Wintaper,

with you there about the hard drive speed. Assuming you mean dedicated HD too. 

With all the extra load on computers things like wireless connections need to be paid attention too. I've found this one out the hard way in low load scenarios; but I think you're also saying that.

It's about keeping a clean route from the digital head to the drive.

And thanks for the tips about allocation.  Though I've not had any troubles with what I've done in the past I'll always look for a better margin of safety.

best,

Mark

your problems seem to be almost solved...
I've done a few multitrack-recordings, 44KhZ@24bit x 24 up to 26 tracks on a very old Laptop.
I've also seen a decrease in performance when I started upgrading parts of my system..
so from what I've experienced:
XP(32bit) is the way to go.. ram is not an issue, and an internal 7200rpm drive is sufficient
Vista is the worst in terms of performance (DPC latency)
Win7 is better than Vista, but worse than XP
So, if you don't get the basics right you'll not get a good performance no matter how hard you try.

The Harddrive needs a constancy throughput performance.. you'll not get that with a SSD drive (unless maybe you'll spend really lots of cash).
I am a bit too lazy to do the math right now, but a 7200rpm should do fine. I had an IDE Hitachi drive that worked very well.. the 2,5" 7200rpm ide drives have been discontinued,.. I guess you are still getting them as SATA drives..

I don't know your audiointerface,.. doesn't it have a direct monitoring feature ?
I used to hook up my ff800 and 2 octamics in series (mics/line -> rme audiointerfaces->output to foh).. direct monitoring enables..
latency within Sonar/audio driver at a very save setting.

Actually I've done all my remote sessions (32 x 48k/24) right onto the 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Momentus drive in my Macbook. Originally had figured on an external drive - but haven't needed one yet. 

I use both Win and Mac on the MBP ... Sonar on Windows XP, Pro-Tools on Mac. Win partition is a dedicated DAW setup for capture. 
 
As far as the OS goes... properly tweaked XP, Vista and Win7 are all capable... 

*BUT* 

Vista and Win7 will have much higher DPC latency on machines that have HPET turned on in their BIOS. If your laptop has HPET (high precision event timer) permanently enabled, you will be *far* better off with XP for capturing large amounts of tracks. XP is not affected by the HPET / DPC problem.


I've done multiple installs on the same laptop - DPC latency on XP can be as much as 100/sec *less* than Vista/Win7 on same exact machine. For capturing on laptop - this is critical.

One additional thing that I had to do with my new SSD drive is to go to aud.ini (Sonar must be closed), edit it- by changing the dropout time from 256 to 500, I may have gone all the way to 1000... 

That made all the difference in the world with sudden dropouts on my new win7 64 bit SSD system. 

Try THAT!

Hi all, This may have been answered somewhere else in these forums, but I have not been able to find the answer myself. I am using a Dell 15R laptop (500GB HDD, 6GB RAM) with a TASCAM US-1641 interface, using Sonar X1 Essential. I can't seems to get all 16 different inputs to show up on the inputs drop down for each track. All I get is the left and right mono, and a stereo. I am using 1 XLR input and 4 TRS inputs. Any help would be great.

Start a new topic in the X1 forum.

This thread is older than me! (joke, but you'll get more hits by posting it as a new topic)

As far as the 96 thing goes, just tell them "yea, OK 96k, and then record at 48. What are they going to know.
If it gets testy, just upsample.

Very old thread and some good reading.
As you can see from my signature I have the us1641
Your inputs under ASIO will show as
Left US 1641 mike in 1   This is input 1
Right us1641 mike in 1    This is input 2  
Stereo us 1641 mike in 1 This you use when your doing a stereo track of 1#2

This is how most ASIO drivers show in Sonar

timidi


As far as the 96 thing goes, just tell them "yea, OK 96k, and then record at 48. What are they going to know.
If it gets testy, just upsample.

  Love it!