[PlanetCCRMA] (Fwd) gak

[DA. Forsyth]

Well, last year i had trouble getting jack stable with no xruns, and 
eventually figured out a group of settings that worked.

This year I thought I'd upgrade a bit to facilitate recording, and added 
RAM (RAM now running dual channel mode DDR2) and a second harddrive (WD 
160gb SATA).
so what happens?   Sunday morning I do a quick 'record 8 channels' test 
and jack goes nuts with xruns.  check, no settings have changed.  fiddle 
around for a looong time before discovering that setting 'priority' to 50 
instead of 0 gets it working (why the change since last year).  right on!  
....  do a trial with software RAID between the 2 disks, (appears to) 
works ok, so lets go... lets go record the band

43 minutes into the recording and ardour stops due to a 'your disk cannot 
keep up' message (sadly is doesn't say which disk).  middle of a song of 
course.  did I mention that we really needed the recording to be one long 
piece so that it can be time aligned with the video tape easily?

ok, after that nothing worked right on that session so I started a new one 
(thanks for templates). even so I ended up stopping and restarting between 
songs, even having disk slow failures again as well.

but now.....
that software raid thing is BROKEN eh?   only works sometimes, in that 
after a restart of the session it may or may not actually use the raid 
setup.  also, for some tracks it did not write out a proper peak file, so 
I had no wave form display until 'something' triggers a peak rebuild.
I did try renaming one of the peak files and it rebuilt it.  is it safe to 
do this?

the big issue is that it 'decided' to keep adding regions to tracks 1 3 5 
7, using the same files (now 500+ megs each), while for tracks 2 4 6 8 it 
created a new file for each region.  what?  I wouldn't mind if it worked 
in the end, but while it did in fact record the audio, the regions are in 
the wrong place, so the only one that works is the first one, the rest 
repeat the first region from the big files, so while tracks 2 4 6 8 play 
song 2, 1 3 5 7 play song 1.  so now I have to time align all these 
things, and each song is different.  and I'm still getting 'your disk is 
too slow' during playback, now and then.  I think it is the big files.   
later today I'll try moving 2 of the big ones to the other drive so the 
big file load is shared.  what else can I do?  split the big files in 
Audacity and reimport them?

hardware
P4 3GHz with 1024MB RAM, SATA 80GB + SATA 160GB.
Delta 1010LT for audio, motherboard audio disabled.
FC5 + PlanetCCMA RT SMP kernel (SMP and nonSMP don't seem to make a 
diffence, since this a fake SMP processor.  yes, I should have got a Core 
2 Duo)
ardour 0.99.3

(yes planning to upgrade FC but since it was working for the last project 
I figured I'd leave it and upgrade to FC6 after this project,  
not wanting to chance a new install giving trouble.  sigh)

RT load shows around 10 to 14%.  latency is 87ms iirc.

PS: side issue.  last year I used 48000 sample rate.  this time I wanted 
to use 44100 since we're making a CD anyway and we don't use a lot of 
effects, being a live recording we get enough reverb from the room.  
however,  nothing i did convinced it to use 44100.  I used envy24control 
to set the hardware to 44100, then tell jack to use that rate (via 
qjackctl), start jack and the envy24 window immediately shows that it has 
gone back to 48000.  now, jack won't start because jack still wants 44100 
but the hardware is doing 48000.   I tried deleteing ~/.jackdrc but the 
hardware still went to 48000.   how does one actually change it?

we need to mix down tonight since some of the band members are going back 
to their home country soon, and writing exams now, so time is shrt.  and 
I'll be out of town Tuesday through Friday.....

any (quick) help would be appreciated....

--
David                       http://iwr.ru.ac.za/~iwdf/
If you receive email saying "Send this to everyone you know",
           PLEASE pretend you don't know me.