Stops recording every few seconds

[seventh gear]

Hello, I am using audacity and an alesis multimix 16 firewire with a dell inspiron 1100 2.4ghz 512mb laptop and a firewire 400 card. running xp sp1 fresh install. The problem I am having is that it stops recording every few seconds and then starts again as if nothing happened. This shows on the recording bar as well as in playback. Sometimes everything sounds fast and sometimes just garbled. Is this enough computer for 16 channel recording? Is the firewire card too slow? I tried this on a desktop (not a good one) and had the same result. I have tried paring down the computer to minimal function, playing with buffer, lower quality, latency settings. Nothing seems to make a difference. Any Ideas would be appreciated.

[kozikowski]

That should work. FireWire 400 will handle a DV Camera data stream and stereo sound. I think that clocks in at 3.5MB or 4MB/sec, and FireWire has excellent device management (he said, typing on a Mac). I would have picked hard drive problems since you're on a PC. When was the last time you defragmented? You could get damaged packets if Audacity has to stop and wait until it finds enough contiguous hard drive space.

But you said it does the same thing on another machine. Exactly the same thing, or similar symptoms?

Does the MultiMix come with software and does that work?

Describe the FireWire interface. PC Laptops tend to not have FireWire, so it's possible you have a blistering fast FireWire connection trying to enter the computer on USB 1.1. Slooooooow.

Koz

[seventh gear]

I have not defragmented since I did a clean windows install on a 40gb hard drive I had as a spare. It is a Hitachi travelstar 5400 rpm. I don't know if there is a faster drive available for this laptop. Does the drive need to be defragmented if it has just been formatted?
It did the same thing on the other machine as far as my limited testing reveals. The other machine is probably even slower than the laptop. It does however have firewire built in.
Honestly I haven't tried the cubase le that came with it. It is only capable of recording on four channels at once. I need at least seven to record my band the way I want to. Since the mixer supports 18 channels it would be nice to get them all working. I have plenty of mics.
The firewire interface is a Dynex IEEE1394 pcmcia card model # DX-FC202. It should work at full speed since it is in the pcmcia slot right?
I am going to try a fast desktop with firewire built in tonight and will let you know what happens.
If this works I will be building a bare bones computer for recording. What is a good cheap motherboard from a year or so ago that will take alot of ram. Agp would be nice since I have a decent graphics card from last year.

[kozikowski]

<<<Does the drive need to be defragmented if it has just been formatted? >>>

Not as a rule, no.

<<<Dynex IEEE1394 pcmcia card model # DX-FC202>>>

I would expect that to work, yes.

<<<Since the mixer supports 18 channels>>>

But Audacity only 16...

<<<What is a good cheap motherboard >>>

You left out "fast," the trifecta.

The last machine I built was ASUS. The MoBo we're using at work has just been discontinued, so we're scrambling to buy up all the old ones. We have programming connected to the hardware.

What fun.

I have no idea why Audacity is pausing now and again. The real question is why doesn't it crash? As a generic concept thing, I can tell you that Audacity is a really simple sound program and it gets along with really simple computers. If you rip down the forum questions, a goodly number of them are trying to force Audacity to do something it can't do, or work on a platform it was never intended.

Does is still behave funny if you disconnect everything, unmount and pull out the cards, restart the machine and do a simple stereo capture from the computer Mic-In or Line-In?

Koz

[seventh gear]

O.K. I tried another old computer. This one had a slightly better spec and a good result. I was able to open all 16 channels and record without any glitching or stopping. I am having a noise problem but at least the computer seems to be keeping up. I have only tried input on one channel so far but I think the others are still recording.
It is a compaq presario s5100nx. It has an intel celeron 2.6ghz cpu with 1gb ram. It must be the extra ram or the hard drive because 2.4 to 2.6ghz isn't a huge jump in processor speed. This unit by the way is running xp home sp2 and is very cluttered with software, years of browsing, general neglect, and it hasn't been defragmented in a long time. Go figure.
It might be useful to all the forum members to make a sticky for all setups that work and another for setups that don't
BTW. thank you for taking the time to look into my problem. I will post an update as to my recording progress.

[kozikowski]

One has DMA enabled and one doesn't? Direct Memory Access is a clicky on my older machines. Without DMA, some real time processes just will not run no matter how much memory you have or the speed of the hard drive. Sometimes it just a matter of putting the drives on DMA. I was doing video on my 733 MHz machines.

<<<I am having a noise problem but at least the computer seems to be keeping up.>>>

That's not good. We'll see you back here to resolve the noise....

Koz

[seventh gear]

I looked into the DMA issue and I did not see any settings for the hard drive. I thought DMA was for optical drives. I did notice however that write caching was not enabled on the laptop and it was enabled on the compaq. Would this make a difference in the performance to that extreme?