Drop outs

I am just wondering if there's anything I can do to deal with the dreaded drop outs I'm experiencing.  By dropout, I mean the program will stop dead in its tracks, and I get an error message about a drop out.  Since upgrading to Platinum, I feel that it's taxing my laptop such that it can't handle it anymore.  I find this really surprising, as this laptop is pretty good.
 
The laptop is a Toshiba with only one hard drive, and 16 GB of ram.  It's not a powerhouse by any means, but still pretty decent.  I use an external solid state Toshiba drive connected with USB 3.0.  I was able to use it successfully with X3, but with Platinum I had to put a bunch of tracks into "archive" state so that I could record a bass track.  I'm recording at 48k and 24 bit.
 
Am I dreaming thinking that I can use my laptop?  My home desktop has no (or few) problems, but it has multiple drives and 32 GB of ram.

I did have my ASIO buffer maxed out, but I hadn't seen the settings for Playback and Record buffers.  They were set to 256 and I've now set them to 512.  Let's see if that makes a difference.
 
Thanks!

I wonder if the bottleneck is with the demands being placed on the primary drive.  Can you please give an indication as to what kinds of data live on your primary drive, and on the external solid-state drive connected with USB 3.0?
 
I would also think that if you have a large number of sample-based sounds in your tracks that you could just be feeding too much streaming data from whatever drive they are on, where you wouldn't have that issue with a corresponding number of audio tracks.
 
I would imagine that freezing whatever you could would help out.
 
Bob Bone
 

Are you using any older 32 bit plugins? I am, and am beginning to wonder if it has anything to do with BitBridge in Platinum.

pmarangoni
Yes, I think I use a bunch of that Nomad stuff (compressors, delays, chorus).  But probably only on two or three tracks.

 
I'm only using 2 line 6 plugins. Hopefully someone will chime in and help us.

You mention that you have an external drive connected to a USB3 port.  But what about your audio interface (Roland Studio Capture, according to your sig)?
 
USB 2 devices can be iffy on USB 3 ports (despite their claim of being backward-compatible).  This is why you should always connect a USB 2 interface to a USB 2 port -- unless, of course, you don't have a choice.

JonD
You mention that you have an external drive connected to a USB3 port.  But what about your audio interface (Roland Studio Capture, according to your sig)?
 
USB 2 devices can be iffy on USB 3 ports (despite their claim of being backward-compatible).  This is why you should always connect a USB 2 interface to a USB 2 port -- unless, of course, you don't have a choice.

The Roland interface is indeed connected to a USB 2.0 port.

I don't have the luxury of doing any troubleshooting like that. I have just a few hours at most to get the recording done in a remote situation. If Platinum requires more horsepower or specific hardware at a minimum, Cakewalk should indicate these minimum requirements.  Right now, if you go to the System Requirements page, it seems as though my laptop exceeds them by a longshot, yet it's hardly enough.
 
I did try deleting the plugins (most of them, perhaps not all), but it would still stop recording after a few seconds. Only by placing about seven tracks into Archive state was I able to record ONE track.

pmarangoni
I don't have the luxury of doing any troubleshooting like that. I have just a few hours at most to get the recording done in a remote situation. If Platinum requires more horsepower or specific hardware at a minimum, Cakewalk should indicate these minimum requirements.  Right now, if you go to the System Requirements page, it seems as though my laptop exceeds them by a longshot, yet it's hardly enough.
 
I did try deleting the plugins (most of them, perhaps not all), but it would still stop recording after a few seconds. Only by placing about seven tracks into Archive state was I able to record ONE track.

Platinum actually uses less "horsepower" than X3. We have several benchmarks to show it.
If you are dropping out on recording you most likely have a systemic problem that happens to show up when recording. How many simultaneous tracks are you trying to record and what audio interface and latency settings are you using? As I said its likely related to your hard disk throughput or perhaps power management.
 
 
You asked if there is something you can do to solve the dropouts. Without some troubleshooting on your end you will never find the source of the problem. You should be able to test this anywhere - I wasn't suggesting troubleshooting on site.
 
Are you sure that you are using identical settings in X3? You can try backing up and copying your aud.ini file from X3 to platinum and see if it solves the problem.
 

abacab
The best tool (free!) that I have run across for checking disk throughput is the CrystalDiskMark utility.
 
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
 
It is available with an installer or as a portable zip(no installer needed).

Thank you!

I know you must have followed the guides for seting up a laptop for recording,, but make sure there are no background processes running. ON laptops this is critical. I found the BAttery managment and wi fi are huge offenders. Go to task manager and see whats running. 
 
Download and run http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
 
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
 
Platinum actually uses less "horsepower" than X3. We have several benchmarks to show it.
If you are dropping out on recording you most likely have a systemic problem that happens to show up when recording. How many simultaneous tracks are you trying to record and what audio interface and latency settings are you using? As I said its likely related to your hard disk throughput or perhaps power management.

I was trying to record ONE track, while playing back about 15 tracks.  Using a Roland Studio Capture with the buffer set almost to MAX.

Cactus Music
I know you must have followed the guides for seting up a laptop for recording,, but make sure there are no background processes running. ON laptops this is critical. I found the BAttery managment and wi fi are huge offenders. Go to task manager and see whats running. 
 

 
There are some things running in Windows 10 that I can't stop, like that damn Cortana.  It just starts up again.  I didn't think about the wireless adapter though, so that may be it.
 
Seriously though, I don't think I'm going to risk using my laptop to record drums anymore. Not until I get a more powerful laptop that is really configured for recording anyway.  There are just too many "moving parts" that have to be aligned "just so" in order to get everything to behave.  I need to know that things are going to work before I start.

microapp
+1 to CrystalDisk utility.
I would get Resplendent Software's Latency Monitor as this may narrow down what is the culprit. It is free.

+1 to LatencyMon

abacab
Your scores on the audio drive are close to what I get on my WD 7200rpm SATA 3GB/s audio drive.  It does not look like this would be a bottleneck on a few audio tracks.

 Yeah, I don't think my issue is hardware related. Thanks for the tip and for looking at my results. When I get to the studio, I'll delete my 32 bit plugins and see. If this is the issue with Platinum, then someone from Cakewalk should let us know (if they know) that Platinum doesn't play nice with older plugins that X3e can handle without issues.