MTAR wrote:every avatar on this thread is smoking a pipe.

Conformity is best when practiced universally, I find.

i understand this guy's frustration with his mbox...but this pipe thing is fucking out of control hilarious. i might have to join in.

How long before there is a smoking ban in online meeting places?

Smoke it up while you can!

MTAR wrote:you should defrag your hard drive. that's crucial brio.

i think that with modern drives and cpus defragging is usually unnecessary. i used a g3-500 ibook and mbox once and it puked all over itself and defragging didnt really help at all, and it took about 5000 hours. i would suggest to you that if your drive is full, therefore access time for read/write is slower as the head has to shuttle around looking for free blocks to write on. this is probably the reason for your skipping. having a lot more free space will certainly help this issue. better yet, buy an external firewire drive with lots of space and use it exclusively for your recorded audio. this should sort you out. what kind of machine are you using? cpu? memory? drive is how full? os9 or osx?

i think casey may be onto something.

right now i'm typing from the laptop in question, which has 27.94 GB capacity and only 586.6 MB avail as i type (after the session that generated the skips). the entire mixdown session that created the skips is something like 377 MB (12 shortish songs, 16 bit, 44,1k) - so i'm definitely pushing the drive past ideal limits. i swear there was more like 2G free when i started though*, since i think the files were copied from thier source directory to an itunes directory to burn the reference cds.

*which still admittedly isn't great, but is better than 586MB

i do own an external hard drive for the machine (something like 100 G, purchased for exactly this reason), but in a long complicated process, i did a session a while back that was dumped to it, that was then handed off to another engineer for overdubs which has dragged on - which is where the drive sits right now, so while THAT project is going on, i'm stuck with my situation. sounds like i just need my external drive back and need them to copy data to thier own drive and record to my firewire drive instead.

computer is mac powerbook g4 osx v 10.4.3 550 mhz ppc 768 mb ram.

the funniest thing is how in real life smoke drives me crazy. (i'm asthmatic). smoke em' while you got em boys!! i encourage smoking in this thread!!!

Rodabod wrote:

nick92675 wrote:yep. insert something witty here.

Hey! When did you set that signature?(!)

bout 2 months or so ago i think, when i got off tour. before i went on tour is was some shit about how you should see me on tour, and before that i used to have some thing about being digidesign protools certified which was clearly a joke given this thread....

I'm not sure. Look at your settings in Protools.

coreaudio manager gives me 2 options, 512 and 1024. i'm using bias peak as my recorder, not PT. i just want to create a simple stereo file, not session files and all sorts of other bullshit. my multitrack is tape, and i'm just trying to make either practice "tapes" or reference cds for people. i've been usung DP w/the 828 for multitrack stuff.

That's not good. You can't fill in the gaps! I guess your were monitoring directly rather than monitoring the recorded signal whilst recording (the recorded signal is often off putting to listen to due to the delay).

indeed i was. it was bad practice on my part. usually i do listen to repro on mix to tape, but this was just a quick demo thing straight to the computer. i need to follow the same practices here also.

Do you have the latest drivers for the M-Box installed? Perhaps search Google for setting up Mac OS for audio.

i have whatever drivers were the latest as of about 6 months ago - and had the worst time getting this crap to work well with the computer.

aside, i also own a motu 828 ii which has been so much easier to get to work with the computer, yet physically bigger.... so i keep bouncing between the MBOX and 828. MBOX=more convenient and smaller (so i grab it more), yet way more headaches. 828 = bigger yet somehow less headaches. but to be fair, the MBOX actually sees more use since it's smaller and more convenient. it's just that every time i've used the 828 it works exactly as i expect it to.. (but i bet would suffer similar problems given my current drive situation)

i can certainly switch to using the external drive and the 828 in studio if that helps, but the MBOX recording to laptop directly sure is attractive for a practice space recording. do you all agree it's primarily a drive space issue, not hardware interface?

nick92675 wrote:do you all agree it's primarily a drive space issue, not hardware interface?

its not necessarily the drive space but that its a slower 2.5" drive with very little space left. the possbility of finding any significant amount of contiguous disk space becomes lower and lower the less space there is on the disk. so your software is trying to write to many little free blocks of disk space that are on different parts of the drive platter. access time of the slower smaller drive is longer, which is why you dont find this to happen with larger IDE drives. like michael said, you could try defragmenting your drive (to gain whats left of your drive as *contiguous* free space), or you could work from a fast external 3.5" IDE (firewire bridged) drive if you really want to solve the problem. and also Peak is problematic using coreaudio manager (in my past experiences) I would try using protools instead, you can export files to interleaved stereo (shift-cmd-k highlighted regions in edit window) if you find that dual mono files bum you out. Protools sucks, Peak sucks, Digidesign Core Audio manager sucks, etc etc yes they do but its cheap and convenient. You just end up paying the price in frustration.

casey_rice wrote:

MTAR wrote:you should defrag your hard drive. that's crucial brio.

i think that with modern drives and cpus defragging is usually unnecessary.

Hi,

While I think that Nick's problem may very well have to do with a maxed out hard drive, or some other issue, defragging is still very important, and should be done regularly, especially when dealing with large files and edit heavy EDLs.

As Stewie already mentioned, defragging should only be done when you have sufficient space on yuor drive (15-20% free).

best,
mike

MTAR wrote: defragging is still very important, and should be done regularly, especially when dealing with large files and edit heavy EDLs.

anecdotally speaking, i havent defragged a hard drive other than the one time mentioned since about 1997. i regularly run 32 channels of audio from a normal 3" IDE drive with thousands of edits and i never ever have to defrag. i think defragging typically is more useful on windows than macos. myabe that is the source of our difference of opinion?

casey_rice wrote:. i think defragging typically is more useful on windows than macos. myabe that is the source of our difference of opinion?

this is indeed the source of our differences!

best,
mike