MOTUnation.com

Hello,

Just joined, so hoping to get some help via this message board...

I'm running DP 4.6 and MachFive software on a 1.67Ghz G4 laptop (OS 10.3.9) with 2Gigs of RAM. For digital audio, I'm using a MOTU 828mkII and have a Radium 61 USB keyboard controller. This is a very simple setup, but once I get up to 3+ tracks using the MachFive plug-in, DP starts to have trouble playing back (stuttering, skipping etc.) and I occasionally get a "disk is too slow" error message. I've set my buffer size in DP to 1024 (the highest available) and even tried recording some of my MachFive tracks as audio tracks (and then closing them out in the MachFive plug-in) to ease the drain on my computer, but DP 4.6 still has trouble playing back. Not only is this extremely frustrating, but it makes recording a stereo audio file for export virtually impossible because all the skips and stutters are recorded.

Am I overlooking something? Shouldn't my compter have plenty of processing power to handle way more than 3-5 Mach tracks before showing any signs of maxing out? Does anyone have suggestions to help me increase the efficiency and performance of my setup?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

check to see that your polyphony is set to only the amount of notes you need - alot of Mach5 sounds default to 32 note & if you have a few instruments set to that it could be causing so of your troubles.

oh I re-read your post - are you using your internal drive to record the audio onto? You will get much better performance from an external firewire drive.

Thanks, I'll check the MachFive polyphony settings..... I'm recording audio to the firewire MOTU 828 MkII.

Your hard disk is too slow. Buy a Firewire disk with 7200 rpm should solve the problem.

KarlSutton, you rock!!! Adjusting MachFive polyphony solved my problems. If you're ever in DC, let me know so I can buy you a beer... THANK YOU!