Continue, or call it a day?

[Zo]

On 4/13/2022 at 3:28 PM, Mr. Torture said:

This is my question I ask myself everyday. I'm not a professional song writer, I don't have a full band, I'm 52 years old. There is no outlet to showcase my music and nobody cares about it anyways. I get the occasional like from a buddy, but I feel my era is long gone.

I cannot compete with bands signed to labels like Frontiers and that's the level of quality I expect from myself. I end up with hard drives full of mediocre material. 

It's a lot of work writing, performing, mixing music. So much that it takes the joy out of it. Years ago I could spend every waking moment working on songs, mixing etc. Now I have to force myself to work on it. Anyone else feel this way? Maybe it's just me and I need to give it up. How do you keep going? Where do you showcase your music? Do you get results your completely happy with? Do people actually like your stuff?

Key is to take it as a hobby , and have other activities .... you're just getting mature , and understand that in life other things matters most  , the chance i have is that my job is music related (teaching)  so i don't feel totatlly disconected and i work for hire to mix and master , but creative wise , i keep that for me one time a year escape in south of france where i compose what i mix the rest of the year ...(albums , songs ect ...)

Don't force yourself , alternate technical works and artistic creation .... space creration the more to be in "need" for it , and once your in that processs you'll be super productive ....

[Mr. Torture]

Thanks all for the positive comments and encouragement. I'm at that crossroads of needing a new computer to continue. Should I spend the money? Or should I just leave things be and move on? It's a hard decision for sure. Not that big of a deal when computers were affordable, but now it's just crazy. I really don't want to get into building one, It's a lot cheaper for sure  but with my black cloud something will ultimately go terribly wrong, lol.

[Tim Smith]

What's your present setup @Mr Torture?

 

[Mr. Torture]

2 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

What's your present setup @Mr Torture?

12 year old computer, i7 with standard hard drives. 32 gigs of Ram, RME PCIe soundcard. Cannot record under 256 on the buffers.

2 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

 

 

[Tim Smith]

1 hour ago, Mr. Torture said:

12 year old computer, i7 with standard hard drives. 32 gigs of Ram, RME PCIe soundcard. Cannot record under 256 on the buffers.

 

Is it set up for audio?  I understand it's a lot more fun to buy a new computer than to attempt to squeeze more juice out of an old one.

One possible solution- Buy a MOBO/ cpu combination. You say you don't want to work on a computer. Maybe you know someone who would be willing to do the swap for you ? 

If you already need a general home computer update, I would check my hardware requirements and get one that could be purposed for music.

[Shane_B.]

2 hours ago, Mr. Torture said:

12 year old computer, i7 with standard hard drives. 32 gigs of Ram, RME PCIe soundcard. Cannot record under 256 on the buffers.

 

Any i7 regardless of what Gen it is, especially with 32GB RAM, should be able to handle a lot in regard to home audio recording. You may run in to trouble when you start adding in VST's on multiple tracks and you keep recording tracks, but if you are using CbB just Freeze those tracks and that frees up your resources. Then raise your buffers back up when you are done recording and unfreeze the tracks and everything will be ok.

I'm still running an old i7. See my sig.. I have absolutely no latency problems whatsoever. I was running a very old i5 650 with 4GB of RAM before this and had no problems. I just had to freeze tracks temporarily if I wanted to record new tracks when I had larger projects.

There are settings you should change in your Mobo's BIOS and in Windows. There are guides out there but for some odd reason the big ones like the one at Sweetwater took the BIOS tweak information out of the guides. They aren't the only ones who did that and I don't know why. Maybe BIOS tweaks aren't needed on newer PC's anymore? I don't know.

Basically,

In BIOS you have to lock/set your CPU clock speed by turning off Intel Turbo Boost and set your RAM speed by turning off XMP if your Mobo has it. Also turn off all the C States. They allow your CPU to go in to power saving modes of various forms. You want your CPU to always be on and available, never sleeping. You need as fast and steady stream of data as possible. On most motherboards you can have multiple BIOS profiles so you can have one for DAW usage with all that stuff turned off and another with it all turned on for everything else.

Check out Sweetwater's guide for the Windows 10 related stuff. If you are running Windows 7 or something else there are guides out there for them too.

If you have inexpensive HDD's and they are 5400 RPM that may be a problem if you are recording a lot of tracks at once, but I can't imagine it would be a problem recording one track at a time or a few even. If the drivers for your audio card suck then nothing else you do will help but you need to start by making sure your BIOS and Windows are tuned properly.

You should be able to squeeze a lot of life out of any i7 so you may just have a few setup problems. Good luck!

[Byron Dickens]

 

 

 

Yeah. I have an older i7, half the RAM and none of those issues.

[Zargg]

@Mr. Torture Have you updated your RME drivers lately? https://www.rme-audio.de/downloads.html

Their newest drivers are backwards compatible for Audio Interfaces that came out decades ago. That might help with latency, perhaps.

All the best.

 

 

[Mr. Torture]

Drivers all up to date, everything optimized. I bought this computer from PC audio labs, specifically built for recording. It’s never been the same since the upgrade to windows 10.

[Peter C]

I think we need a dedicated forum section where we can post the kind of stuff we would happily do for free - a kind of collaborators section. A bit like fiver but for free. Quality not guaranteed - not from me anyway - but it sure would lead to interesting results.

[User 905133]

6 minutes ago, Peter C said:

I think we need a dedicated forum section where we can post the kind of stuff we would happily do for free - a kind of collaborators section. A bit like fiver but for free. Quality not guaranteed - not from me anyway - but it sure would lead to interesting results.

Having started many musical ideas, I like the idea of sharing the ideas to see what others might do with them.  I was thinking the collaborative nature of Bandlab (the web-based platform) and the integration with CbB might be a good place to do this once I get into the groove of uploading ideas there.  That being said, a forum section here to alert others to what has been made available, to point others, and look for potential collaborators would seem complement this. Kind of like:

"I am available to do ___________________, ___________________, and ___________________.  If you want to listen to some of the musical ideas I have done recently for possible collaborations, here's where they can be found: ______________________.   Available to take tracks and try to add synthy stuff for other genres, too."

[Peter C]

Yes, I'm a bit nervous of Bandlab - there seems to be lots of youf out there. Here seems a safe place.

[Tim Smith]

3 hours ago, Mr. Torture said:

Drivers all up to date, everything optimized. I bought this computer from PC audio labs, specifically built for recording. It’s never been the same since the upgrade to windows 10.

Mr Torture If all the other bases are covered, it must be the black cloud thing. Can't do much better than RME, even their old stuff.

Have you ever loaded anything else on it that could be interfering? Just a thought.

- freezing tracks

-manually setting a lower latency if possible

-turning off FX while recording. Cakewalk has a master button for it

-If cpu is coughing due to too many tracks and you used busses, copy buss outputs only to new project for recording purposes.

-freeze computer at sub zero temps for 24 hours ( sorry I was kidding about that one) I couldn't help myself.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Tim Smith

[markno999]

Mr. T.,

If you want to breathe new life into an older computer your best investment is an SSD drive.   Samsung EVO 870 is a good choice and they are not super expensive (about $100)    Makes a huge difference, more so than RAM or other upgrades.   This is assuming everything else is working properly and you don't have any problems lingering from your Windows 10 upgrade.

Regards

[Bapu]

9 hours ago, Mr. Torture said:

It’s never been the same since the upgrade to windows 10.

Womp! There it is.

Have you tried a fresh install of Win 10 and reinstall all your apps? As suggested, do it on a 1tb SSD for your c;\ drive.

 

[Mr. Torture]

I cannot run lower than 256 on the buffers, I have 2 audio tracks going (nothing recorded) just out of my Kemper into the soundcard and one instance of superior drummer. If I try to lower buffers it’s sounds like a bag of angry bee’s when I strum a chord. It’s frustrating, especially when with windows 7 I could run buffers down to 64, have multiple tracks and instance of superior.

the windows 10 was the auto upgrade through Microsoft, is it possible to go there and redo it?

[Tim Smith]

That sounds more like an i6 chip. Maybe a 51/2.

Computer viagra? 

*seriously*  If I had another interface I might try that. The Kemper doesn't have a usb out for computers?

 

[Michael Fogarty]

its not a windows 10 issue.  Maybe you have to reset things. Go to edit configurations and choose default settings, make sure your onboard soundcard is shut off. (I am assuming you are using an external interface.) Maybe run the audio tweaks for pro audio as windows 10 probably resorted to defaults.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/unofficial-windows-10-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide-part-1/

Edited April 30, 2022 by Michael Fogarty

[Mr. Torture]

Intel core i7-3770k is my processor.

I have experienced a couple blue screen as well. This occurred when I simply left the computer idle with an open session when I went to go do something else. I just shut the computer off and back on again.

the computer came with 16 gigs of ram, upgradable to 32 max. Years after I purchased, once prices came down, I bought 32 gigs (4x8 strips) the computer was still running windows 7 at the time and I had a few issues after that upgrade. I’m really suspecting the Ram, although I ran that ram windows diagnostics and it came back ok.

regardless, for just over a $100 I am going to replace the ram and see if that changes things.

 

 

[craigb]

Just checked with Alan Parsons and he says RAM is important! ?