Maximum tracks allowed in N-track?

n-Track Studio Discussion Forum
1

Fader graphics go black after 40 or so

2

Is there a maximum number of tracks that N-track can handlle? The vu meters/faders seem to go black after about 40 tracks. I tried upping the playback buffer (set at default of 2/2048), but that causes n-track to crash when I play the track until I change it back. (24bit Ntrack/768MB RAM / Pentium 4 2.4Ghz).

Thanks,

JD

3

The limit in ver. 3.3 was about 80 tracks, but if that still applies… ???

I’ve never gone beyond 40 tracks anyway - When I did a take containing 32 tracks I considered using one or more sub-mixes, but I managed to get by without…

How is your CPU ressource meter behaving? If you are running 40 tracks without any effects and no background tasks to speak of it should stay below 50 % or so. There may be a million causes for this, but I suspect a ‘bottleneck’ problem somewhere - perhaps your hard drive isn’t up to it. After all, 24 bit will strain a hard drive about 50 % more than 16 bit, and the drive has to be able to handle that amount of data - that is about 5.3 MB/second at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz, or 5.7 MB/second at 48 kHz.

regards, Nils

4

Sound like a resource issue…a running out of resources problem that is. It might be indicative of a bug in n-Tracks or of the video driver. What kind of video is on the machine?

Does the problem happen right after adding some tracks, or will it happen if a song that has preiously been saved with 40 tracks is opened as well?

5

The official answer in the manual, I believe, is that it is theoretically endless. The actual limit, it says, depends on your machine. So basically what phoo said.

6

I have a 7200rpm drive, so I would think that would be ample to handle it. The video is onboard ATI, nothing special.

I have occasional spikes of 80%, but in general the CPU stays low. This ALWAYS happens when adding a track. In most cases, if I go back and remove the track, the graphics for the slider will come right back.

7

So, if you add a track to have 41 total (for example) and get corruption, but save the song anyway, the corruption will immediately come back after exiting n-Tracks and opening the 41 track song as-is?

What I’m trying to determine is if it’s the actual track count or the fact that adding one more track to an existing song is what putting you machine over the limit.

Since you have onboard video you may be running out of hardware video ram. Try turning off any video hardware acceleration to see what happens. That will force it to do eveything in software. Obviously, video performance will suck, but it might help understand what’s causing the problem better.

There are a couple of other video settings that could be poking their fingers in the pie, too.

What you describe (black buttons) is a classic video driver problem, but it can becaused by bugs in software, too. Sometimes figuring out which is which is a pain.