unstable

seems buggy

Well, I have been messing with N-tracks for about a week, and I can manage to record several tracks, and add effects. I must say however that N-tracks seems pretty unstable, prone to crashing. I had to shut down and reboot my machine several times in the course of two hour recording session with my son. Every time I exit the program, I get an error messages too. The program works, it is intuitive with a great interface, but unless I can some how stablize it, I will switch to some other program in hopes of a more reliable platform.

Has anyone else experienced this instability? What was the root of the problem?

I am using a dell P4 2.4 gHz HD, 512 RAM, 825 chipset and recording with a Maudio MobilePre. Any input would be great.

I’ve been doing production work myself for the last couple of weeks (latest build) and I’ve had only a few crashes - no trouble really.

There were a couple of older builds that were troublesome however, but the last has much improved.

Builds?

I’ve been running n-track for 5 years, and have had nearly no problems. But that doesn’t help you. First thing to do is to make sure you have the latest drivers. :)

check, I have those

OK, what drivers are you using? What audio settings do you have n-Track at? Is the sound card 24/44? 24/48? 24/96? Is it 24 bits left justified? :)

Here are some specs.

sampling rates (kHz):
8, 9.6, 11.025, 12, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48

frequency response:
20Hz-20kHz +/- 1.2dB

signal-to-noise ratio:
101dB (typical, A-weighted)

dynamic range:
101dB (A-weighted)

THD:
< 0.002%

USB recording:
•16-bit/44.1kHz > 2-in/2-out
• 16-bit/48kHz > 2-in/2-out

Compatibility
ASIO 2
MME
Sound Manager
DirectX
Mac OS X Core Audio / Core MIDI

No info on driver specifics at this points. Thanks

So make sure that the card is set at the same bit depth/sampling rate as the wav files exported by leaf (24/44?), and try different drivers, that is, try n-Track with the ASIO (prob. best latency), the MME and the DirectX. Also, you can try a reinstall of n-Track - that often clears up the problem. You have the latest build from the download page?

Really, the problems you have described are almost certainly a matter of getting various settings set correctly. Once you get them set correctly you shouldn’t have any issues. These sorts of problems are iendemic to all DAWs, Logic, Cubase, n-Track, whatever. sort of the equivalent of setting up your tape machine…but LOADS less frustrating. :)

There is an issue in V4 that many folks are hitting that will cause playback to flake out every 15 to 20 minutes or so (like clockwork on my machine – I timed it the last two nights – don’t even have to do anything), requiring a restart of n-Tracks on WinXp…it might bring down an OS like Win98.

There is also some lingering memory corruption that is mor likely what you are experiencing. I can hit it by cloning or importing a track. Memory corruption is very hard to find and the symptom may not happen for long time after the memory is corruppted.

Then again it could be the other stuff TOO. Check out the other suggestions no matter what. They are great suggestions.

Thanks for all the advice. I uninstalled everything last night, sound drivers, n-track, everything. I reinstalled and things seem to be much improved. I still need to play around and test some more, but it is better none the less. Thanks again