Breaking the 64 track barrier

Does anyone have insight or experience recording greater than 64 mono tracks at once?


I need to record 72 mono tracks in 24-bit/96KHz via three Lynx AES50 cards. When I hit record, the audio engine drops in less than a second. It's the same with 71, 70, 69 and down to 65 tracks. When I remove the 65th track and record with 64 tracks, it works like a charm.

This problem does not occur using Reaper but I'd rather use Sonar from start to finish.

I have an ADK Hex Xtreme DAW:
- Intel Core i7 4930K 3.4GHz
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
- System disk: Samsung 256GB 840 Pro SSD
- Audio disk: two Crucial M550 SSD's in RAID 0
- Windows 7 Pro SP1
- Sonar X3e Producer

I would call tech support with this one. Take note of the questions they ask and the replies supplied. If they cannot help, please provide the detail information they ask for here to avoid having the same questions posed again.

Was the driver update applied? How is Reaper relevant if you want to use SONAR?

I wouldn't have thought (theoretically at least) RAID 0 would see much of an improvement with SSDs over a single disc. Either of my two Intel SSDs alone gets pretty close to what the SATA interface can handle for sustained read/write.

Were any plugins at all loaded in the Sonar project?

Have you considered reporting this as a bug?

TLW: I guess I was thinking that if writing all 72 tracks over SATA to a single drive was beyond the ability of the drive, then perhaps I would benefit by splitting those writes between two SATA interfaces and two drives.  Sonar allows me to choose a drive on the project level but not by the track so the only way I could see to split writes out of one project to two drives was by using a RAID 0 solution outside of Sonar.

I'm new to much of this and was told that writing 72 tracks of 24/96 could easily be exceeding a single drive's ability. I don't know this myself, it's just what I was told.  TomsHardware.com has an interesting article on the subject of a single SSD versus two in a RAID 0 configuration (). 

No plugins were loaded for this project.  We were just doing a raw recording of a symphony.

I guess it could be reported as a bug but I want to try what I can on my own in case it's just a false alarm.

Anderton:  I've updated the drivers this evening and will need to setup another test to check it.  The Lynx release notes say that this update is a minimal change but I've seen such "minimal changes" save the day before.  And I agree about the 64 number.  Seems suspicious that I get the same response whether with 65 or 72 tracks but with 64, everything is fine.

If the driver update fails to resolve the issue, I would still press support for resolution. Verify Preferences > File > Audio Data "Record Bit Depth" has been set to 24. Might want to tinker with Preferences > Audio > Sync and Caching "Record I/O Buffer Size" the sweet spot is system dependent. Also dial back the dropout sensitivity variable DropoutMsec (I set mine to 750 but have no idea what to set it to in this case) in Preferences > Audio > Configuration File. There are other config file settings which may be of interest FlushWriteBeforeRead, FlushMultiple, EnableCacheWriteThru but would defer to someone more knowledgeable about the impact of these parameters in this setting.

Like I said, 72 tracks is like 18MB/s, no way should that be even near the limit of any SSD. It's always possible something weird is going on in your system but so far that Tom's Hardware thing supports what I was saying.
 
I'd definitely try updating the driver if you still haven't.

Hi Danny,
I happen to have a mutli-input sound card with enough inputs to replicate what you're doing and, while it did tax my system pretty heavily, after tinkering a a bit with the File System options (under "Preferences" - "Audio" - "Sync and Caching" was able to record 70 tracks simultaneously to a SATA drive (not an SSD) with good reliability. I didn't let it go for too long...a minute or so, but I was able to do more than 64. I'm using an RME HDSPe MADI fx, so we have some different hardware, but it did work.
 
The preferences tinkering I did was really to solve the disk overruns that I was getting at first. I didn't seem to run into a track count limitation, just a "my disk drive is too slow to do this" limitation. When that happened I got a specific error about disk overruns.
 
I don't know that I can offer much by way of help for your scenario, but knowing that Sonar is capable of doing it is at least a place to start. 
 
Good luck man, sounds like a big project you're working on.
Dean

Maybe the problem ist the preview drawing of the waveforms while recording.
Ist not only 72 tracks of audio - it's PLUS 72 previews.
Go to the preferences (Customization - Display) and de-click preview while recording.
 

Not sure about your issues completely, but I though I would ask.
When you installed the OS on your raid system drives, Did you unplug the other HDs or SSDs drives from the motherboard?
 
I read on the Crucial website forums that when installing to ssd drive a  win 7/8 os, to remove all other Hard drives and ssds while doing so, and updating the os and drivers...then plug in the other Drives....as windows will put swap paging filing on them on installation...which could cause Page fault errors, and logging of those errors to event viewer and such....ect.
 
Just something I thought might have relevance to your issue?.....Just thinking outside the box....not saying it is your issue...but one I read on, with ssd drives as system drive.
 
Wink.. here is what I read: 
 

Re: M550 Boot Drive Installation

 [ New ]


Options 








‎04-19-2014 03:23 AMin reply to targetbsp
I did find a solution aftrer installing Windows 8.1.  I have three internal hard disk drives and that was the problem.  When installing Windows 7 or 8 onto a new SSD boot drive one must disconect all other internal hard drives.  Otherwise Windows will attempt to change the number of sectors on each drive to match the number on the SSD.  Therefore, disconnect all internal hard drives, install Windows on the SDD and then reconnect the HDDs.  Once that is done it may take WIndows a few hours before it recognizes the other drives but it will. Once that occurs then the installation runs perfectily.  It is rather odd but does work nicely.
 
Thanks for the help.
 
Bob

http://forum.crucial.com/.../highlight/true#M41971
 

I haven't tracked that much simultaneously myself yet, but have you seen the OP's specs? Seriously, dual SSDs in RAID 0 and a very recent higher end quad core I7. Considering that some pro systems regularly track like 180 tracks at 192KHz for hours and the required bandwidth of 72 tracks at 24/96 isn't even close to the limit of a regular HDD, I'd say something is wrong. This should be very achievable.

Good find. I'm also wondering if this got resolved.