Memory question and (AD vs. DP)

[Weekendshooter]

Hello All,

Been a mac owner for all of three weeks now and survived a series of jobs capturing four 8 tracks x 24 bit x 44.1khz x 1 hour sessions. During my recording sessions, DP glitched twice and AD glitched none. I was pleasantly surprised that despite the glitches, I was able to still gather alot of good material. Got a couple newbie question...

(g4 Al pb, 100gb drive, 1-2gb ram, OSX 10.3) <=> Traveler

While I use DP 4.52 for the mixdown work, I'm still tinkering with the idea of using Audio Desk from now on to capture the recording on the guess that AD consumes less resources than DP. Does that hold reason?

After the first glitch, I ordered an additional 1gb of OEM memory to give my lappie (still thinking of what to name her) it's best chance. Does anybody have insight as to how OSX 10.3 allocates RAM to processes? Will DP or AD simply see all that RAM out there and go try to grab it all? Just trying to understand what's happening under the hood...

Admittedly, I did leave the WLAN on though there was no source for it to latch on to. Also used the Bluetooth mouse during these sessions--The red led on the mouse makes a reasonable flashlight when the house lights dim! I suppose both of those could be turned of to conserve resources. Maybe next time.

Neat machine...

[WKWizard]

What sort of glitches? From what I can tell, your biggest problem is using your stock drive (5400rpm) to run your software and record to. An external drive would be something to consider. A faster internal drive would be nice, but I'm not sure how reasonable that is since I use a G4 tower.

[Weekendshooter]

Took some time to reflect back and do wish to correct myself, I had one glitch with AD and one glitch with DP.

The first glitch, I could've easily have caused by jostling around the equipment while it was recording and may have inadvertantly glitched the Traveler to External HD (7200rpm, 3.5" 120gb) signal. Neither the Powerbook or the original Wintel system wouldn't recognize the disk. Fortunately, I was able to plug the actual drive right into an IDE slot, recover the data, and reformatted the disk. Works fine now. Interesting thing was that somehow, AD was able to save on the internal drive. Not sure how or why other than this was the first time I used the rig (it was during dress rehearsal) and *alot* was going on.

Now the second time was with DP tracking to the internal drive. Got a disk not ready error, saved what I had and restarted recording to get the rest of the show. Here is probably where the 5400 rpm drive may have been the limit perhaps.

Nonetheless, the though of using AD to record came to mind on the premise that it would require fewer resources than DP -- I strictly record audio tracks, no MIDI (yet).

Thanks for helping me sort through all of this...

[WKWizard]

For awhile I was using my old iMAC G3 400 to record with. I did install a better drive in it though. Never had a problem with the faster drive. I did maintain the drive on a regular basis to keep it as streamline as possible. I only used AD to record for that one though. Certainly less demanding on the computer overall.

<small>[ April 05, 2005, 03:59 PM: Message edited by: WKWizard ]</small>