The Song Fight Bulletin Board

LONG STORY:
I was recording today, one sequenced drum track, two keyboard tracks, two lead guitar tracks, about 2 or 3 plug-ins running on each one, and as I was going to lay down the rythym guitar track, the sound starts skipping rediculously and Windows tells me there was an error with the program.

I've had this happen before, so I shut my computer down, let it rest for it a bit, and restarted it. Same thing. I check the CPU usage and playing all 5 of these tracks at the same time with 2-3 plug-ins on each one is using 70-90% of my system resources at any given moment. The thing that boggles me is, my computer was built for recording. I even went ahead and took all those 50-90 MB .wav tracks and made them into 4-6 MB 320kbps .mp3 tracks and still had the same problem.

SHORT STORY:
Even though I run a high-end system, playing 5 tracks with 2-3 plug-ins on each one is eating about 85% of my system's resoruces and shuts the program down.

COMPUTER SPECS:
My hardrive is 120 gigs, not even 10% full, and runs at 7,200 RPM. My processor is 2.1 GhZ. I use Cool Edit Pro 2 to record.

What do you think is causing the problem? I'd really love to be able to afford a nice external hardrive but I just shelled out $200 for a new condesor mic.

Any advice?

While that does sound kind of crazy high for CPU usage, I'll just ask this for the sake of being thorough: What plugins are you using?

Also, have you checked for viruses/spyware?

I'm clean in terms of virus/spyware, and the plug-ins I'm using:

On track 1 (drums):
No plug-ins yet

On tracks 2/3 (keyboards):
Compression
Distortion
Graphic EQ

On tracks 4/5 (guitar):
Compression
Distortion
Graphic EQ
Reverb

All of these are plug-ins that are bundled with Cool Edit.

what kind of audio card do you have? I've experienced similar conditions when I've gut my buffer size set too low. In the ASIO settings for the card you should be able to adjust this....for tracking, I like to have it around 256 or lower, but for mixing with lots of processing required, generally I run about 512.

Worth checking out....also, make sure you have the most recent drivers installed for your card.

Hope you find the problem soon!

Are your case fans spinning? Is your CPU overheating?

I think that might be my problem. I don't think my case fan is working at all. I went ahead and just took the tracks and seperately EQed/edited them and brought them together for the mix-down. I'll have to make due with what I have for now, I suppose.

Thanks for the help!

I find that sometimes plugins don't play well together. try taking one off at a time and see if you CPU settles down. I had this problem for a long time until I realized I just shouldn't use some plug ins and not use some of them together.

Ken