Question about Soundcards

[BrandonS]

Hi

My computer is a 2.8GHz processor, I think pentium 4... It has over 2gigs of ram, and is firewire enabled... yatta yatta..

But when I try to export audio from larger audio VSTs like drumkit from hell, or art vista virtual grand piano, the audio cuts out a lot in the bounced wav files. I've been using FL Studio to record my MIDI keyboard to program that stuff... The soundcard I have right now is a Soundblaster Live 24...

I want to be able to export those things of course, but I also want to use EWQL Symphonic Orchestra in the way it is intended, I want to have the ability to put several orchestra instruments in and compose with them without any problems. Right now I can get like 6 instruments in depending on their memory usage. What kind of soundcard do I need to get, or do I just need to change some kind of settings? I have no idea, please help me out if you can.

 

[Mutant]

Reaper is good for you.

Offline rendering is not dependent on your soundcard.

You can even do it on a computer with no audio hardware.

 

[BrandonS]

I had Reaper before and I couldn't even figure out how to get it to do the most basic actions... How exactly would it help me have the processing power to export drumkit from hells and large orchestra and piano vSTs?

 

[Saculus]

If it cuts out on playback and the rendered waveforms look complete you might have driver issues. ASIO4ALL is a blanket set of drivers optimized for music work on computers. Install the ASIO4ALL drivers and if you still have problems you can increase the amount of samples buffered which should make playback more stable and increases latency. If you are drawing music latency shouldn't be an issue.

 

[Mutant]

He said that it cuts out on bounced wavs.

 

[BrandonS]

Well, it will cut out on bounced wavs if I used "export".... However if I record the waves in real time, they seem to come out ok. HOWEVER, Playback is choppy as hell when I record in real time... It doesn't really make sense to me how it can be all choppy and sound like crap but then it is recorded as normal, good-sounding wavs. Needless to say I don't understand a lot about this stuff. For some reason, I thought I already had ASIO4ALL drivers... I think they came with something I had to install before. I'll double check and make sure.

 

[Mutant]

KXDrivers are best ASIO drivers for creative soundblaster cards.

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/

 

[Mutant]

If Reaper doesnt work for you, maybe try some other daws like Wavosaur or Audacity too.

 

[colynomial]

I don't know anything about FL Studio but it sounds like you need to change the hardware buffer size. When you record MIDI parts in realtime is there any latency ie. do you hear the note immediately when you press it on your MIDI controller or is there a delay? If there is no delay, your hardware buffer size might be too small when it comes to bouncing out a 2mix. Again, I'm not sure where to find this in FL Studio- maybe somewhere in your hardware options- but try changing the buffer size from whatever it is to say, 2048. You should notice if you play a note now on your MIDI controller it will be delayed by a few milliseconds so if you want to record some more parts just change the sample size back to 512 or even 256.

 

[BrandonS]

Yeah, I had changed the sample size to 512 in order to record the midi parts without latency, but I never noticed a difference if I put it back up to 2000 or 4000 or even cranked it all the way up to the top, it always just had the same result. Which would be, the program either crashing or bouncing out bad wavs. x_x

 

[colynomial]

The only other thing I can think is your RAM. You say you have 2 gigs- maybe somehow FL isn't able to access all of it? EWSO samples are loaded into RAM and so if you're maxed out in that department it can start just dropping out chunks of samples even if your processor isn't maxed. Again, I'm not entirely certain how to fix this, maybe someone more tech savvy can help, but you could try changing FL's priority in your processes window. Ctrl + Alt + Del assuming you're in XP, then Processes, find FL Studio when it's running, right click, Set Priority and select "Realtime". Not sure if this will help but it can't hurt to try!

 

[BrandonS]

The only other thing I can think is your RAM. You say you have 2 gigs- maybe somehow FL isn't able to access all of it? EWSO samples are loaded into RAM and so if you're maxed out in that department it can start just dropping out chunks of samples even if your processor isn't maxed. Again, I'm not entirely certain how to fix this, maybe someone more tech savvy can help, but you could try changing FL's priority in your processes window. Ctrl + Alt + Del assuming you're in XP, then Processes, find FL Studio when it's running, right click, Set Priority and select "Realtime". Not sure if this will help but it can't hurt to try!

Oh man, I tried that once and I believe it locked up my system beyond control, hehe!