Subject:HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Posted by: sansanatomy

Date:8/8/2003 9:21:52 PM

Techie Info:
I'm using Acid Pro 4.0e, and am running a home-built AMD Athlon XP 1900+ system with XP Professional. My audio card is a Creative SB Live Platinum. I use an outboard preamp and a Tascam TMD1000 digital mixer for an A/D converter.
The PC also has 512MB PC2100 SDRAM, and the video card is an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 with 64 MB RAM (I believe). The hard drive is a 40 GB ATA/133 7200 RPM (Acid, songs, and XP all on the same drive). (note: although the drive is an ATA/133, the motherboard is a bit older and has IDE slots are ATA/100, so I have a PCI RAID card that I run the hard drives through)

The problem:
With ACID - I've been recording rock songs, full band & lots of tracks, and usually never have any performance problems in terms of skipping audio, etc. If I do, I move the buffer up a tenth of a second. Never does it have to get over a half second, generally speaking.

Now that I'm ready to do the mixdown (finally!) I assigned all the guitars, acoustics, bass guitar, drums, vocals, and keys to their own busses. Seems logical enough; that way I can compress and EQ each channel separately. Should work great - or so I thought. As soon as I started adding DirectX Track Compressor, Track EQ, or anything to the busses - skip skip skip skip. It doesn't matter if I'm only running 2 DX effects on all the busses total. It still skips to no end. EVEN AFTER I move to buffer up (all the way to 1 sec), try different drivers, change the number of Audio Buffers (under Advanced) and the size of the buffers.... I can't get any kind of performance out of this program. There is no control at this point - I can try to hit the space bar, and maybe 20 seconds later (!!!) the song finally stops.

Someone, anyone PLEASE... give me your tips. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this problem.

Thanks everyone for your input
Matthew

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: mortalengines

Date:8/9/2003 12:05:54 AM

try just assigning individual effects to each track rather than bussing them - this is just a guess- but, I have come to understand that bussing in acid would be reserved for sending several tracks to the same effect/setting- like, for example, giving a certain room reverb to several instruments (so they sound like they are being played together in the same room- know whut i mean?) You may reduce your cpu load this way- then again you may not- What you are talking about makes perfect sense in the analog world- man... computers sure are different-

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: sansanatomy

Date:8/9/2003 12:58:34 AM

thanks for your reply - yeah, using the same effect is the exact reason why i bussed the tracks... so i could apply one compression DirectX effect to all vocal tracks instead of the 6 that I have for the song (having one on each track would produce a larger cpu load i would think)
but yeah, i did try it with individual effects, and it takes longer, but it still skips.

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: drbam

Date:8/9/2003 8:33:50 AM

You said it was playing fine until you started adding effects? Try bypassing the added effects one at a time till it no longer skips. Make sure to go back to the all the settings you had prior to adding the effects and when the session was playing ok. This should give you more information on what's causing the skipping. Let us know what you find.

HTH,

drbam

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:8/9/2003 12:23:56 PM

You may just be hitting a performance ceiling with your hardware. The SB Live! is not known for its digital pro audio performance, for example.

As much as I like the WDM driver model's flexibility, it can't hold a candle to ASIO's driver performance. Unfortunately, I believe the Live! doesn't have ASIO drivers available.

Try setting your projects at 16-bit/48 kHz to match that of the Live's hardware. If that doesn't help, try also reducing or turning off video acceleration. (Video cards like yours are known to hog the system bus away from other devices.)

Since you have XP, check out MusicXP.net if you haven't done so already for some tips on using XP as a DAW.

HTH,
Iacobus
-------
RodelWorks - Original Music for the Unafraid
mD's ACIDplanet Page

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: sansanatomy

Date:8/11/2003 10:48:48 PM

the problem seems to be when using DirectX effects on busses. I'm thinking about getting a new soundcard (one with it's own processor, do they exist?). Would that help?

Or do I need to build another computer with a faster processor... maybe one of these new AMD Opteron chips..?

Feedback anyone?
Thanks for your posts.

BTW here are the songs without a final mix: http://sansanatomy.trianide.com

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: Vocalpoint

Date:8/12/2003 8:16:48 AM

Sans,

Problem 1 - My audio card is a Creative SB Live Platinum.
Problem 2 - The hard drive is a 40 GB ATA/133 7200 RPM (Acid, songs, and XP all on the same drive).

First ditch this card. You will see an immediate improvement. Search the forums for what to look at...M-Audio, Echo etc...all affordable and all generally kick the crap out of that 2 bit soundblaster

Second - major violation of standard DAW rules. If everything is on one disk...that is hell of a lot of bus traffic for this older PC to handle. Get a second drive as fast as you can...you already mentioned you have a Promise type PCI card for extra IDE channels...hard disk is cheap...there is really no excuse for a single drive these days.

Try these first two suggestions and I think your performance issues will go away fairly quick.

Cheers,

Cuzin B

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: sansanatomy

Date:8/12/2003 9:53:42 AM

hey thanks man. hwo should i arrange the stuff on harddrives - songs on one, acid and xp on another; all 3 on different different drives, or what?
any particular sound card reccomendations from anyone? at the most i record 2 tracks at once (L and R channels) but having a third or fourth certainly wouldn't hurt

thanks!

Subject:RE: HELP!...Acid 4.0e peformance problems with Mixdown, Busses & DX effects

Reply by: Vocalpoint

Date:8/12/2003 6:35:12 PM

Sans,

I have used a Delta 66 (M-Audio) for 2 years and it's been the most stable piece of gear I have purchased. I am actually trading up to the Delta 1010 here shortly but ya really can't go wrong with anything from M-Audio. They have something for every price range.

As far as drives go...yes XP and yer apps on one drive and record your audio to the other disk. You should see an improvement right away.

Cuzin B