Drum editing and laaaaaaaaaag

[Morgan C]

Ok, I've finally figured out how to do cut/crossfade editing in Sonar. Its kinda awkward compared to stretching, unless I'm still missing something, because its really hard to change something that the automatic quantize has done wrong. Mainly because, even if I'm only cutting 8bars, with a simple rock beat, and soon as I split at transients..

LAG. Jesus my mouse starts lagging. It takes a minute to save the project file. Everything is just ridiculously slow until I bounce the files again. So I really can't do ANY manual adjustments.

Now I don't have the BEST computer (2ghz duo, 2gb ram, windows 7), but beat detectiving has been going on a while and this would have been a very good computer back when drum editing first started.

So.. why am I getting such ridiculous slowdowns? Is this normal? If so, how do you honestly edit drums like this?



When I do stretching, I can edit the whole song at once, and then bounce it (which takes about an hour). MUCH simpler, but sounds worse.

 

[Unavailable]

I'm on Sonar 6 and cut/crossfade yields no issues for me aside from a subtle amount of lag when zooming in using alt+mousewheel. I'm on a 2.5ghz Quadcore, 4GB RAM computer, though.

 

[Morgan C]

Two more things..

I'm only on a 5400rpm drive.

And, Task Manager is showing upwards of 1GB of Ram usage when I'm doing this (spikes to 2gb, max, sometimes). BUT Sonar is only using like 100-700mb of usage, and nothing else is using up my RAM. :/ Even when it spikes to 2GB of Ram and the computer completely locks up, Sonar is only using like 1GB or so.


^ Unavailable, how much of a song are you editing at a time? A few bars? Sections? The whole thing (like I do with stretching)?

 

[Unavailable]

Two more things..

I'm only on a 5400rpm drive.

And, Task Manager is showing upwards of 1GB of Ram usage when I'm doing this (spikes to 2gb, max, sometimes). BUT Sonar is only using like 100-700mb of usage, and nothing else is using up my RAM. :/ Even when it spikes to 2GB of Ram and the computer completely locks up, Sonar is only using like 1GB or so.


^ Unavailable, how much of a song are you editing at a time? A few bars? Sections? The whole thing (like I do with stretching)?

I do about a verse and a chorus or so at a time then bounce to clips.

 

[Morgan C]

Ok..

If I disable AudioSnap as soon as its split and quantized, I can edit fairly freely, even with biggish sections. BUT if I go to play, the computer goes fuck you. So I can't actually listen to see if its edited right, without bouncing first.

My RAM is having 1.5GB cached. Which may be the problem, but I don't 100% understand the new mechanics of RAM in Vista/W7. Anyway, only about 5 or 600mb of ram is left, which is all being used by Sonar. If Sonar could use that other 1.5gb then maybe I wouldn't have this problem? I don't know how to change this though.

 

[Erkan]

I edited 8 black metal songs by hand in REAPER recently and one of the songs contained about 5000 items when I was done with the drums on that song, haha That's 8 tracks of drums though so I "only" did 625~ splits per track. No lag, no issues. Got an Intel Q9550 Quad Core and 4GB RAM, 7200 RPM Samsung F1 drive. REAPER has got other fuckin' issues right now though.... *mumbles*

 

[Morgan C]

I definitely think this is a Windows 7 issue. As soon as I start splitting clips, the RAM Cache goes up to 1.7gb, leaving a whopping 300mb for Sonar. I've done a few things to try and change this, hopefully it'll work, if it does I'll say what I did.

 

[Morgan C]

Fuck yes.

I disabled wmpnetwork under Services in Task Manager. And I also followed the second thing on here (http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/clear-windows-7-cache/). Not sure which one worked but now my cache is clear and Sonar has another gigabyte of RAM to use and I can edit like 20 bars at once with no lag.

edit: nvm I forgot to actually quantize it, as soon as I did that, back to 1.7gb of ram in the cache, and massive lockup. Ffs.

 

[Wolfeman]

Hmmm my computer has half the specs of yours, and I have no problems like you are getting. My hard drive is a bit faster but not by much.

Is your machine an audio only PC or is it the same one you are on right now?

Edit- I see that you fixed it. Never mind!

 

[John_C]

I edited 8 black metal songs by hand in REAPER recently and one of the songs contained about 5000 items when I was done with the drums on that song, haha That's 8 tracks of drums though so I "only" did 625~ splits per track. No lag, no issues. Got an Intel Q9550 Quad Core and 4GB RAM, 7200 RPM Samsung F1 drive. REAPER has got other fuckin' issues right now though.... *mumbles*

My by hand drum editing record is over 4000 cuts in one track. Bad times

 

[James Murphy]

get a 7200 rpm drive.. minimum... you will destroy that 5400 rpm drive in no time.

 

[Ermz]

Most definitely. I found I could only get the sort of performance for drum editing that I wanted by locking together two good 7,200RPM drives in RAID0. Usually if I'm lucky I can get through an entire song without consolidating, but the standard practice would be to consolidate as you go. Few or several bars at a time - whatever your system can take.

 

[crosstalk]

I edited 8 black metal songs by hand in REAPER recently and one of the songs contained about 5000 items when I was done with the drums on that song, haha That's 8 tracks of drums though so I "only" did 625~ splits per track. No lag, no issues. Got an Intel Q9550 Quad Core and 4GB RAM, 7200 RPM Samsung F1 drive. REAPER has got other fuckin' issues right now though.... *mumbles*

Editing 11 tracks of drums in Reaper and ending up with 4000 total items. No lag. Can glue them all together which takes a few moments or leave those thousands of items right where they are and not have any lag. No bouncing down every so many bars necessary. I'd go crazy if I had to bounce at any point.

I have a 3.0 AMD dual core.


Def look into a 7200 RPM drive. Would make a world of difference.

 

[Morgan C]

get a 7200 rpm drive.. minimum... you will destroy that 5400 rpm drive in no time.

Do you mean physically destroy the drive?

I've got one more thing to try to disable W7's caching, but I think I will need a new harddrive. I am running out of space (again) anyway.

If I had the choice between Firewire and USB2 for the HDD (I don't know what the extra D is for?), which is better?


edit; ok that seems to have fixed it. Its still slow (saving the project takes forever!), but its usable. I'll def get a 7200rpm drive soonish, and hopefully that'll fix all my problems. As I'm with a laptop I can't easily upgrade the parts, although I might be able to install some cheap RAM, I'll have to check it out.

 

[James Murphy]

Firewire... by a long shot.

 

[Proggm]

Also remember that Sonar's offline and online audiosnap algorithms are different. The offline render algo is much more accurate and smooth, but takes much more time to render. You can configure this, of course.

 

[Morgan C]

Also remember that Sonar's offline and online audiosnap algorithms are different. The offline render algo is much more accurate and smooth, but takes much more time to render. You can configure this, of course.

Yeah I know. I'm used to editing drums with stretching, this is about cut/crossfading. THanks though.


Having done all this, I now get an 'out of memory' error when I try bouncing the clips. I don't have time for extensive troubleshooting now as I've got exams in a couple days that I haven't started studying for, so I'll bump this thread once those are done.

 

[Charlie E.]

Most definitely. I found I could only get the sort of performance for drum editing that I wanted by locking together two good 7,200RPM drives in RAID0. Usually if I'm lucky I can get through an entire song without consolidating, but the standard practice would be to consolidate as you go. Few or several bars at a time - whatever your system can take.

I'm curious. Since the apple raid card is $700 and the difference between the quad and 8 core is about that same price. Which would you think would run smoother or is the better setup? 8 core non raid or quad raid 0?

 

[Lasse Lammert]

I'm using a 10k firefire800 drive for recording. like it

 

[Morgan C]

Out of curiosity, is there a way to test how my harddrive is running? Kinda like the Task Manager's CPU/RAM measurement, but for harddrive speed? I don't know if it works the same but I'd assume you'd be able to detect if its reached its capacity. Just so I can make sure the harddrive IS the problem in this, and not something else. Because the problem only comes after I quantize, not after splitting. So having 300 different files is fine, they're even all already crossfaded a bit. Once they start moving and overlapping though..