Can't record 16 track live without "disk too slow" message. WTF?

tankfield wrote:

fuzzynormal wrote:
USB HD's never worked; not enough bandwidth.

This is a myth. I use USB to record 16 simultaneous tracks at 48/24 all the >time. Message was edited by: tankfield to add the sample freq/bit depth

It's not exactly a myth as it used to be mostly true.
Early USB 2.0 electronics on both computer and external drives tended to have dropouts & disconnects.

That said, I tend to agree with you, recent USB implementation/external drives seem able to move large amounts of data reliably.


pancenter-

|| "This is a myth. I use USB to record 16 simultaneous tracks at 48/24 all the time."

Okay, I'll say this: It never worked for me on my MBP.

How is the HD interfaced with your computer?

Also, the newer HD might be more sensitive to vibration. Try running a test where you record silence on 9 tracks.

If that works, record hi decibel noise comparable with the volume you'd hear in the club...make sure it's got a good bit of low frequencies. Put your computer and hard drive right in the middle of all that sound and see what happens.

It seems like a worthy effort at troubleshooting to me.

I had the same issue with logic:
*disk is too slow or system overload*
(-10010)

i have tried out a 1000 things:
repairing permissions - disk with usb - disk with fire-wire - installing the latest ProKit 5.1 for leopard & snowleopard - driver-update of my ext. audio interface & updating its firmware - updating the OS to 10.64 - i have used the disk maint.utility to check & repair my drive - with &without 24bit rec - tried diff. buffer sizes - tested all with 32bit & 64bit mode - and a lot of other things....

that was really frustrating and a pain in the neck as nothing helped and the same problem remained..

well.. today i have solved this problem
when i play-back logic i have an AUDIO-TRACK selected instead of a midi-track.. thats it..
it was as simple as it sounds..!

hope that was helpful to some of you.. at least it solved my problem.. 🙂

Yep people, remember: when you have a Software Instrument track selected whilst playing back, the CPU overhead is (or can be) much bigger, because the instrument in question is kept in a "realtime-ready" state (it is primed to be played), and this can gobble up CPU, depending on the instrument. Selecting an audio or aux track solves that.
What also can lower the CPU overhead is disabling all inputs for audio tracks. In other words, only select an input for audio tracks when you record - as soon as recording's done, select *No Input* for that audio track.

so... let me get this straight because i've had this problem as well and I happened to be recording MIDI at the time using DFH Superior...

If during recording, I'm recording, say 20+ audio tracks (24bit48k), and recording a MIDI track with DFH Superior (by the way, I made another post about this, but I sure would like to know a way to record the MIDI data without having to select a virtual instrument)... If I have the MIDI track highlighted during recording, THAT is what is causing the Disk Too Slow error? Is that correct?

And if that is correct... right now I don't need to, but what if I DID want to use these virtual instruments live and record?

Thanks for everyone's help!

dont worry.. when having that 'disk to slow' message.. you just need to select an audio-track once.. after that logic should work just fine even when a midi-track is selected.. well.. it did for me..
if that error message shows again.. (just in case) just play-back once with an audio-track selected and after that keep on working with whatever selected..

give it a try.. hope that helped..