Help purchasing a new pc

[studioman]

Thanks in advance for your help and replies. Does anyone know of any good sites I can go to with pc's already optimized and set up for home recording. I feel like I wasted money trying to do it myself. I keep getting dropout problems and I optimized it myself. I now have a emachine
1Ghz Processor
128MB Memory
Cakewalk HS 2002
Tascam US-122 USB Sound Card
and I keep getting dropouts. I would appreciate any sites that sell pc's optimized for recording or any suggestions I can get for fixing my own. Thank you so much!!

[ALBERTPIKE]

www.dawbox.com (http://www.dawbox.com)

[ITGFox]

www.carillonusa.com (http://www.carillonusa.com)

[the_lost]

Hey studioman....

There's no reason you should be getting dropout using the machine you have... I just need a little more info about your setup. What OS are you using? Are you using WDM or ASIO drivers with your soundcard (if your not running Win 98 that is) When are you experiencing the dropouts? When recording audio? When playing back multiple tracks? Any clicks or pops? How many tracks and plugins are you able to achieve?
What bit rate and sampling rate are you recording at?

To reinforce what I said previously about using your current rig instead of buying one, I am still using an old HP rig for preproduction work and it works flawlessly. It's an Athlon 600mhz processor on some cheap ass mobo with 256meg of SDRAM running Sonar on Win 98se. Completely outdated to say the least, but it runs flawlessly as I said. I'm able to achieve about 24tracks of 24bit, 44.1 audio while running about 10 plugins before it starts to bog down. Your e-machine rig is probably running on a celeron processor, which isn't the best for audio, but should work fine for you depending on your needs. The only thing I could recommend doing is at least throwing another stick of ram in the thing. That could help drastically as the system will not have to constantly access your swapfile, which could be the cause of your dropouts... Also keep in mind to have absoluletly no other apps running in the background. That means NO norton antivirus, realplayer, etc. etc. running. Hit control+Alt+Del and see what's running. On my old HP system that I mentioned, all that's running is explorer and Sonar.

let me know about the details and we'll see what we can come up with.

later
jay

[This message has been edited by the_lost (edited 08-26-2003).]

[studioman]

(previous post)
Hey studioman....
There's no reason you should be getting dropout using the machine you have... I just need a little more info about your setup. What OS are you using? Are you using WDM or ASIO drivers with your soundcard (if your not running Win 98 that is) When are you experiencing the dropouts? When recording audio? When playing back multiple tracks? Any clicks or pops? How many tracks and plugins are you able to achieve?
What bit rate and sampling rate are you recording at?

To reinforce what I said previously about using your current rig instead of buying one, I am still using an old HP rig for preproduction work and it works flawlessly. It's an Athlon 600mhz processor on some cheap ass mobo with 256meg of SDRAM running Sonar on Win 98se. Completely outdated to say the least, but it runs flawlessly as I said. I'm able to achieve about 24tracks of 24bit, 44.1 audio while running about 10 plugins before it starts to bog down. Your e-machine rig is probably running on a celeron processor, which isn't the best for audio, but should work fine for you depending on your needs. The only thing I could recommend doing is at least throwing another stick of ram in the thing. That could help drastically as the system will not have to constantly access your swapfile, which could be the cause of your dropouts... Also keep in mind to have absoluletly no other apps running in the background. That means NO norton antivirus, realplayer, etc. etc. running. Hit control+Alt+Del and see what's running. On my old HP system that I mentioned, all that's running is explorer and Sonar.

let me know about the details and we'll see what we can come up with.

later
jay
____________________________________________
Thanks for your replies. I am using WDM drivers on my system. I have tried to upgrade the memory but I can not find any that my machine likes. When I put in memory, it will not start. I don't know why that is. But anyways...I get the clicks and pops and stuttering when I am only getting the tempo for the the metronome which would be midi I guess. But then why I try and record audio, it does the same thing and then it drops out. I have called and talked with tech support from cakewalk and still no help. They told me to set the rate as close to 20ms as possible. And it is at 23.xms. Running plugis are out of the question. After 2 or 3 clicks it drops out then. I don't have any other programs on my pc besides the cakewalk software and drivers. I am running windows xp home edition for my os. What do you think? Thanks again.