My current system is as follows:
2.8 Gig P4 with 1 gig of Ram
40 gig IDE HD for applications
160 SATA HD for recording
RME Multiface external soundcard
N-track version 4
I have been recording some stuff for our worship team at church. A lot of our songs have at least 30 tracks in them with some effects. I sometimes have to set the ASIO buffer settings to 1024 ms to make sure that there are not any glitches during playback. Would additional RAM help solve this problem and allow me to reduce my buffer settings? Thanks.
Probably not. Look at your memory usage using TaskMgr while you’re running. You can even monitor & graph it with the system monitor.
Mr Soul
Well, the CPU usage is usually between 20-30%, sometimes a little higher. Any other ideas about what the issue might be?
How about memory usage? CPU is fine (obviously! 
).
In any case, does it matter that you have the buffering set a bit higher? It just means that there will be some latency in playback. Does that bother you?
Well, the issue is when we are recording things, such as vocals, and they are listening to the recording while singing, the higher buffer settings creates a delay that is somewhat hard to work with, especially when the setting is at 1024 ms or higher. Part of the issue is that I use ASIO drivers, so I only have 1 buffering setting for everything, not individual ones for playback and recording. Am I missing something or doing something wrong?
How are you doing the vocal monitoring? It sounds like you are doing it using n-Track’s “Live” function. Is that correct? Couldn’t you just monitor the vocals from the board or whatever you are recording through?