My PC Finally hit the wall

 Ouch... that hurts. 

So how to prevent it from happening again.


First.... find and use the SAVE button rather often. I learned this the hard way and now.... so have you. 

If you save the project frequently, like after recording a new track or making a fair number of edits to a track, IF you have a crash, you only loose a small bit of the work. 

Next... if you reduce the number of synths running in a given project by freezing them, then click SAVE.... you will reduce the processor load that is likely causing the crashes in the first place.  

Freezing a track renders the midi to audio and puts the synth to sleep so it doesn't draw processing power away from other things it might be needed for. You can always unfreeze the synth if additional edits need to be made. 

regardless of what you do and how you do it...... get into the habit of saving often. Then a crash is simply a bump in the road and not a disaster.

hope this helps..... 

I just made up a song to use as a learning tool for MC6. So I'm expecting a few learning moments. Save often....lesson learned. What about those loops though. Are they a synth? Does freezing them help at all? They are in the audio files that you can click and drag. I'm not in front of my home pc so I don't know exactly what their called? Thanks guys.

Well the bad news is Freezing the midi tracks didn't help much. I'm still getting alot of drop outs. The good news is the song sounds great! I've re-did the work I lost and it's better now. I think this old laptop just needs replaced. It's only 3 gigs of ram. It will work for now...I bumped the song over to my Roland vs2400 and mastered it there. I can make this work untill I have more cash. Any ideas on making it better?

If you did that, and still getting drops, I'd wager that the soundcard is a factory sound card. 

The solution is to get a better audio interface, and if you work with midi, be sure it has a midi input on it. 

Did I guess right?



add: if you are using a factory card, the truth is, if you spend about $150 on a decent M-Audio or Focusrite USB audio/midi interface, you will very likely find that the computer is totally 100% workable as it is... no computer upgrade needed. 

The factory card is a big road block to recording music effortlessly and when you eliminate that by adding a decent sound card (external USB) recording becomes a joy. Everything starts to work the way it's supposed to. 

I'm looking it up right now....yeah, technically it looks like it is. 

It is not a standard USB interface as we know them. It combines the guitar/POD functions into a USB device.... so technically it might be an interface but it sure ain't the best way to do things. 

really, I would say contact Line 6 for support on this product. 

Aside from having the most recent driver updates.... what driver mode does it use? ASIO? or something else? 

are you able to monitor the MC output through the POD's audio outputs? 

Without actually seeing it and playing around with it.... IDK. 

To be clear there is a master volume. but to set my guitar input level I have to adjust the amp inside my patch.

What I mean is....When using the hd500 as an audio interface, there isn't a way to adjust your line level other than adjusting your patch. This is a big complaint from many hd500 users.

Thanks SeriousNoise! Those videos look helpful. I'm using vista.