PC DAW choking???

[SBS]

I am running a Delta 1010 on a 400 PII system. I am using the Vegas Pro software that came with it. I just upgraded to 256 of RAM. I use my system for tracking and mixing full band projects. My problem is it starts to choke in playback which doesn't work when I'm tracking. I can get the drums (5-6 tracks) and bass, after that I start to have trouble. Any ideas?

[SBS]

I originally had only 6 gig hard drive and 128 RAM. I just purchased a maxtor 30gig drive 7200rpm. It's installed as a slave. Before the upgrade my C drive was partitioned and I had no trouble running my program from D and keeping the data storage there and saving the wave files on C. Now I tried to save to my new drive and it choked. I moved my program to the same drive and it was a little better. I read some where about DMA. I checked and mine was disabled. I enabled it but I need to know the correct kbs buffer setting. Things got better after I enabled it though. I'm fairly computer stupid, but it's a cheap way to record. I have no idea what kind of drive my 6gig is. I have an ATX 6ABX2V mother board if that matters.

[Digital Vet]

Try changing your virtual memory to your ram size, going into your performance settings and dissable write behind caching for all drives.

Allso a second drive for recording and the os will boost performance.

:) :D

[SBS]

My OS is on the C drive Vegas in on the D but D is a slave does that matter?. Do you have any ideas on a DMA buffer setting?

[ppxstnr]

I had a 500 amd with a fast hard drive and had infinit trouble trying to do what you are doing. Try running msconfig and turn off all start-up progs not needed for sound (this should be all of them) Also check that your card is not sharing IRQ with any thing except pci steering. You do this in control panel system hardware, click view at the top , select view by connection then open the IRQ tab and look for your card. It should be by itself or with pci steering. To correct you'll have to move your card to different pci slots and recheck to see if windows moved it. ALso play with your sample size in the mixer. This can reduce latency however there is a trade off with popping at too low a level.

Good Luck. If al else fails, upgrade, thats what I did and I haven't regretted it.

[levon]

SBS,what os are u running if u have 400mhz i am assuming you are runnung win98,and that itself among other things mentioned above is not a stable os(win98).
to be honest with you, it looks like u have to upgrade to a faster processer and ram and mainly if you want plug and play pe say,than go with the xp os its very stable comparing win98.
the reason for upgrade, if you are serious about playing back lot of tracks
than u need fast performance at least.tracking or recording a few tracks simultaniously is ok because probabely you will 4 to 5 tracks of inputs simultaniously and thats ok the processor can handle it,but the biggest problem is for example if u want to playback and mix with some plug ins thats where the chocking comes, unless u have upgraded and it will be very stable with some fast processers and xp os these days.anyway the bottemline i have played back and mixed with plugins around 23 tracks of wave on 1.8ghz pc with 512ddram on xp os,absulutely with no tweaks.inotherwords playback with that many wave tracks out of a box with xp os .not bad.
remember each 1 min of wave is about 5 mb storage for mono.and 10mb of storage for stereo track.so keep that in mind when you have around 23 or 24 tracks mono wave lets say,than u have around 500mb to 1 gig of data and on top of that plugins to push thru the processor.its a lot of data and u need fast performance for that.
hope this kind of gives u some info as to whats going on.

btw,my estimation is around 3 minutes of a song of 23 tracks of wave forgot to mention that.just an estimation for informational purposes.

[TimOBrien]

I also have a PII-450/384MbRam/2drives and found Vegas to be a bit.... uh, demanding (unuseable). There are programs that just want a faster machine with more resources to run smoothly due to the way they are written.

Personally, I am running N-Track Studio and can get 16 24-bit audio tracks or 30+ 16-bit tracks without any problems. It's not as demanding on older, slower systems. I'm happy with it on my lowly P2.

But if you're the type who wants to run a gazillion plug-ins or vsti's too you're just going to have to step up to a more powerful system to be comfortable.

[NukleoN]

Suggestion for max performance:

1. Get the fastest CPU you can afford..either upgrade or get a faster PC.

2. Run Win XP Pro. Works great with the Delta 1010.

3. Increase your RAM to a gigabyte (ram is cheap).

4. Use a second hard drive volume (as suggested) which is dedicated to audio. Be sure this is a 7200 RPM drive (EIDE is fine). Defrag often or when you need to.

5. Be sure all drivers are up to date.