Hicups in recording

[Bay3Mike]

I'm recording x number of mics simultaneious on my Dell which is a couple more than usual. I noticed on a session actual hickups on the record. I am predicting this to be a shortage on RAM memory and I could add more. Or ???

[syrupcore]

latency too low?

Recording into?

how much ram do you have now?

what's a hickup?

Will?

[Phiz]

Did you try monitoring any of your system resources to see if any one of them is obviously being maxed out? In WinXP you can get to the system monitoring stuff via Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Performance. Its not the easiest piece of software to figure out, but it can get you lots of useful information. I'm doubtful that you are running out of RAM, as recording usually is disk/bus or CPU limited.

[Bay3Mike]

I have a Dell single proc. Pentium 3.6 with 512 RAM (I know its bad). My card is a Core 2 Lexicon and thus because its such an old card I'm on Windows 98 SE (really am sorry). I have 2 drives for OS and then data at 7200.

The hicup I'm referring to is on the mixdown and playback, I get a sort of hicup in the record like the system went crazy for a minute and sped everything up to catch up. That's the best I can do. I need to verify this in the recorded session as I'm at work now.

I noticed that the CPU light on the front of the box is normally churning when I'm recording.

[Phiz]

Have you tried listening to the tracks one at a time to see if you still have the problem? This will let you determine if the lack of resources is occuring during recording or playback.

My DAW only has 512 MB of memory, and I frequently work with over 40 tracks and lots of plugins. I have never had a problem with lack of memory (disk bandwith and CPU are another matter).

[syrupcore]

The hicup I'm referring to is on the mixdown and playback, I get a sort of hicup in the record like the system went crazy for a minute and sped everything up to catch up.

like, all of the recorded audio is still there but it actually slows down and then speeds up? or is there just a drop out in the audio?

I dont know what software you're recording into but the first thing I would try is removing any plugins on the track and increasing the latency in the software's audio control panel. try recording again.

unless there's something weird with the lexicon (which wouldn't be weird) going from x to x+3 shouldn't make much of a difference in performance. Well, unless your drive is just a clunker. do you know the specs on the drive?

there's a million system tweaks you can try too. google around for some. one of the main ones is to turn off any antivirus software while recording.

I know this doesn't really help and I'm sure you got that card cheap and lexicon should be shot for leaving people in the dust like that but it might just be time for a new card and XP.

will

[I'm Painting Again]

my mac G4 used to hickup..with both of the cheap interfaces I used to have on it with OS9.2..I dont get it anymore with the lynx aes 16 and lavry converters hooked up with an upgrade to OSX..

If it really speed up and slows down which im guessing can't be true it might be a problem with the digital clocking..

if it just kind of stops for a minute and picks up it hardware issues i guess..

[Bay3Mike]

OK. The tracks are fine. The hiccups occured during Summing (mixdown) and I have found that I am badly fragmented on both drives. Learning experience: defrag once a week at least. My real job is being an IT guy. I should have known.

Thanks all for your help and I did learn a lot!!