Dropouts driving me crazy

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diamondknife
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2005/11/05 16:23:50 (permalink)

Dropouts driving me crazy

I've recorded a song using Reason and Sonar 5. I have about 5 audio tracks running and the rest is rewired to Reason. Everything works fine with this setup(no dropouts) except the cpu was runnin high because of effects, softsynths and samplers in Reason. So I bounced the the stuff from Reason to Sonar and I ended up with about 20 tracks of audio. When I click play, i get dropouts every 5 seconds or so. I would like to eliminate this but don't know where to begin. I've read a lot of the posts that refer to removing unnecessary background programs and streamlining your pc for audio, playing with every configuration of asio and wdm resolutions but to no avail. Is the soundcard limited to how many tracks you can run simultaneously? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mauriizo

My computer's specs are:

3.0 GHZ Pentium 4
Hyperthreading off (same problem when on)
2 - 200G SATA hard drives
2 Gig Ram
Echo Mia Sound Card (ISA)
Onboard sound set to disabled
ATI Graphics Card

#1

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    Patrice Brousseau
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    RE: Dropouts driving me crazy 2005/11/05 16:49:52 (permalink)
    ORIGINAL: diamondknife

    I've recorded a song using Reason and Sonar 5. I have about 5 audio tracks running and the rest is rewired to Reason. Everything works fine with this setup(no dropouts) except the cpu was runnin high because of effects, softsynths and samplers in Reason. So I bounced the the stuff from Reason to Sonar and I ended up with about 20 tracks of audio. When I click play, i get dropouts every 5 seconds or so. I would like to eliminate this but don't know where to begin. I've read a lot of the posts that refer to removing unnecessary background programs and streamlining your pc for audio, playing with every configuration of asio and wdm resolutions but to no avail. Is the soundcard limited to how many tracks you can run simultaneously? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks,

    Mauriizo

    My computer's specs are:

    3.0 GHZ Pentium 4
    Hyperthreading off (same problem when on)
    2 - 200G SATA hard drives
    2 Gig Ram
    Echo Mia Sound Card (ISA)
    Onboard sound set to disabled
    ATI Graphics Card




    Try to change your I/O buffer Size to something like 256 or 512. Also, try increasing your latency slider a bit. You'll find these two options in "Audio Options". I have an Echo Mia too (BTW it is PCI, surely not ISA card...) and a poor old Athlon XP 1600+ and I do not suffer dropouts when playing 15-20 tracks of audio. For the record, I found that WDM work better for me. With ASIO, I had dropouts at low latencies.

    Patrice Brousseau
    #2
    diamondknife
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    RE: Dropouts driving me crazy 2005/11/05 17:45:32 (permalink)
    Thanks Patrice.

    It worked! Switching to WDM fixed the dropouts and raising the I/O buffer to 512 decreased the latency to 12ms on my machine. Is there a way to lower the latency more? With the asio drivers the latency was around 5ms.

    Maurizio
    #3
    M
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    RE: Dropouts driving me crazy 2005/11/05 18:17:46 (permalink)
    Hi, Maurizio,

    You might find that the buffer size increase (and increasingly latency for large mix projects) would have fixed your problem, without reverting to the WDM drivers. I believe, typically, but not always, you can achieve the lowest latencies using the ASIO drivers.

    I have a 3.0 GHz P4 machine with 1 GB RAM, rather than 2, and I quite regularly end up with 50 - 60 audio tracks in a project.

    Just adding to your information.

    http://www.noiseinthebasement.com/
    #4
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