Exclamation mark in CPU% bar?

[Stuttaton]

it appears to be when a single track has a vast number of edits. Something about random seeks in the same source file or buffers, perhaps?

I think this is my problem. I have cut up (edited) several audio files into two bar drum patterns, which I repeat for the length of the tune.

Hard disk throughput can't really be the problem, with the amount of data in question. This is further substantiated by the fact that the hard drive LED just flickers faintly, when the problem occurs (and throughout the entire song, for that matters).

/Jörgen

[chico.co.uk]

That's okay, i no longer care whether you can archive the project and unarchive it somewhere else, and if that version runs any better. Don't mind me

<slopes off>

[Stuttaton]

That's okay, i no longer care whether you can archive the project and unarchive it somewhere else, and if that version runs any better. Don't mind me

<slopes off>

Sorry Chico, but I really wanted to try the other theory first, as it has other advantages and I don't have unlimited time.

I copied the midi patterns for the entire tune, instead of the audio patterns.
Then I printed an audio track for each drum sound, that runs the length of the tune.

Did this solve the problem? Yes, it did!

/Jörgen

P.S. The reason I have to print the drum tracks to audio is that I use a home built non-midi drum synthesizer, that can only produce one sound at a time.
How can I use it with midi tracks then? Well, I use the audio out from a midi synth to trigger it.
There is a nice picture of it here: http://hem.bredband.net/bersyn/

[valley]

it appears to be when a single track has a vast number of edits. Something about random seeks in the same source file or buffers, perhaps?

I think this is my problem. I have cut up (edited) several audio files into two bar drum patterns, which I repeat for the length of the tune.

This is seek time then. Generally speaking most hard drives have very poor seek times. This is why defragmenting the drive can much so a large difference to performance.

Purchasing a hard drive with very low seek times will help somewhat, but in many cases it is simply easier to render sections of the audio into one, longer, file so that the drive spends less time searching for data blocks to read.

[mandolarian]

But they told me, seek and ye shall find! But they didn't say it would playback. It seems bouncing the hideously edited track into a continuous file fixes the problem.

[Stuttaton]

Update:
I ran the excellent monitoring program Ulysses by Mark Knutson.

If I play the troubled section a couple of times, it will play entirely out of the file cache. So there is no disk activity at all. But still the sound cuts out.
So my conclusion is that this seems to be some internal performance problem in Tracktion and not caused by the disk.

/Jörgen

[simpletim]

as a third aside, holy crap that Bergfotron is frickin' awesome!

[jamesridge]

Update:
If I play the troubled section a couple of times, it will play entirely out of the file cache. So there is no disk activity at all. But still the sound cuts out.
So my conclusion is that this seems to be some internal performance problem in Tracktion and not caused by the disk.

/Jörgen

Your drive sounds fine. What soundcard are you using? What are the asio settings and how many ins/outs are enabled?

jay

[Stuttaton]

I'm using the Egosys Wami-rack 24.
It has four ins and eight outs. all are enabled, but I didn't use more than two ins and two outs in this particular song.
The driver is set to 256 samples latency. I tried loweing the latency to 128 samples, but that didn't affect the problem at all (and increasing it doesn't either).

/Jörgen

[markmann]

I'm on a dual 1.8 G5 Mac, but I can get many tracks at 24/96 before the exclamation appears. In order to do this I have to go to settings and change the cache size to the 150 megabyte maximum. I've got 7200 rpm internal ATA drives. Have you tried this cache size adjustment? It has a direct effect on how much data you can stream from the hard drive.

And I have to say that T2 is lacking in this respect. I'd like to see the maximum cache size be higher. I run the same projects in Digital Performer and Tracktion because I record/arrange in DP and mix in T2. When the project gets to T2, I have to do a lot of fooling around to make the same amount of data stream off the drive as in DP.

[jamesridge]

I'm using the Egosys Wami-rack 24.
It has four ins and eight outs. all are enabled, but I didn't use more than two ins and two outs in this particular song.
The driver is set to 256 samples latency. I tried loweing the latency to 128 samples, but that didn't affect the problem at all (and increasing it doesn't either).

/Jörgen

I think markmann has the right idea... but given my similar experience with the Marc 8 card, you should also try enabling only the two main outs.