Should I ditch my computer?

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 2:53 am

You will see my specs at the bottom. I am having drops outs and glitches. My computer is a few years old. By the time I get to 6 tracks of audio, I get glitches in sound and spikes in CPU load meter readings despite having all but one track frozen.

I am serious about the music I am recording now and do not want to monkey around with teh computer I want to simply record like I was able to on my Roland 1680 which never crashed once. Thing is the 1680 does not offer the great options Ableton does and I never had the option of playing midi through it and loading loops.

Is it time to upgrade? I am ready to. I am thinking about a iMac desktop. But I see people comaplining about glitches regardless about wha they are running their program on.

I really want to hear your thoughts.
Thanks.

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:08 am

You should be able to run way more than 6 tracks on your computer. Try these tips:

http://tarekith.com/assets/XPTweaks.htm

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:27 am

Thanks. I will check into them tomorrow. Too tired after recording and dealing with this the past couple of hours.

I also found that I had a number of Mastering and Helper (3) effects on the Master track. Once I reduced them, many glitches stopped.

Are audio effects this draining? I different ones on different tracks and it seems at some number the glitches hit. And I like subtle effects throughout my tracks.

arkoenig · Post by **arkoenig** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 2:57 pm

Tarekith wrote:You should be able to run way more than 6 tracks on your computer. Try these tips:

http://tarekith.com/assets/XPTweaks.htm

I'm not so sure about clearing out the prefetch folder, as suggested above. See http://askbobrankin.com/windows_prefetch.html for a counterargument.

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 4:25 pm

arkoenig wrote:
Tarekith wrote:You should be able to run way more than 6 tracks on your computer. Try these tips:

http://tarekith.com/assets/XPTweaks.htm
I'm not so sure about clearing out the prefetch folder, as suggested above. See http://askbobrankin.com/windows_prefetch.html for a counterargument.

Point taken. In general, though, I have heard of many of the other suggestions before and the computer is responding better so far.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:29 pm

arkoenig wrote:
Tarekith wrote: I'm not so sure about clearing out the prefetch folder, as suggested above. See http://askbobrankin.com/windows_prefetch.html for a counterargument.

That guy is talking about DISABLING prefetch

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:34 pm

And there's a really important one missing!

Device manager -->> expand Disk drives, right click -->> properties, tab "policies" untick "Enable wrtie caching on disk"

This is a crappy windows caching scheme that can interfere with the buffering that DAWs do specifically for audio. it needs to be OFF.

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 9:28 pm

djsynchro wrote:And there's a really important one missing!

Device manager -->> expand Disk drives, right click -->> properties, tab "policies" untick "Enable wrtie caching on disk"

This is a crappy windows caching scheme that can interfere with the buffering that DAWs do specifically for audio. it needs to be OFF.

Can we get these steps again for XP. They are the only ones I can't follow so far. I'm not seeing the Expand Disk Drives

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:10 pm

I know 3 people with Lexicon Omegas and not one of them was able to get it work (2 wouldn't work at all, the 3rd would only work at 1,024 samples).

I don't think the drivers are that great. Try downloading ASIO4ALL and see if that ASIO driver gives you better performance.

All 3 now use other interfaces.

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:13 pm

I use asio4all.

Ok, so I am having spikes of 65% cpu usage despite having followed the advice given. I just went back into my boot up and services. I need to shut down Ableton and restart.
I still get sudden drop outs and glitches of no sound.

I may be at fault for dragging and dropping audio effects on the fly to see how they sound. If I have more than two audio effects on a track I run trouble. For example I had vocals doubled, compressor and vocals 2 on a track. I deleted vocals 2 and the song runs fine.

Is this common? Is there a way to remedy it? Freezing tracks does help a great deal. But it still happens.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 3:09 pm

neyko wrote:
Can we get these steps again for XP. They are the only ones I can't follow so far. I'm not seeing the Expand Disk Drives

I meant device manager, now you see a list of devices, then click on the plus sign od disk drives so it "expands" to show you all the physical hard drives on your system. Right click them and turn write caching off (tab "policies")

Just found out it was set to "on" on my laptop... not good!

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 3:13 pm

re-enable “Show Window Contents While Dragging”.

I leave this off, kinda old school like Atari St but it does take more CPU to blit the contents of a window. thing is with all these tweaks, one of them yes/no is not going to make that much difference, but all of them add up to a few % so do as many as you can stand.

I once solved someone's glitches simply by disabling the Windows disk caching! So that one's worth trying.

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 10:25 pm

This has helped, but Isee that after a certain point compressors (Ableton's virtual ones) are cuasing the glitches. Even if the tracks are frozen.

glu · Post by **glu** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 10:32 pm

try with internal sound card using ASIO4ALL driver to see if your external sound card has anything to do with it.

neyko · Post by **neyko** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:05 pm

This is happening during playback at random spots during each play back.

Glu, any idea how to do this?