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bouncing to wave question

ok so here's a silly question...

i'm workin on a track, and i want to bounce everything to wav, i did so and now when i load up all the wav files into my sequencer(FL) i get extreme choppy playback even tho my CPU meter reads maybe...15-20%

before bouncing, my CPU meter was at about 40%, and the track played fine...now after bouncing to wav, it's starting to act up?

i was trying to avoid this by bouncing...what am i doing wrong lol?

choppy playback? like does it stall? are you seeing blank spaces in the wave forms when it shouldn't be? are they looped correctly?

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0729 choppy playback? like does it stall? are you seeing blank spaces in the wave forms when it shouldn't be? are they looped correctly?

it stalls, yes. the waveforms are fine, looping is fine...

How many files did you bounce?

If you're trying to play 24 tracks off a crappy old hard drive, it's going to skip. It's not the CPU anymore that's limiting you, it's actually your drive.

If you have multiple drives, definitely bounce your audio to a dedicated one that's not being used for programs, system, pagefiles, any of that stuff. I have a "Samples" drive for this express purpose.

If not, you're SOL - you have to find the right balance between disk usage and CPU usage. Or, route a couple of channels to a group and bounce them into one file as opposed to a separate file for each track.

How much RAM do you have and how many tracks are you trying to play simultaneously?

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut How many files did you bounce? If you're trying to play 24 tracks off a crappy old hard drive, it's going to skip. It's not the CPU anymore that's limiting you, it's actually your drive. If you have multiple drives, definitely bounce your audio to a dedicated one that's not being used for programs, system, pagefiles, any of that stuff. I have a "Samples" drive for this express purpose. If not, you're SOL - you have to find the right balance between disk usage and CPU usage. Or, route a couple of channels to a group and bounce them into one file as opposed to a separate file for each track.

+1

HD bandwith is a bitch. Depending on your system, I'd suggest a Serial ATA setup or even a RAID if you're doing crazy stuff.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut How many files did you bounce? If you're trying to play 24 tracks off a crappy old hard drive, it's going to skip. It's not the CPU anymore that's limiting you, it's actually your drive. If you have multiple drives, definitely bounce your audio to a dedicated one that's not being used for programs, system, pagefiles, any of that stuff. I have a "Samples" drive for this express purpose. If not, you're SOL - you have to find the right balance between disk usage and CPU usage. Or, route a couple of channels to a group and bounce them into one file as opposed to a separate file for each track.

damn, this is def the problem...the HD is about 2 yrs old, and it has about 4 gigs out of 160 left of free space lol.

i have 13 tracks playing at the same time...

looks like i need to get a dedicated drive!

defrag brotha

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0729 defrag brotha

Even that won't help if he has too many files going. Defragging can free up a lot of space, but it won't speed you up that much.

quote:

Originally posted by thoughtlessjex Even that won't help if he has too many files going. Defragging can free up a lot of space, but it won't speed you up that much.

yes it will

http://www.pcpitstop.com/
http://www.musicxp.net/

it could.


However it could be the software as well. I've been playing with ableton 5 a while ago and it experienced playback problems with about 10 wave files at a time, while cubase had no problemse playing more, and bigger wav files alltogether.

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0729 yes it will http://www.pcpitstop.com/ http://www.musicxp.net/

I know what defragging is. Unless you've not defragged in years, never done it before, or just deleted a hell of a lot of files, it won't change the speed of your Hard-drive that much. Why? It's like cough syrup. It alleviates the symptoms, but it doesn't solve the main problem, which is that your harddrive isn't big or fast enough.

jsut delete stuff you dont need. im sure theres about 50 gig of shit on it. i have a 160 gig hard drive and every 3 months i do a clear out of programs or files i dont use. it always sits around 100 gig now.

quote:

Originally posted by dj_kane jsut delete stuff you dont need. im sure theres about 50 gig of shit on it. i have a 160 gig hard drive and every 3 months i do a clear out of programs or files i dont use. it always sits around 100 gig now.

ya i tried this, but still it's hard to manage my space...i need to get a dvd burner so i can burn all my movies and files...hehe.

quote:

Originally posted by ASFSE ya i tried this, but still it's hard to manage my space...i need to get a dvd burner so i can burn all my movies and files...hehe.

thats your problem the damn movies. if i dont burn them i delete them they eat up alot of space.

quote:

Originally posted by thoughtlessjex I know what defragging is. Unless you've not defragged in years, never done it before, or just deleted a hell of a lot of files, it won't change the speed of your Hard-drive that much. Why? It's like cough syrup. It alleviates the symptoms, but it doesn't solve the main problem, which is that your hard drive isn't big or fast enough.

none of those links were for defrag. in fact none of them even define defrag (so thanks for not reading?), i was giving the topic starter some items to read to get his computer to run the most effecient.

The amount of free space won't make a huge difference, as long as it's more than a few hundred megs.

Defragging can help slightly, but not a whole lot if you're trying to play 13 files. Fragmentation only slows down sequential access, but when you're streaming 13 large files in parallel it's essentially like random access.

If and when direct-connected flash drives come out, they'll help immensely because they are designed for random access. You could even try a USB stick or SD card, although I think those might be a little slow because of the interface itself (firewire would be OK). Conventional mechanical drives suck at random access because they have to keep spinning the plates in order to get from one sector to another sector that might be diametrically opposite. No matter what you do, there's always going to be a certain limit to how much you can stream.

Do some of those 13 tracks have a ton of silence in them? If so, try cutting out the silent parts; you may only need to play 4 or 5 at one time, so cutting out the silence would reduce the parallelism and probably get the thrashing down to tolerable levels.

Otherwise, short of getting a SCSI array or some sort of SAN/NAS, you're pretty much hosed.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Do some of those 13 tracks have a ton of silence in them? If so, try cutting out the silent parts; you may only need to play 4 or 5 at one time, so cutting out the silence would reduce the parallelism and probably get the thrashing down to tolerable levels. [/COLOR][/FONT]

ya, there is lots of silence here and there, cutting that out will help?

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0729 none of those links were for defrag. in fact none of them even define defrag (so thanks for not reading?), i was giving the topic starter some items to read to get his computer to run the most effecient.

Of course I didn't read the links. Your post looked like you thought I didn't know what defragging is, and honestly, I took it as an insult.

quote:

ya, there is lots of silence here and there, cutting that out will help?

Less files being played = less things for the computer to read = faster reading. Computers are better at multitasking than humans, but they aren't infinitely better.

I can't wait until they figure out quantum computing.

i dont get it ive had like 20+ audio files playing with a 3.2ghz p4 with regular sata drives on cubase? isnt there a way to load them into ram or something?

quote:

Originally posted by mysticalninja i dont get it ive had like 20+ audio files playing with a 3.2ghz p4 with regular sata drives on cubase? isnt there a way to load them into ram or something?

I recently did a test out of curiosity. I tried diefferent combinations of running some loop tracks for a total of 40+ tracks stereo of audio at the same time. I've head no problems at all. My hard drive is 7200rpm 16 meg cache segate sata, and the drive meter didn't eaven move, running cubase sx. But this was a seperate audio drive. My system files are on another drive. And i used mostly loops so i had tracks playing at all time, without silence in between.. Plus plugins on each, compressors and eq, just to try to push the computer a bit.. And it's hard to belive He's having a hard time playing 13 audio tracks.

yeah the longest track i have running is an 16 bar pad... everything else is quite short. but i use ableton for djing too so that throws the long loop out the window.

impressed this thread got to 2 pages lol

quote:

Originally posted by DJDIRTY it's hard to belive He's having a hard time playing 13 audio tracks.

Not really, not if it's an older SATA or even PATA drive with small cache and no NCQ. Especially not if he's sharing the same drive with system, programs, and pagefile - pagefile in particular accounts for TONS of drive activity, and even if your sequencer caches all that audio to memory, if that's getting paged to disk then you're effectively negating that caching and probably wasting even more drive overhead.

This isn't unusual in an ordinary, untweaked setup. I'd say that 8-10 large audio files is good throughput in that scenario, more perhaps if they're 16-bit as opposed to 32-bit.

To OP - yes, it will help if you cut the silent parts because then your sequencer is not playing those tracks during the silence. In other words, less disk activity.

quote:

Originally posted by DJDIRTY And it's hard to belive He's having a hard time playing 13 audio tracks.

why would i make this thread if i wasnt having problems? as stated before, i dont have the luxury of a dedicated drive like you seem to do...and i dont know all the technical specs except for that it is a 7200rpm dive. each track is about 6 min long too...

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