Project files = Possible performance issues at times?

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grizwalter
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2014/01/15 09:26:19 (permalink)

Project files = Possible performance issues at times?

Hello all! I posted recently regarding the problem I was having where the audio engine kept dropping out during my attempts to mix a 43 track song. That post is located here:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/From-3-to-7-Gig-of-RAM-and-NOTHIN-m2957531-p3.aspx#2958793
 
Thanks to everyone who chimed in with help and suggestions there! 
 
Since that post I've done some experimenting, and noticed some things which lead me to only one logical conclusion (not necessarily the correct one, but nevertheless! lol). As best I can tell, the problem was completely unrelated to my computer and seems to have rested in the actual project file itself. Why do I think this, you ask?
 
During that thread interaction, one person actually asked if the file might be "bad." Nothing but the audio problem was apparent, so I put that one in the ol' memory banks and continued forward seeking further answers. However, around the time I was trying to get that mix done, I started another which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 26 tracks. While it wasn't as many tracks, I ended up using a TON of processing on that mix, and not once did I encounter so much as a whimper from my system. That got me thinking, so I went and did three more mixes; one was 44 tracks, one 63 tracks, and one 36 tracks. In each case, I experienced no problems whatsoever and everything ran smooth as silk.
 
I'm not sure how a project file can affect performance really, but I also can think of no other explanation for why that previous mix attempt was literally impossible to complete due to non-stop audio engine drop-out later in the process. While I've certainly had some instances where a particular project behaved in a bizarre or frustrating manner, nothing related to the audio engine performance comes back to memory. (I did previously have one project where certain tracks would simply never playback, and when I moved started a new project and imported the clips, everything worked fine.)
 
Thought I'd give a heads up to all, get any feedback/thoughts, and maybe some Cakewalk folks can shed some light on this matter as well?
 
Thanks everyone!
Grizzy 

Joe Walter
Mile-High Audio Productions
Offering Production, Mixing, Mastering and Voice Artist services
http://grizwalter.wix.com/mountainmix
grizwalter@live.com
 
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    bitflipper
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    Re: Project files = Possible performance issues at times? 2014/01/15 10:09:57 (permalink)
    Project files are just the means for persisting data. They are read from and written to the disk drive in whole. A corrupt file might be unreadable, or it might take a long time to load, but once read the project file itself is not referenced and therefore cannot impact performance during playback.
     
    More likely is disk corruption of an audio file such as a physical badspot that requires multiple retries to read the data. The O/S will hide this from the user as long as the number of retries is small, resulting in what's perceived as poor performance. Badly-fragmented files could also cause a similar experience.
     
    Which is not to say there's no scenario under which a corrupt project file might restore data in such a way as to cause inefficient playback. Not knowing how SONAR's data is organized internally, I can't say that. But I would expect any such problems to be resolved as soon as the project is re-saved, since it's rewritten from scratch each time.


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