Okay, A little information first. I'm a complete rookie who's in WAY
over his head on a project. Take pity on me, and throw a little
knowledge and love my way .

First, the rig. Laptop is a Toshiba 2.8gig processor, 512mb ram, 60
gig HD. Audio interface is Echo Layla 24/96, with a Beyringer ADA8000
mike pre-amp ADATed to it. I record with Cool Edit Pro.
I mainly use this rig for archiving a band here in Austin (The
Gourds). I wanted to switch from doing straight sbd patches to doing
matrix recordings with multiple mikes. I mainly only run 4-6
channels, and its performed like a champ since I got the unit in the
spring.
A friend here in town does video work, and was shooting a dvd for
another local band (Vallejo). He asked me to come down and cut the
audio at the show he was filming, and the band wanted to multitrack it
so they could do some post production work on it. We did some sub
mixes to get it down to 14 channels, I set up a set of room mikes, and
we let it rip. About twenty minutes into the show, I noticed my
display was acting a little flaky, but I figured that it was just
having a hard time displaying all the seperate tracks, and besides,
couldn't really stop the show. System ran fine otherwise.
After the fact, several problems arose:
1) All the tracks show a running time that ends EXACTLY on .000.
They are all the same length, except for the mike tracks, which are
exactly 10 seconds longer.

2) The "tech guy" in the band, who was doing the post production
work, says that the sample rates are off. He had to alter the sample
rate to 448000k from the original 44100k.

3) The BIG problem: at about the 20 minute mark, the tracks begin to
get out of synch. Some are in synch for the entire session, while
others are not.

Basically, I have two questions. What can I change/modify on my
machine to make sure this never happens again, and; are we totally
screwed on the project? I'm sort off learning as I go with digital
audio and DAW's. So any advice would be helpful. Also, if throwing
money at this project will save it, money can be thrown, within
reason.

Thanks in advance, and if anybody's ever in Austin, I'll pay you
back in food, wine, shows, girls, whatever you want.

Michael Barnes