[spud[_2_]]

Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.
Is there some setting I'm supposed to change like the swap file size
or something in order to take advantage of the increased memory? I
tried changing to background services too but it made no difference.
Thanks as always, s.

[Geoff]

spud wrote:
Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.
Is there some setting I'm supposed to change like the swap file size
or something in order to take advantage of the increased memory? I
tried changing to background services too but it made no difference.
Thanks as always, s.

XP won't allocate it if an application doesn't ask for it.


geoff

[DeeAa]

"spud" wrote in message
...
Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.
Is there some setting I'm supposed to change like the swap file size
or something in order to take advantage of the increased memory? I
tried changing to background services too but it made no difference.
Thanks as always, s.

You won't see any performance increase until you use memory-hungry
applications.
Memory doesn't give your machine any more speed or power, but if you for
instance use synths, drum machines etc. with huge sample sizes, you'll
definitely notice a marked difference. Or if you like to jump to your email
client, photo editor, whatnot, while mixing, rendering etc....runnin'
multiple apps simultaneously will quickly use up all the available memory.

[Laurence Payne]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 23:05:12 -0800, spud wrote:

Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.
Is there some setting I'm supposed to change like the swap file size
or something in order to take advantage of the increased memory? I
tried changing to background services too but it made no difference.
Thanks as always, s.

Well, before you had enough RAM to buffer a few thousand audio tracks,
now you've enough for quite a few more (though you may
run up against other restrictions :-) It won't affect real-time
effects - that's about processing power (what would a FX do with huge
amounts of RAM? Buffer the data so as to achieve massive latency?)

You'll notice the difference if you use sample-playing softsynths -
more data can be cached in RAM so performance will be smoother.
Offline rendering may be quicker as the program can work on bigger
data chunks. But for many (most?) applications 1GB was doubtless
ample.

The Background Services priority setting (which might cause less
argument if it was more accurately called "Don't boost priority of the
foreground process") is of proven benefit in curing audio glitches.
WERE there any that needed curing?

Was/is your system working well? We may be able to help with
problem-solving. But maybe you had plenty of RAM for your needs, now
you have WAY plenty :-)

[Jim Gilliland]

spud wrote:
Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.

Use the Windows Task Manager (Performance page) to determine how much memory
your application mix is using. If it's not using more than 1GB (I assume you
meant to say gig, not meg), then adding additional memory won't provide any benefit.

Like you, I have 2GB of RAM in my system. Like you, I have more than I need.
My system typically requires about 600-700MB to do its work. My DAW would
perform exactly the same, for my mix of work, with 1GB of RAM as it does with 2GB.

[Tobiah]

Now I'm not saying that having 2gb is not necessary. In fact if you
load up VERY LARGE libraries it could be used. But most of the time
it'll stay idle and wait for some data.

On a Linux box, all available memory will quickly be consumed
for caching hard drive reads. It doesn't matter how large
the memory space is. If your memory size equals that of
the disk, you could conceivably cache the entire disk, and not
have to read from the disk again until reboot. The same
goes for writes, although the OS usually syncs writes to
the disk now and then to prevent loss of data through loss
of power. The memory is not 'full', in the sense that the
OS will simply drop cached disk reads when the memory is
needed by a process.

The bottom line is that more memory will always help to
some degree, because it reduces the amount of redundant
disk reads. I don't know how Windows handles this, but
if it is not in a similar way, then it is quite lacking
in this regard.

Tobiah

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

[[email protected]]

On Mar 19, 12:05 am, spud wrote:
Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.
Is there some setting I'm supposed to change like the swap file size
or something in order to take advantage of the increased memory? I
tried changing to background services too but it made no difference.
Thanks as always, s.

You may not see performance speed up, but you will be able to run
larger projects that use more resources.

For better performance, increase your CPU speed, bus speed, disk drive
speed, move softsynths to a dedicated machine, widen your data path,
etc.

Is there a specific problem you are looking to solve?

[YourHomeStudioDotCom]

I've been running with 512mb for quite some time now and occasionally
I do get some slowdowns but that's primarily because of alternate
takes that I haven't archived or deleted. I could probably use at
least another 512mb but for now it's working fine.

Thomas
www.yourhomestudio.com

Free Home Studio Newsletter -

[Laurence Payne]

On 19 Mar 2007 10:53:12 -0700, "YourHomeStudioDotCom"
wrote:

I've been running with 512mb for quite some time now and occasionally
I do get some slowdowns but that's primarily because of alternate
takes that I haven't archived or deleted. I could probably use at
least another 512mb but for now it's working fine.

Why would alternate takes slow the system any more than any other file
stored in any other folder?

[Carey Carlan]

spud wrote in news:s0dsv2lnkpgrjcul7c3k67mrafkshv3hoa@
4ax.com:

Ahoy, I just got another meg of memory for my desktop pc. I moved from
one meg to two based on the posited belief that winXP will take
advantage of as much memory as you can afford.
The machine behaves exactly the same. I can see absolutely no increase
in performance. Cubase has a utility to let you view your performance
while it's running and it's completely unchanged after the upgrade.
Is there some setting I'm supposed to change like the swap file size
or something in order to take advantage of the increased memory? I
tried changing to background services too but it made no difference.
Thanks as always, s.

Windows (XP and previous, I haven't checked Vista yet) by default will
allocate swap space based on the size of primary memory. More RAM means
more stays in RAM before going to swap. There's also a time factor on the
swap, ununsed longer moves to swap anyway. A portion of the OS is always
in swap space regardless of available memory.

Disk based audio editors (all of them except the toys) don't benefit much
unless you're doing other tasks at the same time.

[Julien BH]

On Mar 19, 3:20 pm, Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom
wrote:
On 19 Mar 2007 10:53:12 -0700, "YourHomeStudioDotCom"

wrote:
I've been running with 512mb for quite some time now and occasionally
I do get some slowdowns but that's primarily because of alternate
takes that I haven't archived or deleted. I could probably use at
least another 512mb but for now it's working fine.

Why would alternate takes slow the system any more than any other file
stored in any other folder?

Lot of misconceptions here...

1- A lot of people who thinks they know computers (on the net or not)
just don't know anything. So ask for more than one opinion before
buying something to make things go faster.

2- Memory CAN increase the speed, but not necessarily. You have to
identify your bottleneck: ie what makes your computer go slow.
Three choices the
Memory
Hard Drive
CPU

Normally the slowest of the three is the Hard drive. If you want more
speed be prepared for a salty bill. SCSI is the fastest solution, but
SATA Raid 0 is a good solution also.

3- Performances in cubase are mostly related to CPU power. Now you
don't need a super performant PC to run Cubase and some plug ins. A P4
3.0ghz is mostly enough with 1gb RAM and 250gb SATA drive. Just don't
go overboard with those unnecesary FX. Get good ones and you shouldn't
have problems.
Yes a core 2 duo rules in that department too.

4-Swap file size is a joke. It takes HARD DRIVE memory (Very very
slow) to compensate for your lack of memory (very fast). If you have
2gb, you probably never have to use swap anyway, so it's not an issue
for you.

5-Giving priority to background services is not needed for a DAW.
Services are what are running in the background to do task (ie: update
your antivirus, host a website). When you use Cubase, it's an
APPLICATION, not a SERVICE. I know most people here thinks it actually
changes something to do that but no.

Now I'm not saying that having 2gb is not necessary. In fact if you
load up VERY LARGE libraries it could be used. But most of the time
it'll stay idle and wait for some data.

Julien,
a tired IT

[Preben Friis]

"Julien BH" wrote in message
oups.com...

5-Giving priority to background services is not needed for a DAW.
Services are what are running in the background to do task (ie: update
your antivirus, host a website). When you use Cubase, it's an
APPLICATION, not a SERVICE. I know most people here thinks it actually
changes something to do that but no.

The "Background Services" option has nothing to do with applications
runnings as services.
It
A) Stops giving higher priority to foreground applications.
B) Changes the timeslice from 15 ms to 5 ms.

The latter can be really important for applications demanding real-time
performance. This change to the OS settings is actually recommended/requred
by Digidesign when installing Pro Tools.

/Preben Friis

[Geoff]

Julien BH wrote:
On Mar 19, 3:20 pm, Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom
wrote:
On 19 Mar 2007 10:53:12 -0700, "YourHomeStudioDotCom"

wrote:
I've been running with 512mb for quite some time now and
occasionally I do get some slowdowns but that's primarily because
of alternate takes that I haven't archived or deleted. I could
probably use at least another 512mb but for now it's working fine.

Why would alternate takes slow the system any more than any other
file stored in any other folder?

Lot of misconceptions here...

I doubled my memory and disc size. My CPU is 100% faster. How come my
music isn't twice as good ?

;-)

geoff

[Romeo Rondeau]

Geoff wrote:
Julien BH wrote:
On Mar 19, 3:20 pm, Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom
wrote:
On 19 Mar 2007 10:53:12 -0700, "YourHomeStudioDotCom"

wrote:
I've been running with 512mb for quite some time now and
occasionally I do get some slowdowns but that's primarily because
of alternate takes that I haven't archived or deleted. I could
probably use at least another 512mb but for now it's working fine.
Why would alternate takes slow the system any more than any other
file stored in any other folder?
Lot of misconceptions here...

I doubled my memory and disc size. My CPU is 100% faster. How come my
music isn't twice as good ?

;-)

geoff

Look on the bright side, with twice as much RAM, they can run twice as
many pirated plugins, making their music twice as crappy in half the
time (a four-fold benefit) :-)

[Preben Friis]

"Geoff" wrote in message
news
I doubled my memory and disc size. My CPU is 100% faster. How come my
music isn't twice as good ?

You forgot to double the sample rate as well? ;c)

/Preben Friis

[Laurence Payne]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:20:54 GMT, Carey Carlan
wrote:


Windows (XP and previous, I haven't checked Vista yet) by default will
allocate swap space based on the size of primary memory. More RAM means
more stays in RAM before going to swap. There's also a time factor on the
swap, ununsed longer moves to swap anyway. A portion of the OS is always
in swap space regardless of available memory.

Ah, the old swap file story :-)

Remind me again just which program modules of a DAW wouldn't fit in a
GB of RAM? And why different ones might get suddenly called for in
the middle of a recording or mixing session, causing potential
glitching?

This isn't the early days of Wordstar, when you had to swap the
editing module out of your 8K RAM to make room for the printing module
:-)

[Laurence Payne]

On 19 Mar 2007 13:21:34 -0700, "Julien BH" wrote:

Lot of misconceptions here...

True :-)

1- A lot of people who thinks they know computers (on the net or not)
just don't know anything. So ask for more than one opinion before
buying something to make things go faster.

2- Memory CAN increase the speed, but not necessarily. You have to
identify your bottleneck: ie what makes your computer go slow.
Three choices the
Memory
Hard Drive
CPU

Normally the slowest of the three is the Hard drive. If you want more
speed be prepared for a salty bill. SCSI is the fastest solution, but
SATA Raid 0 is a good solution also.

On a DAW, the drive is either fast enough to deliver the required
number of tracks or it isn't. If it isn't, things grind to a halt. If
it is, further hard drive speed makes no difference.

These days, a bog-standard IDE drive generally IS fast enough.

If you use softsynths with big sample sets, a fast hard drive data
path, independent to the one streaming audio, is good. Even better is
ample RAM, so sample data can be cached instead of accessed from disk
on demand.

[Jim Gilliland]

Laurence Payne wrote:


These days, a bog-standard IDE drive generally IS fast enough.

Is fast enough for what? My RAID0 array may be fast enough, but it's still the
bottleneck in most of my processing. Of course, my processing may be different
from yours.

[Laurence Payne]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:13:45 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

These days, a bog-standard IDE drive generally IS fast enough.

Is fast enough for what? My RAID0 array may be fast enough, but it's still the
bottleneck in most of my processing. Of course, my processing may be different
from yours.

You're talking about offline processing? Sure, drive speed could
limit this, particularly if the processing is relatively simple. I
thought we were discussing recording and mixing multitrack audio on a
DAW. The drive has to deliver the requisite number of tracks in
real-time. If capacity is sufficient, more won't make anything work
faster or better.

[Carey Carlan]

Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in
:

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:20:54 GMT, Carey Carlan
wrote:

Windows (XP and previous, I haven't checked Vista yet) by default will
allocate swap space based on the size of primary memory. More RAM
means more stays in RAM before going to swap. There's also a time
factor on the swap, ununsed longer moves to swap anyway. A portion of
the OS is always in swap space regardless of available memory.

Ah, the old swap file story :-)

Remind me again just which program modules of a DAW wouldn't fit in a
GB of RAM? And why different ones might get suddenly called for in
the middle of a recording or mixing session, causing potential
glitching?

This isn't the early days of Wordstar, when you had to swap the
editing module out of your 8K RAM to make room for the printing module
:-)

Well, this 2GB XP machine I'm working on right now has 66 MB invested in
the newsreader, no other applications running, and the page file is
currently 215 MB. It's running 300 threads and 24 processes. Unless you
work to reduce the load, that's about average for XP. I don't bother
because it's not stressing anything.

I say again, XP is going to cache part of itself unless you physically
disable disk caching. And I tend to do other tasks whilst the DAW is doing
it's thing.

Just wait until Vista arrives...

[DeeAa]

"Carey Carlan" wrote in message
...
Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in
:

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:20:54 GMT, Carey Carlan
wrote:

Windows (XP and previous, I haven't checked Vista yet) by default will
allocate swap space based on the size of primary memory. More RAM
means more stays in RAM before going to swap. There's also a time
factor on the swap, ununsed longer moves to swap anyway. A portion of
the OS is always in swap space regardless of available memory.

Ah, the old swap file story :-)

Remind me again just which program modules of a DAW wouldn't fit in a
GB of RAM? And why different ones might get suddenly called for in
the middle of a recording or mixing session, causing potential
glitching?

This isn't the early days of Wordstar, when you had to swap the
editing module out of your 8K RAM to make room for the printing module
:-)

Well, this 2GB XP machine I'm working on right now has 66 MB invested in
the newsreader, no other applications running, and the page file is
currently 215 MB. It's running 300 threads and 24 processes. Unless you
work to reduce the load, that's about average for XP. I don't bother
because it's not stressing anything.

I say again, XP is going to cache part of itself unless you physically
disable disk caching. And I tend to do other tasks whilst the DAW is
doing
it's thing.

Just wait until Vista arrives...

Yup exactly...my drum machine eats up about 300megs as well, and soft synths
can easily eat up much much more. I tried DK2 for instance and with a
gigabyte of memory I could only run snare+kick combo before the sampes ran
out. Typically - like right now - I have 500megs free, 500 in use, but when
I openm up Cubase and a song and a few plugins, the drum machine or a synth,
there's nothing to spare.

Easy to see also when the memory runs out; the drum machine starts missing
beats when it has to unload samples to make room for more important stuff.

The other place where I need memory is video editing; those files are after
all over 4GB large, and it takes hours to render 'em, so naturally I want to
do other stuff as well while doing the renders. But not enough memory.

Using 3 machines with 512, 1G and 2G mem I can tell you that 512 is a joke
on a windows machine these days; the machine starts swapping even opening up
Open Office or whatver, let alone if you try to watch TV onscreen or do
something else. Can't be done, really.

On a 1G machine most things work fluently, but even here I can't do very
many processes at once without running out of memory and start swapping. I
know some people do just one thing at a time on their machines, but I am one
of those who even while the PC is still booting is anxiously klicking open
Cubase and Photoshop and Outlook and newsreader and HTML editor and the
browser and the DigitalTV receiver all at the same time. I's be happy with
my memory situation when I can load ALL the programs I use into memory at
once and not have to wait for them to load. It loses important seconds.

@3.15GHz and 3 RAID 0 setups I'm growing really bored with my machine
performance, and I'm seriously contemplating changing for a faster setup,
because I truly hate it that even opening up Cubase and a large project in
it takes up to a minute! And then you have to shut it down to be able to
open Wavelab for a change, re-load Cubase etc...aaaghhhh!

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 03:10:00 GMT, Carey Carlan
wrote:

Well, this 2GB XP machine I'm working on right now has 66 MB invested in
the newsreader, no other applications running, and the page file is
currently 215 MB. It's running 300 threads and 24 processes. Unless you
work to reduce the load, that's about average for XP. I don't bother
because it's not stressing anything.

I say again, XP is going to cache part of itself unless you physically
disable disk caching. And I tend to do other tasks whilst the DAW is doing
it's thing.

Don't confuse Virtual Memory with the swap file on disk. (Though it's
excusable, Microsoft sometimes muddle the terms:-)

What are you DOING with your DAW that doesn't require your full
attention? Obviously when actually recording or mixing in real time
it would be foolish (and unnecessary) to start up other programs. I
suppose a modern machine could cope with playing background music or
recording a radio programme as a background task, especially if the
odd glitch wasn't a show-stopper. Or are you rendering huge files
offline? That wouldn't mind taking whatever timeslots were left over,
I suppose.

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:33:38 +0200, "DeeAa"
wrote:

On a 1G machine most things work fluently, but even here I can't do very
many processes at once without running out of memory and start swapping. I
know some people do just one thing at a time on their machines, but I am one
of those who even while the PC is still booting is anxiously klicking open
Cubase and Photoshop and Outlook and newsreader and HTML editor and the
browser and the DigitalTV receiver all at the same time.

Well, don't do that then, silly boy! You must have realised by now
that trying to start programs while the machine is still booting is
ultimately slower?

I's be happy with
my memory situation when I can load ALL the programs I use into memory at
once and not have to wait for them to load. It loses important seconds.

My! What a busy life you must have! :-)

and 3 RAID 0 setups I'm growing really bored with my machine
performance, and I'm seriously contemplating changing for a faster setup,
because I truly hate it that even opening up Cubase and a large project in
it takes up to a minute! And then you have to shut it down to be able to
open Wavelab for a change, re-load Cubase etc...aaaghhhh!

If you have a dozen other programs running as well, I'm not surprised
:-)

Why can't you open Wavelab alongside Cubase? I can, and have been
able to on much slower machines that I'm using now.

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:31:54 -0800, spud wrote:

Is there a specific problem you are looking to solve?

With 16 main tracks and just a few clips on maybe 10 others, after I
add fx the machine runs at roughly 70% and feels glitchy and sometimes
shows funky screen redraws. I thought adding memory might solve that.
Also, I meant gig of memory not meg, sorry.

Maybe the key is in that throwaway line "...once I add fx...." :-)

Manufacturers delight in making e.g. high-quality reverb plugins that
are very resource-hungry. It's no great trick to max out ANY hardware
by adding instances of these.

Tell us about your FX structure. Are you using a single Send FX for
several tracks where possible?

You could maybe spend a lot of money and buy a new machine that
allowed 50% or even 100% more plugins. Or you could maybe rationalise
your use of FX and require enormously less resources.

Anyway, tell us how your tracks and FX are set up?

[Jim Gilliland]

Laurence Payne wrote:
On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:13:45 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

These days, a bog-standard IDE drive generally IS fast enough.

Is fast enough for what? My RAID0 array may be fast enough, but it's still the
bottleneck in most of my processing. Of course, my processing may be different
from yours.

You're talking about offline processing? Sure, drive speed could
limit this, particularly if the processing is relatively simple. I
thought we were discussing recording and mixing multitrack audio on a
DAW. The drive has to deliver the requisite number of tracks in
real-time. If capacity is sufficient, more won't make anything work
faster or better.

I'm talking about mixing audio. The drive isn't going to be the bottleneck for
anything in real time, but once those tracks are on the disk and you're ready to
mix them (in the box), then you're no longer working in real time. And in that
case, audio data I/O often IS the bottleneck.

As for "relatively simple", that probably translates to anything that is mostly
made up of real audio data rather than MIDI and soft synths. If most of your
audio is being generated by the CPU, then I/O won't be much of a factor. But if
most of your audio is coming off the disk, it's very likely that I/O will be
your bottleneck.

Here's the mix that I'm working on at the moment: 19 mono tracks plus two
stereo tracks, each with EQ and light compression being applied at the track
level. Sends from each of these channels into a reverb bus and some also
feeding a multitap delay bus, then everything routed through four submix buses
(with EQ and compression and limiting on these), then routed into the final mix
bus (a limiter here as well) which then feeds the stereo output to disk.

Does that qualify as "relatively simple"? Because it's definitely I/O bound,
not CPU bound, on my system. I do have a fast multicore CPU, but then I also
have a RAID0 array of fast SATA drives.

Of course, I/O isn't purely defined by drive speed. There is a file system
(supported by an OS) involved as well.

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:35:02 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

I'm talking about mixing audio. The drive isn't going to be the bottleneck for
anything in real time, but once those tracks are on the disk and you're ready to
mix them (in the box), then you're no longer working in real time. And in that
case, audio data I/O often IS the bottleneck.

Are these songs? Or hour-long live recordings? If songs, you could
save a few seconds, but it's never going to take LONGER than real-time
is it? Else you couldn't have auditioned the mix. If an hour or two,
you could indeed leave it running in the background (while slowing it
down by borrowing resources for other purposes :-) Does your
theoretically faster drive system really make a significant
difference?

[YourHomeStudioDotCom]

Why would alternate takes slow the system any more than any other file
stored in any other folder?

What I'm referring to are takes that are not used in mixing the song
and therefore using system resources unnecessarily.

[Jim Gilliland]

Laurence Payne wrote:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:35:02 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

I'm talking about mixing audio. The drive isn't going to be the bottleneck for
anything in real time, but once those tracks are on the disk and you're ready to
mix them (in the box), then you're no longer working in real time. And in that
case, audio data I/O often IS the bottleneck.

Are these songs? Or hour-long live recordings? If songs, you could
save a few seconds, but it's never going to take LONGER than real-time
is it? Else you couldn't have auditioned the mix.

Right, the box needs to be able to keep up in real time so you can audition the
mix. And in my case, these are concert recordings, so they may be anywhere from
30 to 120 minutes in length.

If an hour or two,
you could indeed leave it running in the background (while slowing it
down by borrowing resources for other purposes :-) Does your
theoretically faster drive system really make a significant
difference?

Sure it does. That two hour concert that I told you about takes around 30
minutes to render into a stereo mix. On last year's machine, it would have
taken about 60.

And yes, because I'm I/O bound rather than CPU bound, I can perform other work
in the background without slowing things down appreciably (assuming that I'm not
adding much to the I/O load).

[Arny Krueger]

"Jim Gilliland" wrote in
message

Here's the mix that I'm working on at the moment: 19
mono tracks plus two stereo tracks, each with EQ and
light compression being applied at the track level. Sends from each of
these channels into a reverb bus and
some also feeding a multitap delay bus, then everything
routed through four submix buses (with EQ and compression
and limiting on these), then routed into the final mix
bus (a limiter here as well) which then feeds the stereo
output to disk.

Does that qualify as "relatively simple"?

For me it is mainstream, maybe even a little above average.

Because it's
definitely I/O bound, not CPU bound, on my system. I do
have a fast multicore CPU, but then I also have a RAID0
array of fast SATA drives.

Depending on your software, that RAID array might be more productiven when
configured as individual drives. For example, Audition/CE can exploit 3-4
independent drives. Two drives are almost always better as separate drives
than striped.

Of course, I/O isn't purely defined by drive speed.

A lot of DAW post-processing nets out to be a file-to-file copy.

Right - the worst case for file I/O is a file-to-file copy where both files
are on the same drive. The best case is a file-to-file copy where both files
are on different drives.

The very best case is when you can replace one of both of those drives with
RAM, but that can take a lot of RAM and then you have volatility issues.

I just bought 4 GB of flash memory for $40, as two drives, no rebates. The
downer is that it turned out to be incompatible with my Microtrack.

Nevertheless, the handwriting is on the wall for hard drives as work space.
2 GB drives are a bit lean for the kind of work I do, but 4 GB will be here
for the same price in a year or two, and that is enough to work with.

[Arny Krueger]

"Laurence Payne" lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in
message
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:35:02 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

I'm talking about mixing audio. The drive isn't going
to be the bottleneck for anything in real time, but once
those tracks are on the disk and you're ready to mix
them (in the box), then you're no longer working in real
time. And in that case, audio data I/O often IS the
bottleneck.

Are these songs? Or hour-long live recordings?

Or 20 minute sets.

I do either of the latter two.

Ifsongs, you could save a few seconds, but it's never going
to take LONGER than real-time is it?

Oh no, the question is how much faster than real time.

With nondestructive editing, its the rare operation that is any bottleneck
at all, given that you can everything in real time or better.

It then comes down to the mixdown or rendering step. Even if you beat
realtime by 4:1, it would still take 15 minutes per rendering of a 1 hour
program.

Else you couldn't have auditioned the mix.

Right, but you need reserve performance to ensure no skips during
auditioning to edit.

If an hour or two, you could
indeed leave it running in the background (while slowing
it down by borrowing resources for other purposes :-)

IME a machine that is rendering audio or video can come pretty close to
being a lost cause for fast response time for anything else. I have 3
machines on a network.

Does your theoretically faster drive system really make a
significant difference?

IME it takes a lot of CPU performance to get a serious rendering step to be
siginficantly I/O bound. I'm not seeing it with 3-4 GHz (e.g. 3800+ dual)
CPUs and multiple 7200 rpm drives on desktops.

[Arny Krueger]

"spud" wrote in message


The asus P5P800 touts a DDR400/333/266 memory spec
but at post I see it's set at 333.

That choice was made based on CPU, chipset and RAM speed.

There seems no way to change this in bios,

And there should be none, except to back it off if the system is unstable.

the 400 option just doesn't appear
in the memory settings area.

But you do control RAM chip speed, CPU speed, MB chipset speed, and whether
or not you're exploiting such dual channel RAM features as may exist.
Usually the MB chipset is fast enough to exploit the rest.

The CPU is a P4 2.6 and the FSB is 800/533Mhz whatever that means.

FSB speed relates to how fast the CPU talks to things that are off-chip like
RAM and I/O controllers.

The drive is maybe
18 months old, a 250GB WD, not the newer SATA thing.

SATA versus parallel is mostly a bye at 250 GB.

The place where I bought the mainboard installs the CPU
and memory and tests it before they hand if off. I think
is was about $300 for the CPU, 865PE based mainboard,
128meg asus video card, and one gig of 3200 memory. I
used my old case, drive, LynxOne soundcard, DVD burner

If there are dual channel RAM features to exploit, then exploiting them can
help. IOW if you upgrade to 2 GB RAM, with a second identical chip, the MB
may decide to enable dual channel access, and that is a lot like trading in
that 333 MHz RAM for 666 MHz RAM.

If the CPU and MB are capable of 533 MHz FSB operation, then you might get
even more benefits out of starting over with 533 MHz RAM - two identical
pieces of at least 512 Meg each.

[Arny Krueger]

"DeeAa" wrote in
message

Using 3 machines with 512, 1G and 2G mem I can tell you
that 512 is a joke on a windows machine these days; the
machine starts swapping even opening up Open Office or
whatver, let alone if you try to watch TV onscreen or do
something else. Can't be done, really.

It wasn't this way 18 months ago, 512megs used to be a great plenty. I don't
know whether XP caught RAM creep, the apps got RAM creep, or whether
expectations crept. But I agree that it takes at least 1 GB to play these
days.

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:01:06 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

If an hour or two,
you could indeed leave it running in the background (while slowing it
down by borrowing resources for other purposes :-) Does your
theoretically faster drive system really make a significant
difference?

Sure it does. That two hour concert that I told you about takes around 30
minutes to render into a stereo mix. On last year's machine, it would have
taken about 60.

And yes, because I'm I/O bound rather than CPU bound, I can perform other work
in the background without slowing things down appreciably (assuming that I'm not
adding much to the I/O load).

And the difference between last year's machine and this year's is
solely a faster disk system? :-)

[Jim Gilliland]

Laurence Payne wrote:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:01:06 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

Sure it does. That two hour concert that I told you about takes around 30
minutes to render into a stereo mix. On last year's machine, it would have
taken about 60.

And the difference between last year's machine and this year's is
solely a faster disk system? :-)

No, I updated most of the system. But I/O was the limiting factor on both.

I'm not complaining. This system is fast enough. g But if I wanted to make
it faster, I'd have to speed up the disk - probably adding another drive or two
to the RAID. Adding more memory or a faster CPU wouldn't give me much benefit.

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:24:24 -0400, Jim Gilliland
wrote:

Sure it does. That two hour concert that I told you about takes around 30
minutes to render into a stereo mix. On last year's machine, it would have
taken about 60.

And the difference between last year's machine and this year's is
solely a faster disk system? :-)

No, I updated most of the system. But I/O was the limiting factor on both.

I'm not complaining. This system is fast enough. g But if I wanted to make
it faster, I'd have to speed up the disk - probably adding another drive or two
to the RAID. Adding more memory or a faster CPU wouldn't give me much benefit.

We'll have to agree to disagree about that :-)

[Carey Carlan]

Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in
:

What are you DOING with your DAW that doesn't require your full
attention? Obviously when actually recording or mixing in real time
it would be foolish (and unnecessary) to start up other programs. I
suppose a modern machine could cope with playing background music or
recording a radio programme as a background task, especially if the
odd glitch wasn't a show-stopper. Or are you rendering huge files
offline? That wouldn't mind taking whatever timeslots were left over,
I suppose.

Many of Audition's operations run "offline" as you say. I'll take the two
track recording of a concert and run high-pass filter, noise reduction,
perhaps some reverb, normalize, and dither to 16 bits. All those steps are
batch processes--start and forget. The total time requried is still less
than the concert running time, so it's faster to batch them than render in
real time.

Meanwhile I have time to read RAP.

[Julien BH]

On Mar 20, 10:33 am, Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom
wrote:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:24:24 -0400, Jim Gilliland

wrote:
Sure it does. That two hour concert that I told you about takes around 30
minutes to render into a stereo mix. On last year's machine, it would have
taken about 60.

And the difference between last year's machine and this year's is
solely a faster disk system? :-)

No, I updated most of the system. But I/O was the limiting factor on both.

I'm not complaining. This system is fast enough. g But if I wanted to make
it faster, I'd have to speed up the disk - probably adding another drive or two
to the RAID. Adding more memory or a faster CPU wouldn't give me much benefit.

We'll have to agree to disagree about that :-)

Well try a quad core and give me some news after that.

[Laurence Payne]

On 20 Mar 2007 09:13:14 -0700, "Julien BH" wrote:

And the difference between last year's machine and this year's is
solely a faster disk system? :-)

No, I updated most of the system. But I/O was the limiting factor on both.

I'm not complaining. This system is fast enough. g But if I wanted to make
it faster, I'd have to speed up the disk - probably adding another drive or two
to the RAID. Adding more memory or a faster CPU wouldn't give me much benefit.

We'll have to agree to disagree about that :-)

Well try a quad core and give me some news after that.

I thought you said a faster processor WOULDN'T make any great
difference?

[DeeAa]

"Laurence Payne" lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in message
...
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:33:38 +0200, "DeeAa"
wrote:

On a 1G machine most things work fluently, but even here I can't do very
many processes at once without running out of memory and start swapping. I
know some people do just one thing at a time on their machines, but I am
one
of those who even while the PC is still booting is anxiously klicking open
Cubase and Photoshop and Outlook and newsreader and HTML editor and the
browser and the DigitalTV receiver all at the same time.

Well, don't do that then, silly boy! You must have realised by now
that trying to start programs while the machine is still booting is
ultimately slower?

Perhaps it is, but I go by the idea that if I open up the email program
first, it loads, say, 5 seconds the first time, which is plenty time to go
click a few more programs open. Then while I'm starting to reply to a
message, the other programs have time to load in the background. Then I can
jump to, say, newsreader, and open up Wavelab or whatever while it loads all
the new headers etc. But then again I like to keep the work area relatively
closed, so I keep shutting off the email client only to open it up in five
again, if I have a second or two to spare when another program is doing
something else.

It's a busy life, between work and domestic duties I usually get maybe an
hour in the morning, another in the afternoon, and maybe a third hour in the
evening, if I'm not too tired. In that time I must arrange my work schedules
between 7 workplaces, check and answer 3 different email addresses and all
on different systems ranging from a remote client to Outlook etc. Then I
need to check the news, our own forum stuff, new joinees etc, check out
mixes and sort what audio stuff needs be done next, or whatever I have at
hand. Hopefully get to edit and export a track or two at some point, and
it'd be great to be able to make some recording as well. Then I usually need
to scan documents for work, make photocopies, perhaps make a few CD's or
DVD's, do banking stuff, personal messages etc. and contribute to
discussions and whatnot. And I'd also need to continue writing the book I'm
doing on my 'spare time' :-) And that's just a little of what I have to do.
Today I installed 2 new pieces of software, one for bibliographies for
academic dissertation use and one just for fun (a game I liked on C64 years
back, it was nostalgic to play again. The Sentinel).

Next week I'm thinking of swapping the mobo again on my machine, to a
similar mobo but PCI-e based and with WLAN so I can upgrade a little better,
which means I need to dismantle the raid setup (new controller) and of
course re-install the whole system and all the accessories for the 2nd time
this year...

You get the picture why I'm constantly busy getting to the next task at hand
;-) ?

Why can't you open Wavelab alongside Cubase? I can, and have been
able to on much slower machines that I'm using now.

The sound won't work. For some reason Cubase refuses to release the sound
driver. In fact I don't need to shut down the entire Cubase, just all the
open sessions, and then it releases the sound.

It's a bitch with these sound drivers anyway; I have to go to the soundcard
menu every time I want to change the sync to SPDIF instead of internal, and
when I do, I need to reboot Cubase or it loses ASIO for driver failure. And
the A/D converter needs to be manually set to whatever the project uses
FIRST or the card won't find the sync. And if I change the project, or don't
use the A/D converter, back to the menus, internal sync etc...annoying.

[Laurence Payne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:58:08 +0200, "DeeAa"
wrote:


You get the picture why I'm constantly busy getting to the next task at hand
;-) ?

Well, I get a fair picture of a butterfly mind who obsesses on saving
a few seconds here and there but will happily waste a whole evening
rebuilding his computer system.

(His? Or am I talking to a woman? This smells rather of that female
"Look at me! I'm SOOOO busy!" thing :-)



Why can't you open Wavelab alongside Cubase? I can, and have been
able to on much slower machines that I'm using now.

The sound won't work. For some reason Cubase refuses to release the sound
driver. In fact I don't need to shut down the entire Cubase, just all the
open sessions, and then it releases the sound.

It's a bitch with these sound drivers anyway; I have to go to the soundcard
menu every time I want to change the sync to SPDIF instead of internal, and
when I do, I need to reboot Cubase or it loses ASIO for driver failure. And
the A/D converter needs to be manually set to whatever the project uses
FIRST or the card won't find the sync. And if I change the project, or don't
use the A/D converter, back to the menus, internal sync etc...annoying.

What soundcard? Is "Release driver in background" selected in
Cubase?