E
Englebert
New member
Hello everyone and thanks in advance for all the responses!
I am a promising old talent from Finland and I´m having little problems with my DAW.
A little background first: I have been making music with Cakewalk for some years now (first PA8, now Sonar 2.0). Few months back I decided to get a second PC dedicated solely for recording purposes. While I didn´t have the money the get an absolute top-of-the-line-machine I did a fair amount of research to ensure good performance and avoid conflicts between components. Here´s some comparison between the machines:
Old:
Athlon 1600XP
512Mb
40Gb HD (5400 rpm)
Guillemot Maxi Studio ISIS
Win98
New:
Celeron 2.0Ghz
512Mb
40Gb HD (7200 rpm)
Terratec EWS88MT
Win2000
As you can see the upgrade was not a huge leap but my main idea was to get a "clean", tuned-for-recording PC without any non-music-related soft- or hardware. Biggest step hardware-wise was changing the soundcard. While I was fairly satisfied with ISIS, it had few major drawbacks: no WDM-drivers (and hence huge latency) and no support for Win2000. The EWS88MT had all that and 24/96 to boot. The software was transferred as it was (beside the OS, of course): Sonar 2.0XL, Waves Gold Bundle 3.5 and numerous freeware plugins.
Now I am a little bit confused because I have had somewhat mixed results. Without plugins the audio performance is very good; I can play 25 tracks of 24/44.1-audio with only about 10% strain on CPU, even with fairly low latency. The sofsynths also work fine...
...but problems start at mixing stage. The plugins seem to be putting ridiculous amounts of load on the CPU, even though I try to use processor-light plugs (such as Waves AudioTrack) Some old, plug-in-heavy 16-bit projects that played back just fine in my old PC are giving me constant dropouts in my new DAW, even with latency set way up (even higher than with ISIS!). I had to disable almost all plugins (mostly Waves AudioTracks) before I could listen the songs through. And when I try to mix my new 24-bit projects...oh boy...
I´ll give an example: Six (6) instances of AudioTracks, one C1 compressor-gate, one TrueVerb (in aux bin) cause the song with those 25 24/44.1 tracks I mentioned earlier to dropout after 5-10 seconds. The CPU load skyrockets from ~10% to 60-70% and eventually to the warning-zone. TrueVerb seems to be the main culprit, but even after disabling it I don´t get stable playback - just few seconds of extra time before another dropout.
So what gives? Is it the soundcard, the PC or Sonar? What kind of results have people with similar setups had? I have tweaked the audio options but for no avail. I have also done just about every OS tweak they have at www.musicxp.net and similar sites, so I don´t think there´s much to gain on that department.
Or is this normal? Are the AudioTracks really that heavy on the CPU? And if so, how come my old machine dealed with them so well? Was the ISIS actually the ultimate mixing card?
I am a promising old talent from Finland and I´m having little problems with my DAW.
A little background first: I have been making music with Cakewalk for some years now (first PA8, now Sonar 2.0). Few months back I decided to get a second PC dedicated solely for recording purposes. While I didn´t have the money the get an absolute top-of-the-line-machine I did a fair amount of research to ensure good performance and avoid conflicts between components. Here´s some comparison between the machines:
Old:
Athlon 1600XP
512Mb
40Gb HD (5400 rpm)
Guillemot Maxi Studio ISIS
Win98
New:
Celeron 2.0Ghz
512Mb
40Gb HD (7200 rpm)
Terratec EWS88MT
Win2000
As you can see the upgrade was not a huge leap but my main idea was to get a "clean", tuned-for-recording PC without any non-music-related soft- or hardware. Biggest step hardware-wise was changing the soundcard. While I was fairly satisfied with ISIS, it had few major drawbacks: no WDM-drivers (and hence huge latency) and no support for Win2000. The EWS88MT had all that and 24/96 to boot. The software was transferred as it was (beside the OS, of course): Sonar 2.0XL, Waves Gold Bundle 3.5 and numerous freeware plugins.
Now I am a little bit confused because I have had somewhat mixed results. Without plugins the audio performance is very good; I can play 25 tracks of 24/44.1-audio with only about 10% strain on CPU, even with fairly low latency. The sofsynths also work fine...
...but problems start at mixing stage. The plugins seem to be putting ridiculous amounts of load on the CPU, even though I try to use processor-light plugs (such as Waves AudioTrack) Some old, plug-in-heavy 16-bit projects that played back just fine in my old PC are giving me constant dropouts in my new DAW, even with latency set way up (even higher than with ISIS!). I had to disable almost all plugins (mostly Waves AudioTracks) before I could listen the songs through. And when I try to mix my new 24-bit projects...oh boy...
I´ll give an example: Six (6) instances of AudioTracks, one C1 compressor-gate, one TrueVerb (in aux bin) cause the song with those 25 24/44.1 tracks I mentioned earlier to dropout after 5-10 seconds. The CPU load skyrockets from ~10% to 60-70% and eventually to the warning-zone. TrueVerb seems to be the main culprit, but even after disabling it I don´t get stable playback - just few seconds of extra time before another dropout.
So what gives? Is it the soundcard, the PC or Sonar? What kind of results have people with similar setups had? I have tweaked the audio options but for no avail. I have also done just about every OS tweak they have at www.musicxp.net and similar sites, so I don´t think there´s much to gain on that department.
Or is this normal? Are the AudioTracks really that heavy on the CPU? And if so, how come my old machine dealed with them so well? Was the ISIS actually the ultimate mixing card?
