DIGI001 and Protools LE...

[DigiDudeski]

I've started tracking my band and the goal is to record drums. I will be using to separate DAWs to get the job done. A DIGI001 running on a PIII 1Ghz with 384MB of RAM and a DIGI002 running on a P4 3Ghz with 2GB of RAM. Both machines have two drives each, a system and an audio drive. All of them are 7200RPM drives. The audio drive on the P3 is formatted as FAT32. I will try reformatting as NTFS. On to the problem...

Last night, with the 001/P3 machine, I tried recording 11 drum tracks while playing back three guitar/bass tracks. The odd thing is that playback was fine up until the drummer went full steam into his playing. I've never heard this type of thing happening but it seemed that the playback of the prerecorded tracks was jumping all over the place although the drum tracks were recording fine. It seemed like the DIGI001 was unable to operate in full duplex.

I had the system monitor open and the PCI bus utilization was between 50-55% and the system, disk and CPU usage was less then 20%. So resource-wise, it seems OK, no?

I messed with every single buffer setting that I could find to try to get this working. Originally, I was using some bussing but I got rid of that as well. I realize that this is a low spec machine but it should be able to handle 14-16 tracks without plug-ins, no?

Any ideas what might be going wrong? I'm able to record 14 tracks all at once but not playback and record simultaneously.

I appreciate any help that you can offer!!

[DigiDudeski]

Also, an odd thing is that if he played a slower tempo, the playback of the tracks was fine. Only if he sped up or got busy with his fills did the playback get screwy.

[DigiDudeski]

Hmm, do you think this is because I am running 6.1 with SP2? The program is fine otherwise so I'm not sure this would be the reason but you never know.

[toekneebullard]

Considering it seems to be tied to how hard or fast the drumming is playing, I'm thinkking it's the graphics that are killing your system. Perhaps, with 11 tracks recording, the VU meters and such are just adding too much load.

I'm not sure if you can turn off the live VUs with PT...but I would surely give that a try if you can.

[albee1952]

Try setting your video to 16 colors. Check your connections, especially the cable from the 001 to the PCI card. Maybe when the drummer gets rocking (if he is near the computer setup) the vibration is wreaking havoc with a so-so connection?

[DigiDudeski]

Wow, that's interesting. I had no idea that the video card would affect it this way. I'm using a really high screen resolution! The graphics card is an old Radeon so I'll definitely give this a try.

[madrock]

if that isn't the case, another possibility: how physically close is the system to the drum kit or anything alse that causes massive vibration for that matter?

vibration, such as the low frequency energy emitted by a bass drum or sub woofer, can cause hard drives to track poorly but this usually results in an error message telling you that the drive is too slow or too fragmented.

i came acccross this when i recorded a bass amp in the machine room of a studio i was working in a while ago. it took ages to figure out that it was the vibration from the bass causing the problem as we could record 64 tracks of dead air without any problem but as soon as the band started, the system would choke on 22. extend the firewire cable through the floor into the control room and hey presto, it worked.