OT: PC Sound cards

[Kevan]

Need help from one of youz...

I've pulled my turntable to the stereo and slid in its place a Dell Dimension 2400 PC w/ an external WD Book HD. We have 12 hours of Chinese Opera loaded on the thing; we have so much music. Anyway...I'm getting some poor response from the pc (occasional hiccups and stammering) and wondering if boosting the sound card is my answer. This was a very basic LAN-based PC my wife used at her office and was given when the office did an upgrade. I upped the memory to 2gig, but the external HD is USB connected not firewired, cause there currently isn't the capacity on the back of the system unit to do it. This PC has only two basic tasks required of it: music and Internet and the Internet use is very infrequent, mainly because it plays havoc with iTunes when it's up and running. Am I expecting too much from the 2400 or will plunking 60 bucks worth of sound card, with HD firewire connection, fix things?

Let's get past the turntable suggestions. I gave the ol' Philips away long ago. It's gone and a replacement isn't coming back. 'sides...the vinyl went too.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions. The talent pool here is quite remarkable.

[Marcusaurelius]

I am not completely familiar with 2400, I think computers come with a very basic intergrated sound card which works okay. I upgraded my pc to creative labs soundcard and there was a dramatic improvement.

[xjoex]

The sound card should not be the cause of the problem. Are the 12 hours of opera all broken up in to 1 hour files? A file of that size can be a lot of work for an older PC.

Can you copy one of the files to the local (non usb) hard drive and see if the problem still happens?

-Joe

[Kevan]

but Beethoven certainly has some of the bigger files. Due to some mismanagement of the initial file placement, we did have our library residing on the internal HD and now that you mention it... there was less hiccuping back then. Hmm...

[dannyg1]

Kevan,

There are a number of things that you can do to set up your computer recording sound better and this isn't a subject for the impatient hobbyist. Some of the more important steps will impact your computers ability to do other things you probably lke to do, so first thing is to create a log-in profile specifically for recording. What you're trying to do is streamline your computers ability to process sound.

1: Unplug from the internet and shut off all networking services, firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spy and turn off any indexing services on the drives. Also turn off any device polling (IR devices, CD/DVD, IM, Email, Office extensions, etc). Eun as dumb a system as you can stand. Do this from the run command by entering 'msconfig' and manually killing as many services as you can run without in the 'start-up' tab. Required services are covered in many home recording web how-to's.

2: Right click on 'my computer' and work your way to the device manager. Get the 'properties' on your Primary and secondary IDE channels via the advanced tab in their respective 'prperties' reports. Be sure that they're running in UDMA on the primary an at least multiword DMA on the secondary. If they report 'PIO mode', delete the IDE crd and let the system reinstall it on reboot. Check again.

3: Defrag your drives. After that, run 'Internet eraser' and employ the command 'erase free space on drive C'. http://www.privacyeraser.com/

4: Right click a free space on your desktop and get to your video card controls. in the 'Advanced' tab, turn off hardware acceleration for the video card. Dumb your colors down to 16 and be sure all desktop animations, skins, mouse pointer doohickey stuff, anything like this is off. You'll need to edit your folder view preferences for best performance as well, turning of zoom-rects, mouse pointer shadows, folder actions, etc..

5: Try to get your 'C' drive to have at least 50% free space and set your sound recording program to cache and record to different physical drives.

Try recording now.

[csm]

12 hrs of Chinese opera?
what the heck do you do the other 12 hrs of each day?

[39cross]

The 2400 is a pretty old machine by now. It's not up to snuff by today's standards especially if it is using a Celeron cpu. I wouldn't put any money into it when you can buy a new PC for not much money, it will let you run iTunes and Internet stuff at the same time without breaking a sweat. however, you should be able to play your music on the 2400 until you buy a new PC for Christmas :) .

First, make sure the external drive is defragmented. I imagine it is a USB 2.0 device, but if not that is a problem, it will not move the data fast enough. Assuming the PC is running XP, make sure it has a least service pack 1, otherwise the USB 2.0 drivers may not be installed. If you have an AV program running you can try disabling it while you're playing music. If that doesn't help make sure no other programs are running.

[Dekonick]

Hmmm. A machine that old is ALMOST useless for recording... unless you have A LOT of time to waste. Machines are cheap now. AMD just introduced sub $100 quad core processors that work with DDR2 and DDR3 RAM and while they can't match Intel (think CAMPY) they do the job just fine (think SHIMANO). A complete build can be done for a couple of Benjamins... cheaper if you use Ubuntu for your OS... In a couple of months, Intel is releasing 6 core processors, and (soon?) 8 core not far behind. Prices will really come down...

What does this mean?

Recording is processor intensive... extremely intensive. The more your PC is doing, the more likely you are going to have issues - with an older setup. A new(er) system can be had for little cash, and will be able to handle just about anything you throw at it.

Check out Tiger Direct for complete systems a la cheap. www.tigerdirect.com

-or- you can minimize whats running on your system (as mentioned by others) and hope for the best.

Good luck!

[Kevan]

just a bit.

The intention of the PC is only to play music off of iTunes; I won't be doing any recording. I download off of CDs, but that is as close as I get to recording. I'm just a playuh.

Yeah, I know I was not using the best processor, but with what I thought was limited demand I was hoping it could make the stretch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed if I went with a FireWire infomation would flow more readily between the PC and HD. Also, I think the defrag idea is a very good idea.

Thanks guys...I'll look into all your suggestions, though my pc talents do have their limitations.

[benb]

I'd suggest the problem is software and not hardware.

A machine <10 years old should have no trouble recording a single stream off of a record player and producing audio files.

Even if it was 10+ years old it should be fine, you might just have to do Record -> uncompressed audio -> MP3 in two stages rather then 1.

IIRC my 75mhz 486 could do this, but could run into trouble, the 166mhz Pentium I replaced it with in 1997 never had a hiccup. My guess is your machine is at least 1ghz and has at least 4x the ram and much faster disks then either of those machines I just mentioned.

[39cross]

Yeah, I know I was not using the best processor, but with what I thought was limited demand I was hoping it could make the stretch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed if I went with a FireWire infomation would flow more readily between the PC and HD. Also, I think the defrag idea is a very good idea.Hi Kevan, I don't believe that using Firewire will solve the problem, USB 2.0 moves data plenty fast enough to play your music without stuttering - unless for some reason you are not getting USB 2.0 speeds. Playing music is not too demanding on the cpu, whatever is in there will work. Between all of our suggestions you have some no $ down ways to check things. If your external drive is USB 2.0 and your PC is at least xp sp1, it should work fine. Defrag the external hd first, then go from there.

[wildboar]

When was windows last wiped clean and reloaded? A slowish office machine with 3-5 year old windows load could have all kinds of strangeness going on and cause clicks, pops, stutters when it comes to the PCI bus trying to play music.