I’m starting to think so…
I keep getting high CPU usage(up to 100%) and all that running 5 tracks with not that many plugs. Other things seem to run fine on my computer. Heres my set up…
Processor: Athlon 64 4000+
Motherboard: ABIT KN8 SLI
Soundcard: M-Audio Delta 1010
Video Card: Nvidia Gefore 6800
1gb Cosair RAM(512x2)
Windows XP Home Edition
What could be wrong that it’s not agreeing with?
Hi Rocket Boy:
IT could very well be that your “Desk” is running a number of applications, in the backround… The resources they require are using any available “Headroom” that your computer needs to run n-Track… efficiently.
Do a Control-Alt-Delete on your keyboard and check to see what applications could be doing this… Close anything that may not be required while you are using n-Track… There is an application called End-It-All… A lot of the “Trackers” I know use this application whenever they open the multi-track editor they use… Next thing to check is… See what IRQ assignments are sharing the same IRQ’s… Try to get your Delta 1010 audio card on it’s own IRQ. And… try to assign the graphics card to it’s own IRQ, as well… Try to get a hard drive for writing the .wav files you “Stream” to-and-from that drive and use it for storing just .wav files…
These could be some of the bottlenecks that can tax your computer’s resources and cause your computer to not run efficiently…
I’ve learned some of those hints from lurking around this Board… Maybe, you’ve already checked these issues…
Bill…
Well, all of the system resources seem to be devoted between N-Track and “System Idle Process”
Your video card is maybe hogging some cpu, try getting round that, (uncheck “fast time window refresh” and “generate peak files wave while recording” and anything you do not really need in preferences). Check your video and audio drivers for latest versions. What plugs are you using? Try removing them until you find the culprit. Otherwise go to multitrackstudio.com and download the lite version (free) and see what it does to your cpu. Sometimes a configuration just doesn’t work, it is probably a sum of all the little deviations. In that case you have to change programms. Good luck.
Check out thiis site it may help, it helped me big time and thanks whoever originally posted this.
http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.php
Are you running two or more external devices using firewire?
I’ve tuned my computer down pretty far using the musicxp site before… I mean. It’s not a slow computer, it doesnt seem like a few plugs on 5 tracks should be making me hit 100%. I’ve used different set ups for N-Track as far as preferences and it doesnt seem to make much difference.
I tried checking the IRQ thing with my soundcard and it said “no conflicts”. I dont know if that’s what I was looking for though.
I downloaded the demo of Tracktion and ran one of it’s demo songs. It had way more tracks with 3 or more fx on all of them and never went much past half for cpu?
Try resetting n-Track to its defaults (“revert preferences to the default settings” in the Preferences). I had that once where everything seemed to go berzerk in n-Track. Once set back to “factory default”, everything was fine.
Paul
Hi Again:
I have this ASUS/Intel/Intel P-111… I used to call IT the worst P-111 I ever saw… Nothing or any application I had installed on it seemed to work very well… But it did work… But to improve my studio’s DAW performance I built an ASUS/Intel/Intel P-4… IT was a great working machine till the mainboard failed… I don’t know why… To rebuild it I couldn’t get the identical mainboard… So, I got something close, but IT’s not the same… I’ve spent sense April getting this DAW up-and-running… IT’s close, but no cigar yet…
Your machine could very well be suffering from some of these ailments…
Anyway, in the process of refining it’s behaviour, I ran into IRQ issues… Now, there were no IRQ conflicts [or so the computer config. said] but a lot of the hardware I installed on this machine occupied the same IRQ’s… I had to enter the BIOS and turn-off some of the very pieces of hardware that I bought the Board for and turn them off to install PCI devices to take their place… cause I couldn’t re-assign the IRQ’s that were assigned to them , by default… I worked on this machine for many days trying to observe which pieces of hardware could share IRQ’s with the least performance bottlenecks… IT could be a combination of the Hardware Selection and the IRQ./Buss assignments and the chip-set… Who knows.??
All I know is, IT seems as though I have to settle for something less in performance than the original P-4 that in my opinion worked much better than the one I have to settle with now…
I don’t know why that is… I ain’t no computer whizz…
But, I think you can make your machine do what you want it to-do…
Bill…
I was on FXpansions site the other day on their support form.
Someone there was topping out his CPU when running the BFD program through Sonar. Soemone made a suggestion that his OS was setup to compress audio data, so evertime he triggered a sample, it would have to uncompress.
I can’t find the post now but I think this is something the tweaks on the xp site doesn’t mention. Does anyone know how to check for this?
On WinXp drives or folders can be compressed. Right click on the drive letter and pop up the properties. For folders, pop up the properties and click the Advanced button. In both cases there is a check to compress or encrypt the contents. This can REALLY slow down performance.
What a thought! I wonder if some otehr folks that have had perf problems - especially laptops that have smaller hard drives and need to save disk space – have had one of these turned on?
I ended up adding a second harddrive and setting up a dual boot winXP machine. When I boot to my DAW side… Nothing loads… no internet, no software other than my DAW stuff. after going through all the optimization suggestions at musicxp.com and other sites I stripped windows down to just run my daw software. Windows running on drive A - Files going to Drive B, etc. Works great now. If I want to do graphics and internet… I boot to my first install of XP and all is normal without having to worry about loading virii and spyware into my daw side.
| Quote (Guitodd @ July 24 2006,17:18) |
| I ended up adding a second harddrive and setting up a dual boot winXP machine. When I boot to my DAW side.. Nothing loads.. no internet, no software other than my DAW stuff. after going through all the optimization suggestions at musicxp.com and other sites I stripped windows down to just run my daw software. Windows running on drive A - Files going to Drive B, etc. Works great now. If I want to do graphics and internet.. I boot to my first install of XP and all is normal without having to worry about loading virii and spyware into my daw side. |
Dude, that's the way I went myself. Works great. I used Partition Magic to set mine up but you don't have to do that way. All anybody needs is their Winblows XP CD and a couple hours time. I found it amazing at all the extra crapola XP sucks into memory for nettin' and such...
D
Okay. I downloaded the demo of Sonar 5 and running the same tracks with the same effects it maxed out at a whopping 3% cpu. N-Track shot right up to near 100% and started adding crackling to my audio…
I think this would seem pretty definitive this is something to do with N-Track? I already uninstalled and reinstalled it, no difference… It must just not agree with something?
Rocketboy is it possible you have 64 bit processing turned on in ntrack. Sonar I think only uses 32 bit processing and this is the only huge difference with the programs that I can see.
Check by opening nTrack
File/Settings (way down at the bottom there is something called 64bit mixing, if there is a red check mark beside it its on) turn it of by clicking on it.
What plugins are casuing the grief?
Plug’s dont seem to make much difference because it craps out regardless. They just expediate it a little.
64 bit mixing doesnt make any difference on or off.
I’m baffled.
You should probably contact Flavio about this. Something doesn’t sound right here.
Has anyone had problems with SIR in N-Track? That one seems to do a lot of damage. Although in Reaper, using Sir and GSnap I peaked at like 8% or so. Er. I’m hoping Flavio has an idea i’ve gotten used to the workflow 