Recording for 10 hours straight

  • Thread starter Thread starter trikero
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trikero

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I work at a place that has 2 stages. We have L/R from the board and 2 mics (L/R) on each side, running into a presonus fp10. Currently, we use adobe audition 3, but sometimes half second dropouts occur. If there are shows on both sides we might have 8 tracks recording for up to 10-12 hours.

computer specs are...
p4 3.4 ghz (no fancy dual core or anything)
2gb ddr ram
250 gb 7200 RPM ide HDD
750 gb sata HDD (audition writes to this drive)
1 tb firewire HDD (this one is for storage/editing)
sound blaster audigy 2 card
geforce 5600 128 mb

Do these drop outs happen because:
1. audition sucks?
2. the computer cannot handle such large files?
3. ???

is there a some other program more suited towards doing something like this?
help help help! please and thank you!:D
 
anyone?

I'm considering installing sonar 7 PE and seeing how that goes.
 
Is this something new?
Or have you always had dropouts?
Or only on the long nights?

Not real familiar with Audition, so don't know if it sucks or not. But I know a bunch of radio stations that still use it (or the former Cool Edit Pro) with no problems.

First guess....Not enough RAM.
Assuming your OS is XP. If it's Vista, Definitely not enough RAM.

Or there's something in the background that's trying to start up/shutdown during the long sessions causing the dropouts. Even something as simple as a screensaver kicking on can cause things to go screwy.

How often are HD's defragged?
Any other programs running while the recording is going on?
How long since the connections/cables/ports have been cleaned/checked?
 
I have used wavelab to record 10hrs. You just need something that will automatically split the files up as it is recording
 
trikero said:
sound blaster audigy 2 card
Click to expand...

That is most likely the problem, assuming you are monitoring back through the phones jack. SoundBlaster = latency issues.

Have you tried disabling the SoundBlaster card and just going back out through the Outputs of the PreSonus?
 
If I needed to record 10 hours continuous with any real reliability, I'd have two computers with two interfaces running in parallel.... That way, when something went wrong with one, odds are good that the other one would keep on trucking long enough to get the first one back up and running.

It's the same reason I always used camcorders when doing live-to-tape video recording. If I screwed something up and needed to edit in a bit from a different camera to cover up some jackass walking in front of the camera, I could, and more to the point, if something went wrong with the main recording, I could always cut over to one of the camera originals.

Just my $0.02.

As for your particular problem, make sure the FireWire hardware uses a TI chipset and make sure it is not sharing an IRQ with anything (and particularly not with the video card or ANY usb chip).

Also, run a thorough check on your HD. Multi-second glitches could be caused by a re-seek/retry caused by bad blocks. If so, swap it out for a drive that works.

Finally, make sure you aren't overheating the CPU. Intel chips, at least in my limited experience with them, have this nasty habit of just suddenly putting themselves in a thermal nap mode for seconds at a time if they get too hot. We're not talking about CPU throttling to keep the CPU below some threshold temperature. We're talking about the CPU stopping completely until the temperature drops below a certain threshold, at which point it resumes running at full throttle.... :)

It is also possible that you are recording on a volume with a limited file size (e.g. FAT32 has a 4 GB limit, IIRC). If so, you might be hitting that limit about every 4 hours or so. If your audio app can't transparently create enough files quickly enough and preallocate enough disk space, you'd glitch at that point. This could be caused by the CPU not being fast enough, the disk not being fast enough, or possibly even a lack of sufficient RAM to buffer the data. No idea.
 
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