No problems!
Would like to share my experiences with n-track so far. I use a SB Live! 5.1 card with kx drivers (3538i), 1400MHz CPU, 512MB RAM and 2 HD’s. At the moment I’m using Win xp configured for DAW. N is build 2040, v4.1.5.
Problems I had was frequent crashes of N, click and pops when recording wave, MIDI and wave out of sync, lagging and more. I have been comparing N with Cubase and the later is a little more mature when it comes to sync and lag issues and MIDI editing. But, actually once I got n to work correctly - wave handling is really efficient (like cubase) plus it is a more user friendly program! MIDI tracks are at least eating a lot of my CPU resources, a lot more per track than wave tracks, this was a little surprising when I found out, maybe somebody could explain (I’m using SoundFonts)? Mixing down MIDI tracks to WAVE is no problem (trough the card itself internally of course), but when I record line in tracks (ie guitar) there is a little bit of glitch which is easy to correct afterwards.
To get it to run smoothly I had to reconfigure things a bit.
1) n-track crashes was due to IRQ sharing with the grafix card, I fixed that in PC BIOS.
2) Had a lot of problems with ASIO drivers, when trying to achieve a low latency for live! Playing. I gave up on that – actually I don’t even need it! Now I am using kx WDM and they’re great.
3) If the program crashes I have to restart the OS, otherwise there will likely be clicks/pops and nasty glitches.
4) Don’t mess with the kx driver settings while in N, or it is likely to crash!
5) I use the first of the low buffer settings (there are 3), maybe it is called ‘low’.
6) I’m using wave timer for both MIDI and WAVE, interesting to note is that the lag value shows nonsense values during recording, like 5 or 6 digits with a minus sign, I think that timer info is reported wrongfully from the SBLive! card. When using system timer lag values is reported correctly but there are sync problems with MIDI and WAVE, the music is played back at a not consistent tempo!
7) The parameter audio devices->advanced->keep audio devices open is unchecked.
Well, if I did this (which is all in the documentation and FAQ) the program really rocks! It is cool and useful and cheap! Beat that!
For starters, always, always, always record at 48kHz with a SB Live! card. Many of your sync problems will go away as if by magic.
A new I forgot something, of course I chose 48k, was prolly 1st thing I tested anyway, easily overlooked because of simplicity, obviously. Thanx!