Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Tim McCulloch

Tim McCulloch

Graduate Student
Jan 11, 2011
3,093
65
48
Wichita KS USA
Our shop just added a DigiDesign/AVID SC-48 to the console inventory, and as I was doing the 2.9.1 updates and general set up, my boss saw the Firewire ports and asked about recording. "Do we need to buy an Apple to use this?" "No." "Good, I have a gig next week with a band I recorded in the studio, I want to record their show."

With that in mind, I know that the stock Windows install doesn't lend itself to multi-track recording and the general advice has been to kill off any processes that aren't needed. I'd like to configure a 'recording user' with it's own hardware profile and Windows environment. Since I'm not an OS guru, can anyone point me to some step-by-step help for configuring Windows to be better behaved for this use?

Inquiringly,

Tim Mc
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

general advice has been to kill off any processes that aren't needed. I'd like to configure a 'recording user' with it's own hardware profile and Windows environment.
Click to expand...
Is this a mod to an existing multi-user multi app Win PC or a "fresh start" for a dedicated machine?
( Background processes and services can be disabled, BUT you have to be careful
I've kept an 11 year PC running XP by turning off the overhead. )
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Tim....

I believe Sweetwater had a PDF primer for doing this. IIRC, they also have live telephone tech support for the same.

DR
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

I don't know for sure; but it appears that the PC will have to be setup with Pro Tools LE.
Avid has a FAQ and configuring trouble shooting guide.
( Don't use sys drive for recording get fast 2nd drive BTW )
The Avid site has a knowledge base with:
Pro Tools LE for Windows Compatibility & Upgrade Information [353241]

http://www.audioforums.com/resources/protools-optimization.html
For XP
http://www.audioforums.com/resources/windows-xp-optimization.html
 
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Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Hey Tim,
As a (former) SC48 owner, I found it to be pretty straightforward, and I don't think you need to worry too much. Initially I had a firewire device that didn't play well with the version of PT that shipped with the console. An update solved this. I would recommend making sure you have the latest updates for PT installed.

You might also consider doing the upgrade to PT 9. It's cheap to do so (only $250!) from LE and makes recording much more convenient and just way better all around. 9 kicks LE's butt big time. This would be my preference, it's a VERY worthwhile upgrade.


Regarding tracks and external drives etc.... An external drive for a laptop or dedicated PC drive is not a bad idea, but you could easily do the 18 simultaneous tracks to any reasonably modern laptop's internal HD without issue.

In terms of optimizing the OS, I used to turn off wireless in the laptop I was using, as it shared an IRQ and seemed to cause occasional hiccups. This was on a Macbook (boot camped) btw, and it is likely a vendor specific issue. If you want to take it farther you can certainly disable plenty of startup processes and services. An easy way to do this is to run "msconfig"

Hope that helps a bit. Make sure to do a test run before the event with a good length chunk of recording time.
 
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Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

I put it here because it was more about recording under Windows than using the SC-48.

Thanks for the replies, Robert, Dick & Jeff.

Tim Mc
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Self-bumping this, as I can't believe there's not more to it.... or that the folks that customize Windows for audio use have been ripping folks off.

Thanks for the pointers so far!

Tim Mc
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Tim McCulloch said:
Self-bumping this, as I can't believe there's not more to it.... or that the folks that customize Windows for audio use have been ripping folks off.
Click to expand...
I don't know about Protools, but I have no trouble recording 32 tracks to an external 2.5" hd on my 6-year-old Notebook running stock Win 7 or Vista.
The only thing I do (in CuBase) is set the soundcard latency high to keep from getting clicks and pops. No problem having high latency since I'm not playing back while recording.
Modern PCs are more than up to the task of multi-track recording. Makes me laugh when people recommend dedicated HD recorders nowadays.
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Tim McCulloch said:
Self-bumping this, as I can't believe there's not more to it.... or that the folks that customize Windows for audio use have been ripping folks off.

Thanks for the pointers so far!

Tim Mc
Click to expand...

Tim, it's not as complicated as it used to be, since most computers these days have quite a bit of power to spare. You can pick up a decent quad-core rig for less than $1000 new, and considerably less used (I just sold one for $350).

Make sure there is absolutely NO antivirus, antispyware, or any other "anti-" software on the computer, as these will cause significant disk overhead, especially for big file I/O operations like recording.

If using Windows 7, I'd put the theme on "Windows 7 Basic" to save all the CPU from being wasted on 3D accelerating the desktop.

If you use an external hard drive, it SHOULD NOT be USB! USB is extremely slow compared to a hard drive, and will probably be a bottleneck for high track counts. I highly recommend a eSATA drive (sometimes hard to get recognized, but once connected will work well) or a Firewire drive. However, I've sometimes had issues having two high-bandwidth Firewire devices on the same card. Make sure you experiment in the shop first with a worst-case track count for at least a few hours.

The computer part has always been easy in my experience; it's digital sync that always seems to kill me, especially over ADAT. Fortunately you shouldn't have that issue.
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Silas Pradetto said:
If you use an external hard drive, it SHOULD NOT be USB! USB is extremely slow compared to a hard drive, and will probably be a bottleneck for high track counts. I highly recommend a eSATA drive (sometimes hard to get recognized, but once connected will work well) or a Firewire drive. However, I've sometimes had issues having two high-bandwidth Firewire devices on the same card. Make sure you experiment in the shop first with a worst-case track count for at least a few hours.
Click to expand...

Silas,

Isn't USB 2 slightly faster than FW400?
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

I have had ZERO problems using USB2 hard drives for live recording on SC48, StudioLive, and misc setups. It shouldn't be a problem unless you are talking about much higher track counts.

As I said before, with reasonably modern equipment, audio is no longer much of a challenge. Video is a different story, but a modern system even of lower quality has tremendous audio recording capabilities compared to earlier days.

Tim just needs to ensure the system is stable, performance shouldn't be an issue in this case.
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Silas Pradetto said:
Tim, it's not as complicated as it used to be, since most computers these days have quite a bit of power to spare..
Click to expand...

+1. Basic running services should be well under typical ram usage. Just look for any obvious high users, and obvious unneccesary users. As mentioned.. keep the antivirus off too. Agree also about shutting off the wireless... they can bump CPU when they are trying to establish a connection. Regarding USB2.. I have also discovered excellent transfer speeds... depending on device.
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Scott Smith said:
+1. Basic running services should be well under typical ram usage. Just look for any obvious high users, and obvious unneccesary users. As mentioned.. keep the antivirus off too. Agree also about shutting off the wireless... they can bump CPU when they are trying to establish a connection. Regarding USB2.. I have also discovered excellent transfer speeds... depending on device.
Click to expand...

USB can get to around 30MB/sec in my experience (theoretical max 60MB/sec), but the average hard drive can do 100MB/sec. One problem is, USB takes CPU to run, just like a network card. Firewire has a dedicated controller.

In fact, I've done several multi-terabyte transfers to USB hard drives, and they almost never get through the entire transfer without crashing or having an error of some sort. It has always seemed to be an issue with the chipset on the USB mass storage device, because some do it and others don't.

Before I committed USB to anythign critical I'd do a lot of testing first.
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

If I use my computer for more than a few tracks or for a long recording rather than song by song I find that with all the Anti Whatever software off and wireless off, my very average laptop is quite happy with up to 32 tracks with the latency fairly high never tried it for more tracks recording, though it will mix down over 40 tracks again latency is high but that is it as far as adjustments are required. I still prefer a dedicated recorder but not to the point of refusing to use the laptop these days. I use REAPER as it seems to have the lowest CPU overhead as long as you don't go inserting loads of plug ins etc. I can play back 24 tracks 48k/24bit from my USB drive no problemas well just to add to the confusion :) G
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Hi Tim:

Regardless of I/O interface, successful multitrack recording with a Windows OS is dependent upon consistently available CPU time. Various drivers that keep the CPU intermittently busy, thus unable to lay down glitch-free multitrack data streams, create something called delayed procedure calls (DPC). XP tends to have several DPC issues with high track counts unless you disable certain drivers. Vista and Windows 7 addressed the DPC issue pretty well with a different audio driver system and improved hardware drivers.

A very helpful gift exists to measure DPC's and find out if you need to make adjustments to the OS reliable real time performance:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Generally, with XP you'll find the need to disable the wireless Ethernet driver. If you use a Mac in Boot Camp, you'll also need to disable the KbdMgr.exe driver with the System Configuration Utility.

With Vista and Windows 7 on a laptop, you'll probably only need to kill anything that throttles the CPU (like SpeedStep), hard disk, screen, etc. while plugged in (which it certainly should be during multitrack recording). It will probably help slightly to disable the wireless Ethernet driver, but in my experience it's unnecessary.

With any of these OS's, if you still have high DPC latencies, you'll need to follow the instructions available on the above link and turn off one thing at a time to see where the issue(s) is.
 
Re: Windoze tweeks for firewire audio recording

Thanks to everyone who replied, particularly Langston and Rob. It seems I'm probably making this more difficult than it really is.

I have a plug-in question... I'll start another branch of this thread for it.

Have fun, good luck.

Tim Mc
 
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