Track count...hardrive question

[Kang]

Just wondering what your all's track count can reach up to in Tracktion?

I just built a new system (P4, 1GB Ram, Sata 150 HD), and am still maxing out at about 22 when the dreaded exclamation point starts going off.

I switched from a 2000 Dell that got me 16 so I was thinking I should be getting more than that with such a big upgrade. Is tracktion HD hungry or do I probably have other problems? (my system seems to be working fine, and my CPU still never goes past 50%)

[mandolarian]

Nomally run 30-40 24 bit tracks without the dreaded , however, if an audio track has lots and lots of edits then all bets are off. The hard drive is in seek hell, 7200rpm 133 IDE. This on my lowly PIII.

See thread: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ek#1172730 where Valley eloguently explains the seek issue.

The solution is to render the offending track(s) into a new continuous file. Then start cutting that one up. Rinse and repeat.

And it helps to have a dedicated hard disk just for audio. You do don't you?

[Kang]

Well, I have two harddrives, my system was installed on my SATA, and I have an ATA 100 installed, plus a firewire external. All drives give me the same track count which is about 22. All are 7,200rpm.

This is all with no edits.

Do you think this is weird?

[pHz]

got up to 36 and got bored ...

... extrnal USB2 HD (some gericom thing ... cant find any RPM rating anywhere for it though) ...

slainte rob

[valley]

I get[1] pretty poor track counts compared to what my PC *should* be able to do, but in general I've noticed that the nVidia nForce drivers didn't give stellar IDE performance on my version one Asus A7N8X non deluxe board.

That said, the usual question stanns. What are you calling a track? 44K, 16bit, mono tracks are not equal to 96K, 24/32bit, stereo tracks.

[1] got - I upgraded this weekend, and haven't tested the new MOBO out much yet.

[markmann]

I'm on a Mac but I think it's the same. To maximize your number of tracks you can play from a hard drive, go to settings and set the cache size to maximum (150 megabytes). Also, you need to set the latency for your sound card to the maximum. Tracktion seems to be less capable in this area than Digital Performer which can get more data off a drive. I think Tracktion might be better if you could set the cache size even higher. It's not really a drive issue as far as I can tell because when you split a project onto two drives there is no improvement. It seems like a bottleneck on Tracktion's input. I am running at 24/96 and I'm able to get 22 tracks ( counting a stereo as two and mono as one. This is off one 7200 rpm drive. Hey, maybe Tracktion has a built-in 22 track limit since that's the number that keeps coming up for everybody.
Mark

[pHz]

cache size 64Mb / latency 2.9ms here ...

(all my tracks were 44.1 / 16 BTW)

slainte rob

[Kang]

My tracks are all 24bit 48khz.

That is weird that you also get 22, and that's pretty much what each of my drives gives me... hmmm.