Maxing out hard drive while recording

[chizuck]

Another newbie question:

As I continue to fight my way up the learning curve with Cubase and home recording in general, I've started opening the windows computer performance monitor while messing around in Cubase LE. Yesterday while trying to record a couple audio tracks through my Tascam US-122 I noticed some strange behavior. I was playing back a guitar track I recorded while recording a banjo track and noticed that the CPU usage was hovering around 90%. I wasn't running the signals through any kinds of effects or anything. Then I tried recording a track of vocals (same setup but different microphone) and the usage was more like 20%. Then I switched back to banjo and it stayed constantly at 100%.

I didn't have any other applications running, and it's a fairly new computer (Athlon 64 processor at about 3GHz, 1Gig RAM). Is there some reason recording a single track would eat up so much of the processor?

 

[pikingrin]

Try checking the buffer settings in your interfaces control panel. I use a tascam FW-1804, and it has a shortcut on my desktop which makes it easy to mess with, since it's in clear view. Make sure that the buffer setting is somewhere in the 512-1024 range, that way it puts a lot less stress on everything (CPU, hard drive, etc.) trying to keep up with the recording and playback at the same time. Hope this helps!

EDIT-> It might help to know how you're recording the banjo, though. I'm sure it's not direct, is it? Hmmm... interesting...