Perhaps true enough with the mics and all in the electronic/rock world. 

What I've been doing, it's the jazz world, so I'm mostly using mostly LD condenser mics and tightly set directional condensers.  Sometimes there's a direct in from an electronic keyboard or an electric guitar,...  I'm supplying no sound to the room.  It's more like an acoustic/electric hybrid.  I choose to use 24/96.  It works for me.

Sets are rarely anything more than 45 minutes, but I always have all the sets pre-set as different projects so I can quickly move into a second or third set by changing projects.  If I'm concerned, during an an extended applause after a number, I can also hit stop and then record again.  Now I'm back to zero time for the file.

I do not worry about latency since I'm only doing audio.  And no plugs to contend with, no processor load with that.  Besides, why would you really need to?  It's about getting the track down.

It's really about how much bandwidth can you push through the buss into your hard drive.  It doesn't take a lot of proc for that but does require two hard drives  and a reasonable amount of ram (2gig for xp 32 bit, 4 for 64 bit) and a machine that's tweaked for audio.  (Davii: get the second hard drive!  Your system might be getting bogged down trying to read and write at the same time.  This is DAW 101  Shoot, borrow one for a test if the money's an issue.)

Again, hard drive is cheap these days, and the projects are easily moved onto DVD for back ups and to clear the space out for new projects,

The projects are then transferred to my studio computer where I do all the post live work.  The external drive makes this easy.  ( and I usually have a better chair to sit in!)

And as I said earlier I'm using a Pentium M for this.  It's 6 years old but it's tweaked only for audio, has an external USB drive and 2 gig of ram.  I'm also using Motu heads for the 16 channels I get.  Even using the Nvidea firewire, go figure.

For what I do I like to do it this way. 

It works for me,...

+1 Mark. I work about the same way as you and set up a bunch of pe meditated project files ready to go. If one song runs into the next I just leave it be. There's usually enough time during applause to stop n' save. If not I have all the songs minimized in the bottom and just open and hit the master record button. I don't have the horse power for 96 so am happy with 48. I agree with wintaper, the equipment being used live is already compromised anyhow, funky AC, HVAC and trucks rumbling on the highway. I believe capturing the energy of the performance is most important. As many feeds as you can steal from the FOH and a clean recording.
 and I guess each type and style of music will be a different approach, the last thing I'd waste bandwidth on would be loud rock or death metal. Just compress the snot out of it and watch for overs. 

wintaper


Sorry if my last post was a bit edgy. Let us know how you make out with the RAM when it comes.
-Dan

It's cool
 
RAM is in, have brought the interface back from the studio, so will look to get to work on all this after a good nights sleep...otherwise I'll no doubt hurl the laptop out of the nearest window

Ha ha, and remember - It's never the machine, it's the operator... so don't hurt yourself.

johnnyV


Ha ha, and remember - It's never the machine, it's the operator... so don't hurt yourself.

I said that to an ex girlfirend once...
 
...I still have the scars 
 
I've been dabbling with the rig this evening, even though a tired head probably isn't a good thing to be working with. I did manage to dig out an external HDD though, albeit a 7,200rpm one, but that was only happy up to 48. Strange thing is, the internal SSD won't manage 48 without a "disk might be full" error. I'm going to put the previous (not the original) HDD in, as I'm sure I did band stuff on that, just out of curiosuty.
 
The comments about genres/mics are something I think I may need some clarification on, as they are an unknown at the moment.

Here's a link for some pc tweaks if you need to double check.  http://www.pcmus.com/TweakXP.htm  If you're running sata drives some of the HD buss stuff will be out of date.

The 7200 drive should be fine.  Make sure all ports (serial parallel, etc) are turned off in bios.  Turn off any WIFI

What are your driver buffer settings?

mark s


Here's a link for some pc tweaks if you need to double check.  http://www.pcmus.com/TweakXP.htm  If you're running sata drives some of the HD buss stuff will be out of date.

The 7200 drive should be fine.  Make sure all ports (serial parallel, etc) are turned off in bios.  Turn off any WIFI

What are your driver buffer settings?

Thanks Mark, though the link gives a page not found error?
 
Update:
 
I put the previous HDD (7200 one) back in the laptop and put the SSD into the external caddy, cleaned it off, disabled all the usual suspects etc and...
 
Hey presto. 16 tracks @96/24.
 
There's occassional cracks to be heard, but as I forgot to bring some mics back yesterday, that could be the bits n' pieces I've had to dig out which are less than brilliant.
 
Plan to talk a friend into doing some real world tests, fingers crossed!
 
Think I might do what others have mentioned too and look to having templates setup for different sample rates - especially as the large number of bands are likely to be noisy guitar bands through 57s/58s. Think the 7200 HDD will get changed for an SSD too, as money allows.
 
Buffer size is greyed out, but showing 2ms/192 samples by the way.
Thanks for all the input everyone

Read through the page earlier and now I get a 404 too!

Since the old drive seems to be working I'd suspect the new one has less buffer memory built into it.  Good to har it's going better for now.

You must be using asio mode for the driver?  You should be able to change it in the driver interface some how.  increasing the ms should help you out.  I do about 6ms on my rig.

mark s


Read through the page earlier and now I get a 404 too!

Since the old drive seems to be working I'd suspect the new one has less buffer memory built into it.  Good to har it's going better for now.

You must be using asio mode for the driver?  You should be able to change it in the driver interface some how.  increasing the ms should help you out.  I do about 6ms on my rig.

The old drive has 16mb cache, but as it's not a spec that's given for SSDs, I've no idea there. One thing I will say though, is that the Disc activity bar in Sonar was a lot higher than I expected it to be.
 
I'm of the opinion at the moment, that the "disc might be full" error is a result of a bottleneck, prompting Sonar to assume the disc has run out of space. You'd think an SSD would have no such difficulty, through it's lightning speed, but judging by that status bar...
 
There are settings for latency available; Lowest/Low/Normal/High/Highest. For now, I've left it on normal, with the view of possibly raising it depending on real world testing.

ultimately, for straight-up live recording, the real determining factor is the hard disk speed. Btw - disk cache size doesn't really make a difference because in this case you are streaming to disk one-way (and in many cases caches are write-through)

Knowing that the disc will be the weak link, lightening the load on the host machine is also a good idea. Obviously don't use any plugins. I generally record into projects that have no routing - no sends/inserts/groups al all. Anything you can do to remove potential problems. Disable screen savers, turn off power management - disable wireless. Set latency at the highest setting - you're just recording after all - it doesn't matter.

And (yes I keep harping on it) set Sonar to allocate disk space in larger chunks - 5 or 10 min is good. turn off wavefile rendering while recording.

This will give you the leanest possible capture setup. In my case - I transfer to a workstation for processing. If you are actually working on this machine, you'd need to reconfigure for mixing mode.

-Dan