ram

  • Thread starter Thread starter RODDLES
  • Start date Start date
R

RODDLES

New member
I,m going to by a interface so I can record 8 simultaneous tracks of audio in cakewalk 9 and I am wondering if I increase my ram will it make it easier to do so?I currently have 128 meg and want to know how much more will do the job?I,m usin a p111 733 with cakewalk 9 and a 20 gig 7200 rpm hard drive.....any help would be appreciated.
 
Your setup is perfect for running 8 tracks. infact with that setup you could probably run all 128 tracks simultaneously without real-time effects (especially without reverb). my system currently consists of a p II 333 and a 15Gig 7200 RPM harddrive. it can push 128 tracks if i dont load any effects in (which is way more than enough). just do the most important real-time effects at one time, like compression. but of course thats only if your gonna try and run 128 tracks. in your case, 8 tracks will be easy and you could run real-time reverb on all tracks and probably every other effect you want. the ram, really doesnt do much when it comes to audio recording. 128M is plenty. most of it is your CPU and harddrive (mostly CPU in most cases i think).
 
BTW. I am currently running 8 tracks on a recording im doing at the moment. Without any real-time effects im only using like 2% of my cpu and 2% of my harddrive. with compression, reverb, gates on every track, the cpu goes between 20%-30% and the harddrive stays 2%-10%. hope i helped yah out a bit.
 
sorry (again)

i was just reading in some other talks. it seems ram does matter a bit when recording, however i dont see why as long as you are recording to hard drive. i use 196M and that runs perfectly fine for me. Sorry if im starting to confuse you haha.
Lata
 
RAM is used for buffering all the data going in/out of your interface when recording/playing back. I was using a Celeron 333 system with 128 megs RAM. I bought a Gadget Labs Wave 824 unit (great unit, 24bit 8in/8out, $500) and found it worked fine while recording 4 tracks at once but would choke if I tried recording 8 at once. I upgraded the CPU to a Pentium IIIEB 553 and upped the RAM to 256, and now it is flawless.

As cheap as RAM is, I say buy as much as you can afford.
 
128MB for the most part, is good enough. As RWhite says, ram is cheap so load up. 256MB should be good enough for anything. I'm gonna upgrade my memory soon to see if it solves some problems. You get 128 tracks on a 333? must be MIDI, or I'm missing out on something. I get 24 tracks tops on a PIII 800 with 128MB before the sound starts to deteriorate, not bog down, skip or choke - the sound changes, and not just because of more instruments in the mix. Don't need more than that anyway unless your doing a score for Star Wars 8.
 
I can play back around 14 tracks (Nearly all stereo, I bounce down to stereo) with maybe two reverbs and L1 on a PII350 with 128meg RAM and 7200 10gig. But to mix down it doesn't matter so if it falls over I switch off a couple of accoustics or something. More RAM would help....hey RWhite, you don't think it was the going from a celeron 333 to a Pentium IIIEB 553 that improved your track number??

cheers
john :)
 
I've never had any issues either, and I'm running 128 MB. However, just like mentioned, the RAM is a form of "buffer", so I think, the more the better. I guess this all depends on how much you've actually recorded, how many effects you're adding, etc. RAM is cheap though, so go to 256 if ya can. I plan on it. It's only like $99-$119. It'll definitely give you room to not even worry at all =]
 
I was just reading other reviews on this subject. It seems strange to me that everyone can only run so little tracks on your systems. I had a PII 333, 196M Ram, 5400 RPM harddrive, and windows 98. I could simultaneously record 4 tracks with my midiman delta 44, and playback 16 tracks without any effects, but still room for a decent compressor on the main bus. well, i recently upgraded to a 7200 RPM harddrive, my cpu and RAM is the same. But what i think really made a big difference, was windows ME. Also i did some optimizing for recording like virtually memory, write behind caching, etc (if you want to know what tweaked ask me). But i can record all 4 tracks (in sync) and, and the big part, 128 tracks playback and still allowing me for some compression effects without DSP. i went one more on the tracks, and it immediately dropped out (probably because 128 is all cakewalk can handle). why i can do this? i dunno. but whatever i did really helped.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top