Subject:LP recording problem

Posted by: randym

Date:1/19/2009 4:05:07 PM

After a 1-1/2 year hiatus, I’ve returned to recording LPs using Soundforge 9 and my laptop with an echo indigo pci card. It seems my laptop can’t keep up like it used to. I’m recording at 88.2Khz, 24 bit stereo. The recording pace starts out about two-thirds real time, but by the end of an LP side the pace is well less than half of real time. I’m surprised that the recording will in fact complete if I wait long enough—20 or more minutes after the LP has stopped playing. I infer my laptop has enough memory (1GB) to buffer the write to hard drive.

My recollection is that recording took place in real time when I did this in July 2007.I believe I was using soundforge 9c at that time. I have windows XP—which has of course changed with updates. I recently wiped my laptop hard drive clean and re-installed XP and all my other programs.

I’ve made sure that no other programs are running. (I even uninstalled my antivirus).

My laptop has an AMD 1.8Ghz processor, 1GB memory, echo indigo pci sound card, latest driver for sound card.

I’d appreciate any ideas on what might be the problem or tests I can do to identify the problem.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Randy

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: Geoff_Wood

Date:1/20/2009 1:58:44 AM

Um, how do record an LP at less than 'real-time' ?

Is the recorded data still being written to the drive after the essentially realtime LP has finished ? If so, then your HDD must be running incredibly slow. It could be fragmented, or could have reverted to PIO mode. Check XP Device Manager and the HDD controller(s) to see what mode it is running. Should be hopefully running Ultra ATA Mode something-or-other.

geoff

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: randym

Date:1/20/2009 3:15:37 PM

Thanks Geoff for taking an interest.

Yes, recorded music is being written to disk for about 30 minutes after a 20 minute LP side has completed playing. At first, the recording occurs at about half the pace the input is coming in, but it slows down very considerably. By the time the side has finished playing, the recording is painfully slow—I’d say 20 percent or less of real time.

I infer that the recorded music is buffered in memory.

In device manager, I found this information by selecting “properties” for the “primary ide channel”

Transfer mode: DMA if available
(“PIO only” is an option in the drop-down menu, but is not chosen)

Current transfer mode: Ultra DMA Mode 5

I’ve done a test of the drive copy speed. It took 82 seconds to copy a 707MB file to the same partition as the original (86000KB/sec) , 110 seconds to copy to the other partition of the same physical drive (64000KB/sec). I cannot find the comparable specification for the drive—can only find that the “max transfer rate to host” is 100MB/sec.

There is plenty of free disk space.

I downloaded and installed the free audio editor/recorder audacity. It works fine. I’m recording at 96Khz 24 bit and the recording occurs in real time. I recorded a LP side in audacity that I recorded in sound forge 9 and the audacity sound quality is noticeably better. I infer that sound forge 9 is being forced to discard some information because of excessive buffering.

I guess I will continue to use audacity until (and if) I am able to fix the problem with soundforge 9.

Randy

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: jumbuk

Date:1/20/2009 7:29:40 PM

Did you check what audio driver SF is using (in Preferences)?

Did you try changing the ASIO settings for the driver?

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: Geoff_Wood

Date:1/21/2009 1:11:30 PM

Sound more like something is severely broken in the HDD subsystem of the computer. Virus ?

Or where is your Temp file set (Options | Preferences ) ?


geoff

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: Larry Clifford

Date:1/22/2009 9:45:38 AM

My opinion is that 1 GB memory is not sufficient for XP. I would suggest 2, possibly 3, GB. I would do this myself, but I am a computer technician and believe in memory.

Out of curosity, how old is your laptop. It may not pay to put a lot into a much older PC. That is your call.

Do any other applications run slowly?

As for the hard drive not being fragmented, that is possible, but may not be significant only because you reloaded everything from scratch.

It was suggested possibly a virus. Check that with a good antivirus program. That will eliminate that possibility.

Please keep us informed.

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: randym

Date:1/22/2009 1:54:35 PM

Thanks all for taking an interest in my problem.

I think the problem is solved. At jumbuk's suggestion, I checked the sound card driver settings from options, preferences. The only available setting was the buffer size, which was set at "256 samples." This was the default setting on the driver and the setting that was used by audacity, and which worked fine when recording using audacity. I upped the buffer to 1024 samples and did a sound forge 9 recording that occurred in real time. I have not yet had a chance to listen to the recording but trust that it is good.

As I mentioned in my original post, I had no problems recording with sound forge 9 in July 2007. But I reinstalled XP, sound forge 9, and my sound card driver. So I lost my buffer settings.

Randy

Subject:RE: LP recording problem

Reply by: Serafin Station

Date:2/13/2009 7:02:29 AM

The question I have for you is your choice of sampling rate (not the bit length aspect).

I undersstand that you're trying to obtain the best transfer of the audio from your vinyl, but unless your stylus/cartridge is capable of reproducing frequencies over 44kHz, you're really wasting a lot of HD space.

Most of the stylus/cartridge combos I use here in my professional studio have a high end limit of 30 kHz. And those are the ones which run $400+ each! Most consumer carts are going to give to 20 to maybe 25kHz... so you double that, and you only need to record 48kHz 24-bit.

You can easily check out the freq. response of the stylus/cart you're using with the Spectrum Analyzer... if you see nothing above 25 kHz, then back down on the sampling rate.

Just a profesional suggestion from someone who has been in the business of audio engineering for 35+ years...

Cheers...
JPS
Serafin Station Studio B