, but not all. am i going to have to just upgrade my internal drive? do they make laptop drives that run at 7200 rpms? or is it a sound card problem. right now im running the crappy stock card until i can afford my pre sonus firepod. PLEASE HELP!!!!!!
 
sorry....computers have never been my shit.....but I would say that you should delete some files and defrag...I do it at least once a week..

Is the External Hard drive USB 1? or 2?

the difference in data transfer is huge....
 
Perhaps it's a sign that you should go get a real job.
 
It could be a million things. What soundcard are you using? What operating system? I would try configuring it 2 different ways and see which one gives you the best results.

1. Audition on internal drive, Wave files on the External Drive
2. Wave files on the Internal drive, Audition on the external drive.

If you're using the internal soundcard that came with the laptop that's going to increase latency etc. Look into purchasing a quality "prosumer" laptop soundcard/interface.

Make sure you OS is optimized and that you don't have anything running in the background like Anti-virus etc. Also, you may want to turn off several services that you don't need. Check out the site below and then the section appropriate to your OS.
 
4200 rpms??? how old is that hard drive??? you would be fine running things off of a 5200rpm drive with a 4.2Ghz processor. Most hard drives over 40gb are standard 7200rpm, if not that, then 5400rpm. 4200rpm on a new drive is unheard of unless it is total garbage (in which case I wouldn't trust my recordings with it) I'd look more closely at the hardware itself and research a little to find out the true speed of the drive you have

in the meantime I would run all of the software off of the drive that's in the machine. No matter what, the onboard transfer will always be faster regardless of the hard drive speed.

In all honesty, if you have enough space on the drive in the computer, scrap the firewire drive for a bit and try running everthing off the laptop hard drive.
 
I would suspect the problem is your sound card and/or drivers. An internal laptop sound card is essentially a p.o.s.

I'm not familiar with Audition, but can you determine what your latency setting is? I would try adjusting it higher and see if that helps - however, I suspect you are going to have problems until you get a better sound card.

You probably want to go with a firewire interface once you upgrade the sound card.
 
dachay2tnr said:
I would suspect the problem is your sound card and/or drivers. An internal laptop sound card is essentially a p.o.s.
Click to expand...
There you go.

It's driving me mad seeing people freak out when it comes to 4200rpm hard drives in laptops.
Even in this day and age laptops are usually fitted with 4200rpm hard drives. So is mine. The first (and so far only) outdoor recording that I did with it (and an RME Fireface) was 4 tracks of 24bits/44.1kHz simultaneously and it went as smooth as a baby's butt.

No you don't *NEED* 7200rpm drives to get recordings done. You don't *NEED* the fastest CPU in the world either.

the froot: See if you can borrow a firewire recording interface somewhere and see how it goes then. Good luck with it.
 
Hard drives and such

RedStone said:
4200 rpms??? how old is that hard drive???
Click to expand...

Most consumer laptops (HP Pavilion etc) still ship with 4200 RPM drives. Corporate models (e.g. HP Compaq nx series and up) often ship with 5400 RPM drives.

Hitachi do make the Travelstar 7K series of drives which run at 7200 RPM with an 8 MB cache, but as others have suggested here I don't think drive speed is your problem. I have an 80 GB 5400 RPM drive in my nx7010 and have had no problem with either Audition or Premiere (other than the fact that rendering video is a bit slow on a Pentium-M 1.7!).

Turn of everything you don't need - look in the system tray and turn off unnecessary stuff there. Disconnect from the Internet first, then disable your AV, turn off Wireless, disable any third party firewall, unplug your LAN cable (to stop any attempted synchronising - may only be a problem if your laptop is on an NT/2k/2k3 domain like mine) etc.

If this fixes the problem you can then turn things back on with tweaks - set your AV to exclude any folders you use in Audition (remember the temp file - Options - Settings - System to get the location) etc.

If it doesn't fix your problem then try tweaking the settings in Audition - there are people here who know a lot more about this than I do and they will be able to help you.

Cya
Andrew
 
thanks

thanks for everyones replies! ive tried just about everything everyones suggested, still nothings working. my last resort is to replace the 4200 rpm hard drive for the 7200. fingers crossed this will work!

thanks again
 
I would guess that it is almost certainly not your hard drive.

Haven't you already tried a 7200 firewire drive with the same results?
 
Dude, seriously. Just get a Fostex four track cassette.
 
Hey J, the Delta1010LT is great by the way. Needs a patch bay for conveinience though. I'll give you the lowdown on Thurs.
 
The Delta1010LT is a great interface but on a laptop? Did I miss something? :confused:

Laptops can be a problem unless you go out and find one/order one which is set up for that purpose. Most PC's come with crap audio cards which simply won't cut it. Upgrades are sometime impossible (internal). I even tried to upgrade a processor on a Toshiba sometime ago thinking it would be like a desktop but NOT...the damn thing is soldered in!

I'm no computer expert but I'm sure that optimizing the PC for recording can make improvements. Getting rid of un-necessary applications, services running in the background and turning off some of windows' bells and wistles may help free up some CPU and memory. Those would be free things to try before taking a shot at the hard-drive.
 
RedStone said:
4200 rpms??? how old is that hard drive??? you would be fine running things off of a 5200rpm drive with a 4.2Ghz processor. Most hard drives over 40gb are standard 7200rpm, if not that, then 5400rpm. 4200rpm on a new drive is unheard of unless it is total garbage (in which case I wouldn't trust my recordings with it) I'd look more closely at the hardware itself and research a little to find out the true speed of the drive you have

in the meantime I would run all of the software off of the drive that's in the machine. No matter what, the onboard transfer will always be faster regardless of the hard drive speed.

In all honesty, if you have enough space on the drive in the computer, scrap the firewire drive for a bit and try running everthing off the laptop hard drive.
Click to expand...

4200rpm is still the standard speed for notebook hard drives. Gateway, Dell, and HP all use these, unless you purposely upgrade. No hard drive over 40gig is 7200rpm standard, unless you purposely upgrade. The only OEM I've ever seen even offer 7200 as an option were Alienware and Voodoo.
 
peopleperson said:
Dude, seriously. Just get a Fostex four track cassette.
Click to expand...

3 posts in this thread, and not one of them useful. We don't need more trolls here.
 
It was a side subject between me and froot. I was talking 1010LT for desktop.
 
Agreed, the 1010LT is a great bargain and performer. As for trolling...hmm...I don't know but isn't that a fishing thing?

I thought the PC optimization was a perfectly supportive bit of advice.

Maybe these links will better qualify my advice;
http://www.musicxp.net/
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Mar02/articles/pcmusician0302.asp
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html
http://www.computermusic.co.uk/tutorial/power/pc.asp

Carrying on a bit now but of course one would want to be sure to check with the recording/mixing application recommendations as well and if you have a dedicated (purpose built) audio card, there will likely be "tweak" recommendations to be followed as well.
 
oops.. I should have payed attention .. I was thiking desktop for some reason ... sorry 'bout that!
I was running a 5400rpm drive on a P3 864 with 512 of Ram. I could throw 20 tracks down with effects running no problem with the stock card in there.
how full is your drive? less than 20% left could potentially distrupt performance
I hope your upgrade works.
 
well all has been done now, ive upgraded the internal drive to a 5400 rpm 100gig drive. i only installed the most neccessary programs with the same result. now im pretty sure its the soundcard. i just need to save my dough a little to afford the pre sonus firepod. anyone used this interface with a laptop before?
 
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