Please help PC gods!!!! Recording freeze ups!!!

[Freudian Slip]

Ok. Here is my hardware profile. I have a 1ghz P3 computer running windows 98 with a 60 gig Ibm ultra IED 7200 RPM hard drive. A Intel Easton 815 mother board, 256 mb of pc133 ram. A echo layla24 interface, and Cakewalk 9.0 suite.

Here is my problem. I can playback about 20 tracks at a time with about 8 real time effects and record a couple of tracks at once, but if I try to record 7 tracks at a time while playing back 2 tracks it will go for 10 or 20 seconds and then the playback will skip like a CD or the system will freeze.

This is pretty muck a stock untweaked installation. Oh ya, there is no midi involved except I play the midi metronome over my sound blaster soundcard into a mic to make the click track. From there it is all audio.

Can anyone help me? Do you think there is a problem or is my system just to weak? How should I have my clocks set? Internal? Do I need a ultra scuzi hard drive or more memory or do I just need to tweak my system. I have played a lot of tracks and recorded a few at the same time. Why cant I play one or two tracks and record several.

Buffers?

Please help if you can.

Are there any good threads about this?

PS Cakewalks database sucks so bad. Their support has no
subcatagories for different sound cards, I would say that is my biggest bitch with them. Poor support. Grant it I have not called but I work all day and it is a day time phone on the east coast!!!!


BAAAAHHHHHHH!!!

 

[heinz]

7 tracks at once could mean many things... like... does that mean 7 Stereo 96K 24-bit tracks, or 7 mono 44.1K 16-bit tracks? If you can give more detail it would provide a baseline to calculate how much input data you are pushing into your system.

Regardless it sounds like you may have reached the input bandwidth limit for recording, this could be based on several things, like how fast your hard drive can write 7 tracks while playing back 20 overdub tracks and realtime effects? That's beyond the capability of most stock hard drives until you get into the ultra-wide scsi2-3 category.

It sounds like you're getting pretty good performance, what do your system graph's read in Sonar, are you maxing out on CPU or HDD throughput? Faster hard drive subsystems, CPU's, more memory, and better soundcard DSP's will all help improve performance. Moving to a different O/S like Win2k would give you better/faster disk management over Win98, plus support for dual-cpu's.

PS - Cakewalk support is pretty good if you call them, e-mail them, or post on the support boards (in that order).

 

[Freudian Slip]

Thanks

I am recordin 7 mono at 16/44100 and playing back 2 simple clean tracks.

I was thinking maybe it is the hard drive but was hoping some one would tell me do this stupid (stupid being me).

I am in pro 9.0 as well not sonar.

 

[RWhite]

Freud - your hardware should be more than sufficent, although I would recomend getting more RAM.

I don't have a answer, but you might find one in this document. Below is a portion of the Gadget Labs Wave 824 card manual. It deals with setup for Cakewalk. Some of the info will be inappropriate for you card, but check out the lines about buffer settings. Experiment, you might find the answer....


Setting up Cakewalk for WavePRO

To take advantage of WavePRO's 24-bit recording and playback
capability, we recommend Cakewalk version 9 or higher. The
following steps will configure Cakewalk for good performance and MIDI synchronization; you may wish to "tweak" values for higher track counts or lower latency. Any settings not mentioned can be left at the default values.
NOTE: Cakewalk has calibrates itself to different audio devices with a ‘Wave Profiler’. Anytime that Cakewalk finds new audio hardware installed, it runs the 'Wave Profiler'. Afterwards, it's important to double check the settings noted below.

Select the menu item, 'Options | Audio
Select the 'General' Tab
- For 'Playback Timing Master', choose CH1/2 playback. Choose
the same setting for "Recording Timing Master.
- For 'Audio Driver Bit Depth' choose 24.
in the Mixing Latency section:
- For 'Buffers in Playback Queue' choose 4.
- Set 'Buffer Size' to 87 msec.
Select the 'Drivers' Tab
Highlight each stereo pair (1+2, 3+4, 5+6, 7+8) that you wish to
use by holding down the 'Shift' key and clicking on each stereo
pair that you want activated.
Select the 'Advanced' tab
-' I/O Buffer Size (KB)' should be set to 32
- 'Simultaneous Record and Playback' should be checked
- 'Stop on Driver Underrun' should be checked
- 'Wave Pipe Acceleration' should be checked
- 'Clip Audio Mix Upon Overflow' should be checked
- 'Apply Dither' should be checked
- The last two boxes should remain unchecked (don't enable
Unpack >16-bit audio or Left-justify unpacked data)
Select the 'Device Profiles' Tab
- 'Show Profile for:' should show CH1/2 out Wave/824
- 'Use Wave Out for Position Timing' should be checked
- Set 'Buffer Characteristics' to 4096 for each Sampling Rate
found in 'Stereo'. For 'Mono' choose 2048. All of the offsets
should be set to '0'.
- Select the menu item, ‘Tools | Audio Options’. The Audio
Options dialog box will be displayed.
Once this setup is finished, use the Track Properties Source and
Port settings to assign specific WavePRO input and output
channels to individual tracks.

 

[gidman]

Buffer/Latency

Freudian Slip,

Your pc should be ample to handle your recordings.
I only have 128. I am saving for a 256. My processor is 750mhz.
I have experienced the samething with 12-16 tracks with multiple
effects on each channel. Here is how I deal with the drop out problems.

Make sure you have cleaned your audio disk. This removes any unused audio from the song.
Put your playback buffer at the safest setting (all the way to the right) Sometimes the playback will catch up and start skipping,close the program and restart it.
If I am going to record another track, and I can't get it to stop dropping out, I take off most of the effects to get the song to play. Make sure you save your effect settings, if they are custom.
I have also noticed that if you drop it to 16 bits, the processor has an easier time playing the song back.
Also I have an extra fan on my hard drives... I have two hd's. A 30gig 5400rpm and 40 gig 7200rpm...I have noticed that after a few hours of operation the heat on the hard drives are tremendous. I give them a rest from time to time, by just shutting the pc down for a while (20 to 30 minutes).
The band doesn't mind most of the time, since I don't allow smoking in my home/studio, they are dying to get out for a smoke.


Hope this was some help.

Gidman