Weird erratic sound in 16 audio tracks simultaneous record

[James Argo]

Few days ago I went to record a full live band. This time, the band wanted to do 16 audio tracks simultaneous live recording & I thought it would be good opportunity to test my old trusted system to do the job. It's been long time since I do 16 audio tracks simultaneous recording. Usually I record only 8 tracks max, and I never had a problem with that. The pc in use is an old machine.

Intel Core2Duo E8400
8GB DDR2 Ram
Win7 x64 SP1
2 x M-Audio Delta 1010LT PCI card (clock synced with external Spdif cable, one as master and the other as slave), latest driver available for Win7 x64.
Latest Cakey 2020.04
3  x 500GB 7200rpm HDD (that's right, HDD not  SSD), 1 for OS, 1 for recording data, and 1 for pic cache.
Recorded in 24 / 44.1
Audio buffer size 512 samples
Playback I/O & Record I/O buffer size 512k (Cakey Preferences audio sync and caching)

After a couple hours of mic positioning, wire routing, cable management, setup the monitoring, etc, the session was ready. I did few short recording test to see if everything worked as expected, and it did. So there we go.

Then the session began, we did about 8 cover songs recorded live. Everything *looks* ok. Each song was recorded in different cwp project.

The day after, I open the recorded projects to mix, just to realize something is not right with the recorded tracks. I found many random erratic sound all over tracks. Looks like something in the chain is not that "strong" or "fast" enough to handle the session.

I attach the sample wav of how the erratic sound like.

Did anyone experience this? What do you think causing it? Any suggestion what to do as to improve my old system?

Any comments are welcome. Thanks !

Record 1erratic_sound.wav

[David Baay]

Sounds like the problem from back in Platinum era with  'Remove DC Offset During Record'  in Preferences > Audio Playback and Recording.  As I recall, it was fixed at some point, but maybe still manifests in some cases.

That, or did you maybe enable the experimental 'Aggressive' ThreadSchedulingModel=3 in AUD.INI (Preferences > Audio > Configuration File)?

[James Argo]

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

Sounds like the problem from back in Platinum era with  'Remove DC Offset During Record'  in Preferences > Audio Playback and Recording.  As I recall, it was fixed at some point, but maybe still manifests in some cases.

That, or did you maybe enable the experimental 'Aggressive' ThreadSchedulingModel=3 in AUD.INI (Preferences > Audio > Configuration File)?

Yes, the  'Remove DC Offset During Record' is ticked (selected). I think I never touch that since installation, I leave it there by default. Do you think it may cause problem in some case?

The ThreadSchedulingModel=1 

Is there anything I should pay extra attention  in case of 12+ tracks simultaneous audio recording? Config, hardware, or anything that may cause bottleneck?

Thanks! 🙂

[David Baay]

Remove DC Offset is not enabled by default, and has been known to cause exactly this issue in the past. Defnitely disable it, and I think you won't see this issue again.  Other settings look fine. ThreadSchedulingModel=1 is the default, and fine for your Core2Duo. 2 optimizes for quad cores and above. 3  has proven problematic for many users, and is not recommended at this time.

 

[John Vere]

I recorded live band 16 tracks night after night to a 2008 Sony laptop duo core 8 GB RAM night after night for a good 2 years and never had and issue. I used an old Tascam us 1641 interface for 14 audio tracks plus 2 tracks were midi. Later on I added a Yamaha mixer that put out a stereo USB and used WDM mode( later WASAPI ) . along side the Tascam.  So I think your issue might be the Deltas.

I did nothing special to Cakewalk. The projects were bare bones no effects added yet, just the 16 tracks. Only noticeable glitch was the graphics were slow. 

[James Argo]

13 hours ago, John Vere said:

I recorded live band 16 tracks night after night to a 2008 Sony laptop duo core 8 GB RAM night after night for a good 2 years and never had and issue. I used an old Tascam us 1641 interface for 14 audio tracks plus 2 tracks were midi. Later on I added a Yamaha mixer that put out a stereo USB and used WDM mode( later WASAPI ) . along side the Tascam.  So I think your issue might be the Deltas.

Thanks for confirming that the processor and the RAM is not the bottle neck in this situation! I knew it can handle the job. 😉

My Core2Duo PC above was built around 2009 as second DAW to replace the stacked ADAT system to record 16 audio tracks simultaneously. During those days, we still used acoustic drum with many mics involved. The purpose of the PC was only to record, capturing live band.  I transferred the  captured material to my main DAW for editing, mixing, etc. It  worked just perfect with Sonar 8.5 (if I'm not mistaken), never had any problem with it for years.  I believe the Deltas are fine. It was perfect solid machine. In 2012 we replace the acoustic drums with E-Drums (Roland TD) so we no longer record drums as audio, instead we capture the MIDI and use sampler (Supperior drummer). So I never have recorded more than 8 audio track simultaneously anymore since then. I use this second DAW also as my "mobile DAW" whenever I need to track in clients location. I never feel the need to upgrade anything since it worked just perfect. The only thing I did was replacing the HDD 2 times after some years.

I have a feeling the bottle neck *could* be the HDD cache. In 2009, I used 2x 2TB HDD with 64MB cache. Now, it's running 3x 500GB with 8MB cache. I heard the cache will affect how fast the HDD writes in multi track situation. I'm not sure, I haven't tested it. If anyone has valid info, please let me know.

 

Edited May 2, 2020 by James Argo
typos

[David Baay]

7 hours ago, James Argo said:

I have a feeling the bottle neck *could* be the HDD cache.

I'm almost certain the issue is Remove DC Offset. Disable it, and make an extended multitrack test recording. I think you'll be fine. 

[LarsF]

For multitrack live recording I would consider this also

"Record Pre-allocate File (seconds). When this option is set to a value greater than zero, Cakewalk will pre allocate the file to 
be recorded to the size specified (in seconds). This means that the file will not be resized while recording until it reaches the 
allocated size. The setting has the potential to reduce disk activity while recording and allows for more possible tracks. The valid 
range is 0–14400 seconds and the default value is 0. A reasonable setting would be 10 minutes (600 seconds) to 30 minutes 
(1800 seconds)."

 

Also bigger chance each file has consecutive file allocation and would also defragment drive before starting.

So would set to an hour if that capture length of live set, or 2 hours or whatever.

[James Argo]

3 hours ago, David Baay said:

I'm almost certain the issue is Remove DC Offset. Disable it, and make an extended multitrack test recording. I think you'll be fine. 

This is interesting, I will test as soon as possible. The problem is I need to test in live band situation which is not going to happen so very soon due to social distancing thing. I'll make sure to test every possible setting before I replace the HDD. I'll post the result here..

Thanks!