potentially a problem

[lharless]

i got my onyx 1640 and firewire card the other day and im doing a test of the live recording capabilities and im trying to do 16 channels at once. having a problem at about 2 min into the recording.

--here goes---

i have 16 mics plugged into a 1640 onyx with a firewire card, going into a sager np5670 with a gig of ram, 800fsb, ati9600 128 video ram. three channels on the mixer are set with phantom power as they have condensers on those channels. some with low cut, some without.

gain on each channel is set at 12:00. firewire option button is on. assign to main mix is on. main mix button on the control room section is on. firewire is plugged in correctly from what i can see (i used a 6 to 4 pin adapter).

im recording all sixteen channels at once, just the room sounds. all the mics are hooked up and sitting under the coffee table in a little array, just for the test...(the test is to see how long i can record 16 channels at once, and also to rehearse stopping and saving in the same edit, before doing it in a live situation. so for now, im recording the room sounds and the tv and my girlfriend walking around. nothing at the level that the mics were designed to record. but none the less, it's sound. and it's going to produce the same amount of file (am i correct in saying this?) and the same size file...??

so...

everything set on the mixer the way i said earlier, i hit record. i let it go for two minutes, and after about two minutes, it starts to become garbled and very very intermitten and it starts to sound very weird, as if theres digital noise, and it's getting worse and worse and worse, and the cpu meter is pegged. i have 2 drives. two 60g internal notebook drives. maybe running 5400rpm... they worked fine with pro tools...

mind you i have a 3.2g machine with a gig of ram and an 800fsb, i shouldn't be having this problem. the wifi card was in. i will try again without the wifi card. but please don't stop listening at that fact...

i went to save the short 2:08min file that i had created and the little hourglass went up on the screen. it stayed so long that i eventually went to task manager, and it said the program was not responding.

so i quit and restarted the computer. and tried again. all the gains set to 12oclock. the firewire button on. im monitoring the "mix" through my headphones, i start recording, and it happens again.

i don't know how to describr it any better, with some guidance i could describe it better maybe... somebody please help me. i have a job on saturday to do with this equipment.

((i know... i should have tested it sooner before committing))...

i may have to cancel this one and go with another date. unless you guys can think of something that i should check..

is there anything im doing wrong?

i've run mixers all my life, but this firewire connection into the computer is a new one on me.

i never had this problem with my pro tools le rig... i know it will do it. i did near 13 channels once at a live show with that rig. and had no problems.

should i set something up differently?

are there services that i should eiminate?

im running xp home, sp1. ...best performance, background services...

should i set my paging file to a certain number?

im lost here.

[IIRs]

It sounds to me like your hard drive is not keeping up.. 5400rpm is a bit slow for serious multitracking to be honest. What resolution are you recording at? Is there an improvement if you drop this lower (bit depth, sample-rate or both)? What if you reduce the number of channels you record?

Also, check you have DMA enabled for all IDE channels (device manager -> IDE controllers) and that you are actually recording to the drive you think you are..

[mandolarian]

Any Anti-Viral agents running? Anti-Spam/Malware agents?
And did 16 discrete files show up after the reboot?
And if so, were they all the same size?
And can you import the files into a new project and do they all get crackly at the same moment?
And what firewire chipset in the PC? ( Check Drivers)
And what ASIO buffer settings?

Try 8 tracks at once with no input. If it works ok past 2 minutes, then...Record 16 channels with no input. Will still tax the PC, but not the bus. You gots to eliminate as many variables as you can until you can safely conclude that T2 is still not ready for primetime!

[aldi]

if you have xp with sp2 try the firewire hotfix from microsoft. sp2 breakes somthing in the firewire protocol that should be fixed with the hotfix WindowsXP-KB885222

[mandolarian]

He's running SP1....(Or so he says....)

[aldi]

ahh yes. too much information, it slipps thru

[mandolarian]

Also the 6 to 4 pin adapter sounds like trouble, but if was real trouble it just would not work at all....My 2 cents is on the driver/bus/hard drive front or he's recording at 192/24 with more data than capability. Or the onyx firmware is buggy..Ewww.

[lharless]

actually, i did another hours recording, and raised the latency all the way up. no problems.

i looked at the manual (pg. 34) in the troubleshooting portion and i decided to increase the latency all the way... actually wait... lemme see wht i have it set at...can't remember, i think i had it set at 3.0 ms. or at least higher than that and it did fine.

the audio i was hearing was clitchy. i looked at some lof file in a temp folder and there were alot of instances of "cant keep up with recording" or something to that effect.

anyway, i tried a recording at a higher latency and it worked fine. i guess i needed to do that all the time. i had it set on the lowest latency possible at first. stupid me.

oh, ad i was recording at 44.1 the whole time. and ill probably do that for good. live recordings of rock bands don't really need to be much better than this really, for demo purposes anyway. that's the whole reason i need this setup in the first place was to do live demos.

i feel so stupid.

give me some hardware and ill be good to go. give me a recording application on a computer....im gonna have fits. but im workin this out.

i think ill be ok for this weekend. im going to track drums (5 simultaneous tracks, broken up into different edits, or "songs". and then ill add each guitar and bass and other parts as we get there for the guys.

so, ill be fine this time, just have to be careful when i get ready to do a live set.

monitoring thru headphones is gonna sound awful funny, unless theres a way to monitor the audio going in without hearing the latency, but to hear the audio that actually going into the computer. is there? if so, im golden, i don't care about the latency in recording, until i comes time to record an overdub.

i should be able to do overdubs without too much latency i hope. if this doesnt work out, im returning this mixer, lololol.

ill just go to some firewire preamps and cubase. i like this software so much though. actually it's the reason i bought the mixer. i like the routing before the eq. it's the best way to go. i think ill like mixing in the box, but im worried about latency when trying to do single channel overdubs, with the rest of the recording playing in the background. standard overdubbing. do you guys think ill have a problem?

i was able to record an hour of audio, with no glitches at a higher latency. so recording a single channel overtop of a few pre-recorded tracks from earlier in the day shouldn't be a problem eh?

eh?

[maximilians1]

What is the latency set at now? I think around 10 ms and monitering will sound fine through headphones, but I have no idea how the signals are routed , All I know is that if I play a softsynth realtime at 10 ms it works ok, 5 ms is ideal though for me.