Re: M-Audio: PCI or USB?

Mike Rivers wrote:
On Dec 11, 3:46 am, "Riccardo Rubini" <rub...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I own a Pentium 4 ( 3.0 Ghz, + 3 Gigs or RAM ) that is slowly aging.
I am having more and more problems using a sequencer with my
projects - and unfortunately each of my songs is getting bigger and
bigger, in terms of tracks used and FX and plugs involved.

Perhaps you should be looking at what you can fix with what you have.
Does this computer do anything else but work with audio? Do you play
games? Surf the net? Visit U-Tube? It could be that your computer has
become bogged down with extraneous programs (malicious and just plain
busy) that have nothing to do with your audio work. It's also possible
that your disk drive is getting tired and access is taking longer due
to flaky sectors.

As far as I know, there are no borked sectors on my hard drive. It's a
pretty new hard drive, it's actually a 1:1 replacement for another one that
died recently and I did backup just in time.

No, I don't do anything else with that hard disk and setup. It's there for
the sole and exclusive purpose of digital audio work.

A 3 GHz CPU and 3 GB RAM should handle some pretty good sized
projects, though plug-ins can eat up a lot of horsepower. You can
alleviate this by making some mixing decisions as you work by using
the technique usually known as "freezing" a track. Essentially, you

I use this feature extensively already, actually. Whenever a project gets
past the 8 tracks, the CPU seems stuck at 50%.

What I do wrong, actually, is I use the same partition for playback and
recording. I read that it's a no-no. I have a spare other controller and
hard drive to save my project to, but I have been lazy to move the stuff
around. Would I see a huge benefit doing so or would it be just a small leap
forward?

If you have a lot of tracks with plug-ins and need to tweak all of the
plug-ins during a mix, you'll never get finished mixing. So this
technique has a double benefit.

Well, this one makes sense :-)

I have sadly experimented already the pleasure ( or displeasure ) of
over-producing something, topping the scale of anality.

However, you do have to tweak certain tracks together, because, correct me
if I am wrong, I envision equalization as the art of subtracting something
so that something else can be heard better... Usually when you have
conflicts it's quite useful to be able to tweak at least two tracks
together.

Usually the switch goes in the other direction, people replacing a PCI
card with a USB or Firewire card with better converters or more I/O.
However, if CPU resources are really your problem, USB requires more
computer resources than PCI. However (and this is just a wild guess)
you can make up for that difference by eliminating just one instance
of a plug-in running on your mix.

Short answer: You probably have a problem that's different from what
you think it is.

I don't know what to say. I tried a lot of tweaks ( cutting useless registry
voices off, killing processes, etc. ) to make this latency gap go away, but
still the AC97 + ASIO4ALL seem to outperform my MobilePre. If I try to pull
down the latency with the MAudio config tool provided with the mixer, the
audio starts "clicking" - I have no other word to describe it: that is, you
hear clicks here and there...

I had in mind an Audophile 2496 card, so that I could possibly retain
compatibility with the Pro-Tools M-Powered package I got with my MobilePre.

Riccardo



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