I am having a lot of problems with n-track and I am not sure why.
Once I get around 10 tracks laid down is starts to get slow and often locks up. It is especially a problem if I try and put VST effects on any of the tracks. Sometimes I press record and it records for a millisecond and then stops recording 
Most of the time it just crashes and burns 
Background Info
N-track 4.1
Amd X2 4600
2Gb DDR 400 Ram
2 x 80Gb SATA HDD (one of which is dedicated to n-track alone)
Ati Radeon x800xt PE
Windows XP Professional Edition
Echo Gina 3G
As you can see my specs are really very good and should handle what I am asking it to do. I have no other problems on my system so I don’t think that is the problem (I can run Half Life 2 on full settings!).
If any one can help me I would be very grateful as I am totally foxed
If you have a machine good for games, it may not be setup ideally for audio as your graphics card may be hogging a lot of system resources…
A lot of high end graphics cards will have the PCI latency set up high which will hog the PCI bus.
Do a search for Doubledawg. It is a utility that will tell you what each device has set as it’s PCI latency and you can adjust them to see if lowering your graphics card and possibly increasing your soundcard will help.
Might not be the cause of your problem at all, but as you said your machine has plenty enough grunt to run 10 tracks plus fx…
What bit depth and sample rate are you recording at?
Rich
You might also try changing your multithreading setting (File->Settings->Preferences->Options->“Multithread audio processing”. If it’s checked, uncheck it, or vice versa, then see if it has any effect. Theoretically you’d want it enabled with a multi-core CPU, but you never know–there could be a bug or something in how n-Track’s multithreading works. Just something else to try…
Tony
Check to see if you have the most up to date drivers for you soundcard, graphics card etc.
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| 2 x 80Gb SATA HDD (one of which is dedicated to n-track alone) |
Just a shot in the dark here,
But I have read in other post about 2 hardrives, using on for the OS and the other for music…?
Can’t remember if it works to the advantage of the user…but do recall people having problems.
Something about, your computer having to search two different drives to preform the recording function, IE one drive for the “soundcards info”, and “windows info” needed, the other drive containing the “ntrack info”.
Making the computer use CPU to search two seperate drives rather than one, …?
I dunno, but do remember this coming up a few times.
Something about RAID,Firewire? configuration… or better ways to use both drives without reducing the overall speed.
It’s all greek to me, but does sound familiar.
jerm
Generally it’s better to have two drives as musicman3eq has.
The problem with a single drive is imagine that n-track is working hard to write (or read) audio tracks from the drive when the Operating System suddenly decides it needs to access a file from another part of the disk… result - a pause in reading/writing the audio. Slap in an dedicated drive for audio and that problem goes away.
MusicMan’s problem might just be a simple as needing the buffers tweaking.
Alternatively, if another process (eg a Virus scanner) starts up and tries to scan something it might just steal sufficient cpu cycles to cause a problem. Even worse - if something like a virus scanner is trying to scan the audio tracks the are being played/recorded trouble ensues. Ideally a DAW should have NOTHING other than recording software on it - ni Internet, no Virus scanner, no Firewall, no “helper” utilities in the system tray etc…
Thanks for all the advice everyone… I will try all of the suggestions and let you know.
Btw I have just upgraded to version 4.15 of n-track and it does seem to be a lot more stable.
It is now working fine but I would have to open some old projects and check them out.