Problem rendering

[bob32069]

I am relatively new to this so please bear with me.

I recorded a 2 track project. The first track is an acoustic guitar with the reaper noise gate, compressor, reverb, and EQ. The second track is just a double of the first track, i.e I created a new track and copied and pasted the first track into it, panning track 1 left and track 2 right. When I play the 2 tracks within the project, it sounds great. I rendered the project into a 24-bit 44.1 kHz WAV file and I get about 4 or 5 very short skips when I play it back. They are very noticable and are driving me crazy. I have tried rendering with different options (sampling rates, quality settings, etc) and the same thing happens every time. It even seems that the same exact skips are occurring at the same times within the playback no matter what iteration of rendering parameters I use. I have a PC with intel core2 duo, no hyperthreading, 3 GB RAM, 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, running 32 bit Vista Home Premium optimized for performance (i.e. I've turned off all the bells and whistles). Anybody have an idea what's going on and how to fix it?

Thanks

[bob32069]

apparently the problem happens only with trying to render a WAV file. I just rendered the project as an mp3 and it sounds great without any skips. still, i'd like to know how to fix the WAV problem if anyone has any ideas.
thanks

[Staccato]

These waters might be a little uncharted, Vista is not familiar to many, like me. I know this is no help, but it looked unanswered so far......

[manning1]

there are many reasons for skips in playback.
and why various audio anomolies occur.
but whether these are the issue with your system i dont know.
difficult not being there.

one possibility is that another activity on your pc is
interrupting the audio process.
does the problem occur on normal playback ofmultiple tracks ??

i suspect your useing one hard drive....am i correct ??
if so....this means that all windows activities are working with the same hard drive as audio.
thus one possibility is that windows is doing some "task"
and takeing over the hard drive.
its kind of a shame useing one hard drive with such a great processor as you have.
particularly as drives are dirt cheap.
i recommend 16mb cache hard drives.
you might try installing a second hard drive and recording seperately to it...thus leaving win free to do its own thing on its own hard drive.
this is what i normally recommend.
as to whether the preceeeding is your prob i dunno.
youll need to run tests with another drive.

i assume also that your existing drive has dma set up ??

as i said..lots of possibilities.
or might be something v simple and none of the above.

it would help to know...
if in fact u have one drive.
and its dma set.


it might also be simply a vista issue.
i'm staying xp till vista matures/drivers for audio sound devices get nailed down etc etc.


addendum...
ah..in another thread i notice your useing motu ??
some other possibles are mebe settings in the motu ??
mebe an issue with firewire/drivers ??.
as this is all very new under vista.
do you have any other firewire devices connected
as well as the motu ??
one possibility might be its been known for some firewire devices to be incompatible with certain pc host firewire chipsets. normally a TI chipset in a pc is recommended.

as i said ..lots of possibles.


mebe others can comment further.
cos i dont own a motu.

[bob32069]

thanks for the reply manning1.

in fact, i am using one hard drive. actually, i believe there are 2 drives set up in a raid configuration (i don't know too much about this!) where drive c is called os (operating system?) and has 455 GB capacity and drive d is labeled recovery and has a 10 GB capacity. i know there is a way to configure or partition the drives to get the music production stuff on one of them and all the windows stuff on the other, but i don't know how to do that and i am wary of messing around and screwing things up. regarding the cache, i am not sure what the capacity is but its all pretty high end stuff that i bought. not sure what DMA means either.

with regard to playing multiple tracks, i have projects with 5 or 6 simultaneous tracks and i experience no audio problems whatsoever when they are all playing together within the track view of reaper, so i don't think its a CPU problem (the CPU meter is at maybe 1 to 2 percent even with multiple effects in the chain). I have not tried rendering these projects yet.

in terms of your other suggestions, i don't have any other firewire devices connected - i've heard that can cause problems - and i have had no problems interfacing the MOTU with Vista. the problem I am having is post-motu in the production chain - no problems at all getting the audio into the computer.

one thing i did notice after rendering is that the mp3 file itself is relatively small - 1 to 2 MB, while the WAV files were large - 14 MB or 20 MG depending on the quality settings - perhaps there is just too much data to capture into the WAV file and so some of the data is being dropped?

anyway, thanks for taking a stab at my problem

cheers

[tspring]

If I start my computer before I turn on my Edirol FA-101 firewire audio interface, I get a behavior similar to the one you describe. If I turn the FA-101 on before I start my computer it works wonderfully. I assume that there is some kind of bus contention that is causing this, and that somehow the computer can deal with the contention properly only if the right startup sequence is used. So...it might be worth experimenting with the order that connected devices and computer are turned on.

T

[bob32069]

Okay, I just solved this problem. Turns out all I had to do was change the samples per buffer on my audio interface (which I am using as my computer's audio output) to 512 from 1024.