Exclamation mark in CPU% bar?

[Stuttaton]

Exactly what does the ! that shows up in the CPU-meter mean (in Tracktion 1.6)?
I have a problem that the sound cuts out briefly at a certain point im my song.
I only have eight tracks and the CPU-meter shows around 20% at most, so what can the problem be?
If I mute just one track - any track - the problem goes away.
The really weird thing is that I have exactly the same chorus twice in the song and the first instance plays without error every time!

/Jörgen

[IIRs]

It means your hard drive can't keep up. 8 tracks isn't very many though, unless you're using very high resolution? Are you reading the tracks from a slow laptop drive by any chance?

You have various options: try de-fragmenting your hard drive, or freezing some tracks, or recording at a lower resolution to start with.. or simply buy a faster hard drive!

[Stuttaton]

Thanks for the quick reply!
I defragmented the partition that I use for audio, but it didn't help.
Maybe I ought to defragment the system/program partition as well. I'll try that.
I have a quite decent 80 GB desktop HD by the way.

/Jörgen

[IIRs]

Make sure you have a reasonable amount of free drive space.. you using a pc? Make sure you have DMA enabled for your audio drive.. also check you are recording to the correct directory! You should be able to get more than 8 tracks going I think..

[nuffink]

Thanks for the quick reply!
I defragmented the partition that I use for audio, but it didn't help.
Maybe I ought to defragment the system/program partition as well. I'll try that.
I have a quite decent 80 GB desktop HD by the way.

/Jörgen

Check that it's running in DMA mode.

Start->Settings->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager->IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers->Primary IDE Channel Properties->Advanced Settings

[Stuttaton]

I checked DMA mode, set scheduling to background tasks, Set fixed swap file, defragmented the C drive.
But still no change. It still plays one instance of the chorus, but not the other.
What else can affect disk access speed? I tried deactivating the virus scanning, but it didn't help either.

/Jörgen

[Bennett]

One thing which helped me was reformatting my audio drive(s) with a 64k cluster (max size for WinXP) vs. the default WinXP 4k size.

The improvement isn't huge, but definitely helps manage I/O calls to the drive.

Simplified explanation: If you are cueing up 128k of audio data, with 4k clusters you need to make 32 I/O calls, while with a 64k cluster you are makine 2 I/O calls.

This info came off of an optimization FAQ for GigaStudio BTW.

[rpc9943]

sounds strange to me, are you recording 32bit files or 16bit?

RonC

[valley]

sounds strange to me, are you recording 32bit files or 16bit?

and at which sampling rate?

[Stuttaton]

It's just plain old 44,1 kHz / 16 bit.
The hard drive is set to "ultra DMA mode 5".
The machine is a 2 GHz Pentium 4 desktop.

/Jörgen

[chico.co.uk]

What's going on in the 8 tracks, are they just pure audio files, or do you use VSTs? Specifically, do you use any kind of rompler, or anything that's streaming sound from disk, maybe sfz using DFD on multiple tracks or similar?

As a quick test, if you archive up the project, then unarchive it to a new folder somewhere else on your hard drive, does that version play any better?

Just trying to eliminate possibilities ...

[jamesridge]

I used to have the same problem using a Marian Marc 8 Midi card. When I disabled the inputs and outputs I wasn't using, it all cleared up. Strange, since it had little to do with hard drive performance, but true. Btw, no such problems using a Motu 828 mkII with 18 ins/outs enabled.

[Stuttaton]

What's going on in the 8 tracks, are they just pure audio files, or do you use VSTs?

It's only audio. I have some midi in tracks that are muted though.

I'm starting to wonder if the way I organize the audio can cause problems like this.
Maybe it's in the way I recorded my drum patterns as audio? I recorded each sound on a different track (five of the used tracks) but I recorded maybe four two bar patterns in one go. Then I cut the bars up using the "/" and copied them to where I wanted them. So there are a lot of two bar clips, but on the other hand, these are based on relatively few audio files.

/Jörgen

[IIRs]

are you running any effects at all? if so, does disabling them make a difference?

[Stuttaton]

I'm running two reverbs and a chorus. Originally I had four reverbs. But then I routed the three hihat tracks to another track and put the reverb on that. This saved two reverbs, but did no difference whatsoever to the problem.

/Jörgen