no worries - yes, it should be able to do 96k.

but tascam has never been top on my list of DAW hardware to buy because of their drivers.  their drivers tend to be "hit and miss" and may or may not work on any given system.  I've yet to see a real correlation narrowed down as to what might be the common denomenator other than their poor drivers.  I had high hopes that their drivers would be better for the new units like you have, but so far I still am seeing problems on the forums with some of them and some of them work fine.  status quo for Tascam.

so even the message you're seeing is about the disk drive being full, if you think that's not happening, then I might at least try the higher latency buffers and see what happens.  it can't hurt to try that.

Beagle


no worries - yes, it should be able to do 96k.

but tascam has never been top on my list of DAW hardware to buy because of their drivers.  their drivers tend to be "hit and miss" and may or may not work on any given system.  I've yet to see a real correlation narrowed down as to what might be the common denomenator other than their poor drivers.  I had high hopes that their drivers would be better for the new units like you have, but so far I still am seeing problems on the forums with some of them and some of them work fine.  status quo for Tascam.

so even the message you're seeing is about the disk drive being full, if you think that's not happening, then I might at least try the higher latency buffers and see what happens.  it can't hurt to try that.

I've just spotted that Security Essentials' realtime scanning was still on, which probably didn't help matters much at all.
 
Part of the difficulty with narrowing this down, is that the flight case with the interface, mic splits, cabling etc, is at the studio, which I don't get as much time to get to as I perhaps need, to go and test. Especially with things like the latency checker. It's just utterly frustrating that the better the system gets on paper, the worst it gets in practise, argh!
 
I'm under pressure to find a new venue to work at too, but of course, the last thing I want to do is pitch a service that I can't provide, so fingers crossed the RAM and some of these checks suggested by you guys come up trumps :)
Thanks for the input everyone :)

Seems odd that these customers demand 96/24 when in the end they will post it on the net as a 128kbps MP3. Very, very few home stereo system these days could distinguish between a file at 44.1/ 16 and anything higher. But I do understand your issue with the storage. There's something not working right.
Beagle is correct regarding iffy results with Tascam drivers. Mine works great with my laptop but will not work with MIDI and soft synths on my much more up to date desktop. It's a bargan for the having 16 inputs but it's not what I would buy again if I was involved in serious recording. I'm afraid that caliber of gear still costs big money.

Cactus Music


Seems odd that these customers demand 96/24 when in the end they will post it on the net as a 128kbps MP3. Very, very few home stereo system these days could distinguish between a file at 44.1/ 16 and anything higher. But I do understand your issue with the storage. There's something not working right.
Beagle is correct regarding iffy results with Tascam drivers. Mine works great with my laptop but will not work with MIDI and soft synths on my much more up to date desktop. It's a bargan for the having 16 inputs but it's not what I would buy again if I was involved in serious recording. I'm afraid that caliber of gear still costs big money.

Indeed, a lot of it is psycological "so n' so can reocrd at twice that sample rate for the same money" etc comes in to it. The other side of the coin though, is that many look to film the performance and put the video and audio together onto DVDs, but ultimately the vast majority of stuff will end up online as you say.
 
Yeah, the capacity thing has really thrown me. Something is definately up there
 
I've got 8Gb of RAM arriving in a few days, then I'll look to heading back to the studio to see how much of an impact that has.
 
Originally, I'd planned a gradual change over, but no firewire on this laptop (express card slot is buggered) meant I had to come up with a plan B. On paper, the Tascam looked like the only option that was both financially viable and still small enough to lug around the Underground. Overly deep (compared to other simular kit), no ADAT and the last two channels being S/PDIF coax really didn't help! Otherwise I would've kept the Presonus Lightpipe. All because of no firewire, argh!

Does Tascam actually say the US-1641 can handle 16 simultaneous tracks of 96k/24bit audio?   16 channels of simultaneous 96k/24bit tracks over the USB2 bus in a loud (i.e. lots of vibrations) environment is tall order.   I don't think it's realistic to expect a ~$300 interface to have that kind of performance.  I would suggest a faster interface (firewire, RME bus, etc) if you realistically want to even get close... 
...and on a laptop, I wouldn't trust USB or FIREWIRE to get this kind of performance.  The implementation of the USB and Firewire buses on most "off the shelf" laptops is not very good.  You'd be lucky to get 10-12 megabytes per second (of actual audio data sustained continuous streaming over 3-5 minutes for a song) out of standard laptop.   More RAM is probably not going to help you at all.  The kind of portable rig (computer + interface) that can give you rock solid performance recording 16 tracks of 96k/24bit audio live is not trivial to put together.  


The only thing I can suggest is crank up all your buffers...  Or go back to whatever it was you say you were using before that could do this (32bit vista or something? I didn't really follow what the specs were on your former rig that could do this)
Using an HD24 based rig to get the raw tracks live and then dumping them to your rig at home to mix is really not that bad of an option... though I think they only go up to 48K.  

A separate USB card may help, if your laptop has a slot for one. Not all USB chip sets are the same. Some are better for audio than others.  As already stated, that is quite a bit to expect from a US-1641 but maybe not imposable. I use a firewire interface for tracking with my laptop. I own a US-1641 but rarely use it. It didn't perform well with my laptop but did fine with my main desktop.  

jimmy - i'm not sure what you mean by "a separate USB card may help"

are you talking about a Cardbus to USB card?

I do tons of live multi-track recording. Absolutely no need to record @ 96KHz. The types of microphones typically used on stage do not merit the higher sampling rate. Have you checked the frequency response of a Beta 58 recently?

You can argue that you need it - but your system can't handle it - and buying more ourboard gear ain't gonna help.

Last weekend I ran 32 tracks / 5 hours @ 48k/24b onto the 7200 rpm internal drive on my MacBookPro. No problems whatsoever. Do it all the time.

-Dan

I need to catch up here, lol.

The Tascam is supposed to be able to do 16 tracks, 96/24 simulaneously.

Firewire (or a 3rd party USB2) express card is no good, as the slot doesn't work.

The successful use, was with the original Vista 32 whilst using an external USB2 Raptor drive. In changing the internal hard drive, I had to use Vista 64.

96/24 isn't the be and end all, just that I'm up against others offering that spec and, originally, there was no hassle in me doing that until I ended up where I am now. It's really only a selling point, but sods law says someone will want it.

The current RAM situation is a 1Gb + 2Gb Sodimm, due to the original 32bit OS, so it's not running in dual channel mode and is a bit lacking considering the 64bit OS currently installed. I'm hoping overkill on RAM, in dual channel mode, might at least give the machine a chance to breathe :-)

Ran the latency checker; Have now disabled quite a few things and that appears to be all good, but until the new RAM arrives, I won't be at the studio to find out how much better things are...if any considering the capacity issue that came up.

Previously had an HD24. Great machine, but too much to cart around town when I was doing mobile recording, so aimed for the smaller setup.

I am looking at other options to replace this, in particular a 1u iTX i5 + RME RayDat + 2x Octopre Dynamics route...depending on how much the girlfriend loves me... but, obviously, a working rig right now is the main thing.

Thanks for the input, my brain is more enclined to take the SSD out, put the old 5,400 Vista 32 back in and flog the laptop on eBay...

Hey, the laptop should have plenty power.  I typically do the very same with my MOTU set up and a Pentium M laptop with 2 gig of ram and XP on it.  I record to an external hard drive.  Then I just burn to DVD when I'm done with it.  That's usually after I migrate it to the studio system,..