Sound sucks when running tracks from external HD

mortalengines · Post by **mortalengines** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 4:45 am

Hi, I recently got a sony oxford FW hard drive (kind of a generic one from Tiger Direct) enclosure to run my loops from with the idea that it would go a little easier on my CPU. Well, I get the same CPU load readings either way & I get "pops & clicks" when I run off of the external. I gues my question is...Am I doing something wrong, or have I neglected to do something else first to prepare the external drive? Could it just be a crappy HD enclosure? I have a G4 powerbook, 1.5ghz Processor, 1.25 gig of RAM & am running OSX 10.3.5. Any feedback or suggestions or similar experiences would be appreciated.

DeadlyKungFu · Post by **DeadlyKungFu** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 5:48 am

word is 7200 rpm drives you don't need to worry about
5200 rpm drives 'can' suffer from that
what do you have?

Select a clip, hit the RAM button in the Clip View, so the sample runs from RAM, not from the drive.

Next to latency this is probably the second key to a smooth system. Drives are pretty cheap, cheaper than a vst, a synth...

Check the buffer sizes in the Preferences, there's an audio buffer and a plug-in buffer size.

mortalengines · Post by **mortalengines** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 2:18 am

The external HD is a 7200 RPM, I'll mess with the buffers a little, wiil this do much to ease the strain on CPU? & Assigning tracks to play off of RAM....would you do this to a select one or two, or as many as your RAM can bear?

nolus · Post by **nolus** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 5:39 pm

are you using a firewire sound card on the same port? that causes problems for me.

mortalengines · Post by **mortalengines** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 10:19 pm

Yes I am using an Onyx firewire card that comes with the mixer...I have a FW400 port (Onyx) & an FW800 port. I did bump up the buffers on the plug ins (256) & on the audio out (750 samples) as well & this seems to help as far as sound quality & the pops & clicks have stopped, for now at least & I will keep monitoring as I go.

mortalengines · Post by **mortalengines** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 10:45 pm

Well, the occasional pop/click/glitch has returned. I will have to try RAM mode now. I have the HD on one Firewire Port & the hard drive on another. Am I missing anything at this point? Geez... I am only running 8 frozen tracks with 3 Returns (nothing particulary fancy either - reverb & two different kinds of delays).

djmichaelwenz · Post by **djmichaelwenz** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 7:00 pm

I would like to know too