Mysterious Shrinking Track Count?????

K

kennedy connor

New member
I have spent the last week trying to figure why my system has what seems to be a gradual erosion of track count. when I first put it together 10-00 I was getting 20+ no problem. Now its more like 8 but sometimes it takes as little as 4 to cause the cakewalk drive meter to start spiking and "dropping out". I have done every windows tweak for audio I can find but it still continues. I followed the directions in cakewalk manual and other win audio optimizations... I loaded up an early file and it seemed to work fine after an initial stutter....but my current project continues to "drop out" early and often . This machine is purely for audio no games or other software....
my system specs :

Abit BE-6-2 440BX
Pentium 3 750 slot 1
Maxtor 30.7GB (audio)
Maxtor 10.2GB (system)
512 PC 100 ram
Plextor 12x10x32x CDRW
ATI Xpert 98 8MB
Teac 1.44MB
Mitsumi keyboard
ATI rage pro
Microsoft intellimouse
Win 98 SE
#A50 Case
Linksys 10/100 ethernet LAN card

Soundscape Mixtreme V1.2.1
Soundscape SS810-3
Soundscape Audio Tool Box V 1.03
Wave Mechanics DSP Reverb V 1.1.1
Cakewalk Proaudio 9

thanks for any ideas
 
Disk Fragmentation...

...run a disk de-frag program. DiskKeeper or sometihng similar...

As you create and delete large files, the available "chunk" of disk space keeps shrinking since a file delete does not actually do any sort of disk-space recovery. You need a disk-defrag app to combine all small blocks of unused space into a contiguous block.

Bruce
 
Besides defragging your disk, you could have fragmented audio files in Cakewalk if you are saving them as .wrk files.

This is from the Cakewalk Help file:
"Try defragmenting your project file:

1. Open the project file that has audio problems.
2. Save it as a Cakewalk Bundle (.BUN) file by selecting Save As from the File menu and selecting Cakewalk Bundle from the Save As Type drop down list and clicking the save button.
3. Close the project.
4. Open the Cakewalk Bundle you just closed

Saving then re-opening the bundle file automatically defragments the audio data used by the project, reducing the chances of a dropout or other audio problem.

When you are ready to save the file again, you may want to save it as a normal (.wrk) file. Saving and opening .wrk files takes less time than saving and opening bundle files."

Also, are you using more realtime FX in your projects. This adds extra overhead to your projects as well, and will reduce track count.
 
1) Remember to count stereo tracks as 2 tracks... there's twice as much audio in a stereo track as a mono track.

2) Use "compact audio data" from the tools menu from time to time. Keep in mind that it will kill your undo history.

3) Defrag (it could take a while, do it before ya go to bed)

4) Lots of plug-ins will cut your track count in a hurry... though it should be CPU dropping out and not disk in this case.

Hope it helps.
 
Also I believe that a drive reads better from the outside of the disc than the inside, so as your disc gets fuller the read head has to skip to the next track of data more and more often which means it has to move, settle, check and then start to read after increasingly smaller amounts of data have been streamed. this of course is due to the decreasing circumferance of the inner 'cylinders' of the disc.
 
Thanks to everyone who responded. After much effort I tried a number of your suggestions. I eliminated all the dead wood (.wav) from the audio drive and saved the file to a .bun on cdr and reloaded on the drive and it seems to be working fine now.
The situation now is that Andy Maddox at Cakewalk Tech support sent me anumber of ideas which I already had gotten from you all but one stood out......

"If you have Internet access, use the Win Tune test application
available at www.winmag.com. This diagnostic tool measures your hard
drive's uncached transfer rate. We find that an uncached transfer rate
of 3mb/sec can get around 10 mono tracks of audio, therefore if you
are trying to do 20 tracks, then you would need a rate of around
6mb/sec. If this is slower than you wanted, then you will want to get
in touch with your computer or hard drive vendor for advice to speed
up the hard drive."

well of course I had to do the test and my D: was at 1.99MBs and C:4.84 the comparisons showed similar systems with 5 and over 6MBs....Any Ideas on what my next step improve my numbers
 
I'm not sure what's up, but it seems like you should be getting a lot more than 20 dry tracks (with no real-time effects). When I tested my 13 gig a while back it supported at least 48... and that was while mostly full. It's not a dedicated drive either. I would expect a newer drive to do at least that well. In Cakewalk, goto Options -> Audio and check your settings for "Buffers in Playback Queue" and "Buffer size". Also, what's your "I/O Buffer Size" set to on the Advanced tab?
 
Are you using the C drive to record audio to? It appears to be 2 1/2 times faster....what speed are your two hard drives?
 
the saga continues..............

D: is the dedicated audio drive there are only .wav files and .gig files for gigasampler. Both drives are Maxtor Diamond Plus 7200 rpm. I have tried the various tweaks in cakewalk options audio for sometime now and there have been no signifigant improvements. Last night I loaded the file from .bun off cdr and then added tracks to the original and added 4 more stereo tracks bringing the total to 22 mono tracks which of course is not possible according to the cakewalk specs. At 22 tracks the drop outs began again. The OS is 98 SE with High Point 370 UltraDMA 66 plus controller. I am now in the process of defragging (yet again). I did two "thorough" scans and one error was corrected on the C:drive. Also many people have suggested that I make sure that DMA option is checked but there is no box (greyed out or not )to do this.
I plan to do another wintune test tonite if the defrag EVER gets done!

thanks again
 
New Drive

It would appear that things are back to normal!...Maxtor replaced the HD and luckily I paid for a warranty that allowed me to immediately swap drive at the shop....FYI this is my second Maxtor to go out luckily all under warranty....I just glad I bought locally saves so much time when these inevitable problems. All of Your ideas were helpful with determining that the drive was the culprit. thanks to everyone
 
144 Tracks?!

I used the handy little echo tester and the D: will supposedly play back 144 tracks! the Wintune puts the uncached speed at 4.9 for both drives. this is still comparably slow compared to similar systems at Wintune.....I found a great resource at Storage Review.com ...they suggested that disabling a quiet feature on maxtor drives might increase performance which I am trying to do presently. In any case I stopped trying to crash it at 50+ tracks...(no efx)..the resource drive meter in cakewalk NEVER goes over 20%
 
kennedy, maybe you could share with us what that "quiet" feature on your Maxtor drive is? I would be interested in knowing.

I don't think you can enable DMA if you are using a PCI HD controller. The controller is supposed to enable DMA for you from what I understand.

Oh, and echotester always says you can run more tracks then you actually can! Not a very reliable HD testing app. A program called Disk Bench of something like that seems to give figures more consistent with the one you mentioned above. You might try it out too.

Good Day!
 
"quiet hard drive"

There is in fact a feature on at least the Maxtor Diamondstar drives that supposedly can reduce the amount of noise (like you hear from the comp.).... this requires a download from Maxtor site a utility that makes it possible to enable or disable this function....I tried it to today and couldn't get it to see my drives....called maxtor.. no real help but said it was disabled by default....it is rumored that this noise reduction reduces drive speed....
 
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