Subject:Large Wav Editing Performance

Posted by: stauffer

Date:9/17/2001 9:24:03 PM

What can I do to improve performance of editing large files?

Current setup:
Win 98
384 MB of RAM (Adding RAM and running SF gives a VCACHE error)
13GB ATA/66 (OS and editing)
30GB ATA (storing created MP3 files)
Average wav size of > 500MB

Normal procedure:
1. Record stereo(only right used)
2. Use cutlist to remove portions
3. Copy right channel
4. Create new stereo file and paste to both channels
5. Save
6. Convert to joint-stereo MP3 (using lame)
(2-6 takes about an hour)

I have looked at RAM HD's and RAID (3ware.com Escalade 6410).
What will work best? (I could spend up to $1000 if necessary)

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: LanceL

Date:9/18/2001 10:34:23 AM

You don't mention your processor's speed. I'm fairly sure that a faster processor would give more "bang for buck" performance increase than an expensive RAID set-up. It'd probably be good to get an ATA100 7,200 rpm drive or two, and have one as the temporary files partition. Anyone else found ways to speed up performance?

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: stauffer

Date:9/18/2001 10:56:12 AM

My processor is an Athlon 500.
During those operations the hard disk light is continually on so I
assumed that it was a I/O bottleneck. Why would cut, copy, or paste
use much of the processor?
Also while editing a 900MB file one of the temporary files was 1.5GB.
Why would it be that big?

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: pb

Date:9/18/2001 12:59:38 PM

I'm using a 1.2 ghz AMD processor with 512 meg RAM and 7200 rpm drives. Large files process quite quickly though take a long time to load. Biggest I have tried is 55 minutes when I used the Noise Reduction plug in to eliminate hiss (thanks again to Brain Franz aka rednroll for saving my ass!)

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: PatrickL

Date:9/18/2001 8:24:33 PM

$1000?
98SE! 98 original can't really make the most with your 256+ Ram. 98SE can utilize 512Mb+. I am assuming you have a 256 stick of ram. Try taking the other one out and see if there is a performance.

go to your START>RUN and type in system.ini and look at your current [VCACHE] settings. If you don't have one copy this and paste it under your [386Enh] entries (seperate by space). You have to restart for it to take effect. If you don't see a performance increase take it out.

[vcache]
MinFileCache=1024
MaxFileCache=102400
ChunkSize=512

Raid is also not expensive. I brought an ATA card for $40 to hook up 4 hard drives together and increase the cache speed on those disks as well. Mind you it is not raid enable but hooking up your harddisk IDE drives to a ATA controller card can increase caching right away.

Try testing your current pc at pcpitstop.com and look at the results to give you some knowledge of where you stand

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: dj4005

Date:10/11/2001 6:26:21 AM

My situation is almost identical to yours. I record 3 hours of radio weekly, cut the program into 2 chunks, the first two hours long, and the second an hour. I then convert to MP3 for archiving to CDR.

At 22KHz, my raw file is over 900 meg.

I built a new PC about a year ago, basing it on the 1 GHz Athlon Abit KT7-RAID motherboard (half gig of memory) and a pair of IBM 45 gig drives in a RAID 0 configuration, partitioning the RAID into 25 gig and 65 gig partitions (the max under Win98SE).

I find the exact beginning and of the program, then cut and paste into a second window for saving under the new file name.

I'm using Music Match for the conversion to MP3.

The speed is absolutely BLAZING!!! I've read reviews about RAID setups, and from everything I've seen, really large files are where RAID setups come into their own.

If you are satisfield with your motherboard, go with an external RAID controller. I've used Promise controllers in the past and love them, but there's no reason to believe that the 3Ware (or Adaptec) wouldn't be just as good.

If I had to do it again right now, I'd probably use a Seagate Baracuda IV drive because of bad rep of IBM drives over the last year (mine are still kicking). I'd also take advantage of the newer Abit motherboards that use DDR-RAM. But keep in mind that it's disk, not RAM that is your bottleneck in this sort of application.

Have fun!

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: RickZ

Date:10/11/2001 9:19:03 AM

You may have checked the option for 32-bit Float Temp Files. This will slow things down.

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: Cyclops

Date:10/12/2001 10:35:20 PM

I am running an Athlon 1.5Ghz machine on an Abit KG7-Raid mobo with a single IBM 7200 RPM 40gig drive with 512 MB of DDR RAM at CAS 2 latency (good Crucial RAM sticks) and it still takes me about 12-18 minutes to do either an Equalizer change or volume change on a 800Mbyte WAV file. I use Soundforge for my DJ mixes, and I have to break the long 80 minute mix into separate songs so that I can have track breaks when I burn the disc. These "cut" and then "paste to new" take about 10 minutes each to do. I really don't think that the problem is hardware related. Yeah, Raid striping will speed up some of this stuff, but I believe the problem is with the way Soundforge works. Does it process everything via software? Are there any tweaks in the program that will allow me to speed things up?

Also, does anyone know of a PC based sound editing program that will allow me to take my giant, 800+MB wav file and simply drop track break markers directly onto the master file to avoid the "cut and then paste to new" process that I am currently doing. It really is a waste of time, plus I always get the faintest ticks and pops at the track breaks when I use "disc at once." I know Waveburner Pro can do this on the Mac platform, but is there anything similar to this for the PC? Thanks

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: PatrickL

Date:10/12/2001 11:06:36 PM

"I am running an Athlon 1.5Ghz machine on an Abit KG7-Raid mobo with a single IBM 7200 RPM 40gig drive with 512 MB of DDR RAM at CAS 2 latency (good Crucial RAM sticks) and it still takes me about 12-18 minutes to do either an Equalizer change or volume change on a 800Mbyte WAV file. I use Soundforge for my DJ mixes, and I have to break the long 80 minute mix into separate songs so that I can have track breaks when I burn the disc. These "cut" and then "paste to new" take about 10 minutes each to do. I really don't think that the problem is hardware related. Yeah, Raid striping will speed up some of this stuff, but I believe the problem is with the way Soundforge works. Does it process everything via software? Are there any tweaks in the program that will allow me to speed things up?
Also, does anyone know of a PC based sound editing program that will allow me to take my giant, 800+MB wav file and simply drop track break markers directly onto the master file to avoid the "cut and then paste to new" process that I am currently doing. It really is a waste of time, plus I always get the faintest ticks and pops at the track breaks when I use "disc at once." I know Waveburner Pro can do this on the Mac platform, but is there anything similar to this for the PC? Thanks "

Interesting keep us informed on your progress. I am coming into ACID and wish to know more about it.

As for any recommendations on your system; here's one.

The single hard drive will hurt you. You are accessing software (acid on one part of the disk) and music files (on another part of the disk) at the same time. It takes time for the reader to cover the disk but by placing both software and music files on the same disk it will be effectively slower. Since both will be interupting your CPU one after another while all this is happening.

If I were you I would invest in a 10 - 20 GB harddrive and operate the OS and software from there and leave your 40GB IBM HD to handle all your media files. If you wish leave your current OS intact on the hard drive in case you need to access it down the road

For immediate tweaks download something like cacheman to manange your vcache, chunksize, path cache, etc. If you would rather do it yourself insert this under your system.ini settings.

Goto >Run>(type)system.ini>[vcache]
if the vcache is currently empty try coping and pasting these numbers under it.

[vcache]
MinFileCache=131072
MaxFileCache=131072
ChunkSize=512

I recommended different Vcache settings to someone else not to long ago but it was more geared for gaming not music and multimedia.

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: dj4005

Date:10/13/2001 7:41:58 AM

I have to disagree with at least part of your rationale.

Consider the hard drive mechanics of copying files. You've got enough RAM that swap files should not be an issue. You're copying data from the hard drive into the RAM of your PC, moving the head to the location of the new file, and writing it back out. Even with the random access times of modern drives, it's this head movement that is by far, the slowest link of the chain. That's why a copy between two physically different disk will be faster than the same copy to a different location on the same disk.

I agree that a second HD is a good move. But for your application, the second drive should be used for the destination of your copy.

Consider going with a drive that is a duplicate of your other. You've already put out the bucks for the RAID motherboard. Having the duplicate drive allows you to see what benefits you've purchased. If it doesn't work out, you don't HAVE to use it as a RAID drive.

You should benchmark your EQ and volume change changes in the RAID vs. non-RAID configuration to see just where you are getting the most bang for you buck.

*** PLEASE NOTE *** If you are in the same boat as I am, the IBM drives are of the generation that have been giving the users so much grief. Mine (45 gig) have run flawlessly for a year, but a LOT of users aren't so lucky. This may make a difference on which drive you purchase, particularly if you decide to use it as part of a RAID.

And one last note. No matter which direction you go, do regular defrags of your data drives. Like I said, head movement is the limiting factor of disk access speed. Fragmentation only makes the problem worse. And large files are the absolute worse case scenario.

Best of luck!

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: stauffer

Date:10/24/2001 10:04:45 PM

I got a RAID card (Adaptec 2400A) and 4 IBM Deskstar disks in a
RAID-0 configuration. The drives are rated to provide 20-40 MB/s
sustained throughput so I would expect 80-160MB/s seqencial reads
and writes (PCI bus limits it to 132) but I am getting nowhere near that.
pcpitstop.com found an uncached speed of 6.4MB/s on the RAID
drive and about 2.75 MB/s on the other drives. I have noticed
that when I am doing I/O intensive operations the CPU is
at 100%. Why is that? When peakers are built for a wav on the RAID
drive System Monitor records it providing 12MB/s.

Clarification: Using Win 98SE.

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: stauffer

Date:10/24/2001 10:05:14 PM

Nope.

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: JADCorp

Date:10/26/2001 2:01:21 AM

Why would cut, copy, or paste use much of the processor?

IDE hard drives use a significant amount of system resources to do I/O. SCSI uses much less, but is admittedly more expensive. I deal with files that are in the range of 450 MB and use the following configuration for hard drives.
I have a 9.1 GB U2W IBM SCSI drive that I partition with a primary DOS partition and an extended logical partition. I have a 4.5 GB IBM SCSI drive with a just primary DOS partition.
I load the OS and the applications on the primary DOS partition of the 9.1 GB drive and store the music files on the extended logical partition of the 9.1 GB drive. The 4.5 GB unit is only used for the temp directory of Sound Forge. When editing with this configuration the data is moving from one physical disk to the other so the heads move a minimum. The OS assigns drive letters as follows: C:\ = 9.1 Pri. DOS Partition, D:\ - 4.5 Pri. Dos Partition, E:\ = 9.1 Extended Logical Partition. I'm currently running a P II 400 but will be upgrading to a P III 850 this weekend. It is never fast enough, but I refuse to throw an Intel cpu at the task of running IDE hard drives.

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: RickZ

Date:10/26/2001 7:59:54 AM

>>>
(I could spend up to $1000 if necessary)
<<<
I recently added W2kSP2 as a second boot with WinME, only paid $153 from www.microx-press.com for OEM full install CD. SF and Vegas now perform much quicker. Actually everything runs better, and that was the only change. Now that XP is out, W2k may soon be pulled.

Also, if you have room, add another hard disk or 2. If you can arrange it so that temp file is on one disk, edit-from directory on another, and save-to directory on another, everything runs smoother since disks aren't flipping back and forth reading from one part of disk, writing to another.

Regards,
Rick Z

Subject:RE: Large Wav Editing Performance

Reply by: pb

Date:10/26/2001 8:54:48 AM

I suggest you get yourself a Lacie Cheetah 10,000 rpm SCSI, say 36 Gigs. You guys in the USA pay a lot less than we do, even considering the exchange. I use quantum Atlas IV 7200 or AVID 10,000s at work and Cheetahs at home - fast, reliable and rock solid all of them.