Maybe I'm thick,but...

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drflanger

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OK I have cakewalk 8 on a one year old duron 800mhz and ive just upgraded to 512 ram thinking it would make recording easier.

I have managed to record a whole album by very short takes, editing the files to clean up the overlapping humming guitars and microphones etc. It was good enough for the record company, but it was torture doing it. For my next project, I thought that a huge memory upgrade would be enough to allow me to record a couple of minutes of guitar over an imported wav file of mixed down drums, but it hasnt made any difference - cakewalk still stumbles after 20 secs or so.

How do i get cakewalk to take advantage of my hugely increased ram? It doesnt seem impressed at all. I assumed that as little disk accessing as possible ( watching that little blinking light) would be desirable, so I exerimented with the buffer sizes ( like a chimpanzee would play with a pocket calculator) to no avail.

And one thing really bothers me. Five years ago I recorded digitally with a band in a studio, and the guy did it all on a really old pc, an atari I think, with a slow processor, and that didnt sieze up constantly.

Is it too much to expect a pc to record and playback 4 tracks of a 3 minute song without messing up? And yes, I have disabled all other running applications, and effects etc...

At least my fostex x-15 4 tracker kept going.


Thanks in advance...
 
What soundcard are you using?

Is your harddrive fast enough? 7200 rpm is recommended.

But as a comfort (or not...) I remeber having a similar problem with an old version of Cakewalk. Pro Audio 7 or 8, I think. It disappeared when I upgraded.
 
Hi Moskus,

Firstly I must concede that my soundcard is shite. It is an integrated sis 7016 on the mainboard, only a year old though. Im not convinced that upgrading the soundcard would make much difference - what do you think?

The hard drive was a new 40 meg generic IDE disk type 47. How fast is that?

It seems to me that cakewalk 8 doesnt use my system to its full potential, maybe an upgrade would work?

Thanks.

Drflanger
 
If Cakewalk 8 is stumbling an upgrade won't help much, you'll probably have the same problems. The later software will stress the hardware more, if anything.

There are many factors involved in how well the thing will work as a digital audio workstation. Did you run through all the tips mentioned in the Cakewalk manual/help system?

The hard drive controller is possibly a big factor. It's not the size that's the issue, it's the type of controller. To get decent performance, you must have at least a UDMA/33 controller (well, a good SCSI controller would be fine too but you probably don't have one of those); a standard IDE controller just won't cut it. A 7200 rpm rotation speed will help a bit too, but the controller type is more important.
 
In general, additional memory will probably help you with your plug-ins (FX), but it won't do a whole lot for track count.

For that, the biggest plus is hard drive speed. As AlChuck and Moskus have already told you, a 7200 rpm, hard drive would be beneficial. Even better, a 7200 rpm hard drive that is dedicated to your audio, with a second hard drive to handle the OS and Cakewalk program.

A better sound card, with current drivers will also help.

HOWEVER, you should certainly be able to get 3-4 tracks of audio on an 800 MHz machine with no problems at all (depending on what plug-ins you may be running). So I would suggest that you take a look at whether you have DMA enabled for your hard drive. I'm betting you don't, and I'm also betting that if you enable it, you're life is gonna get a whole lot better.
 
dma

Dachay, you were right about dma. It wasnt enabled on my drive.
I'd thought about that before but decided against it after some brief research, probably in the wrong places. I've enabled it now and once off the net will reboot and see how it affects performance.

The second drive option is gonna have to happen i think.

I haven't researched soundcards recently. I think that £50/$80 is enough to pay though. The newer cards have some onboard memory, right?


Alchuck, yes I have run through all of the options in the help files/manual. I suspected the ide controller, but naively assumed that because the drive was new the ide would be somehow better than older ones. Am I right in assuming that the controller is part of the mainboard? If so am i stuck whether or not I get a faster drive?

Despite this I still notice that cakewalk is less reliable than Soundforge when it comes to recording a simple stereo input. Soundforge would happily record 10 minutes of line in without stumbling, but cakewalk couldnt. It obviously works harder, keeping more options open.

Thanks to both of you for your advice.


Drflanger.
 
If it's a newer computer the controller and the drive are most likely UDMA-capable, but it might be operating as a regular IDE controller. Check that DMA is enabled like someone else suggested. Running that utility Cakewalk mentions can tell you is your drive subsystem is above or below the threshold for reasonable operation (I think it was called WinTune? -- there are others... Echo had something once too called the Echo Reporter...)
 
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