Cakewalk dropouts with Gigasampler

[Magpel]

Hi folks,
All was smooth sailing with my new system until I got the gigasampler. On a current project in its early stages, I\'m getting CWPA dropouts while trying to record a mere 4th audio track playing alongside about six gigasampler midi tracks and 4 other midi tracks. Sometimes I get an \"Unable to Save entire recording. Audio disk may be full\" message. When Using Cakewalk without gigasampler, I\'ve done 20+ audio tracks with 12+ realtime effects with no problems.
I\'ve defragged the drive (from within the gigasampler\'s disk manager). I\'ve cleaned up the hard drive, and the problem continues. I\'m looking to invest in quality gigsampler libraries and make it my main sound source, but if this is the perfromance I can expect, that\'s a scary proposition. To make it work, I\'ll have to record the gigasampler tracks to audio, archive the midi tracks, record new audio, then unarchive the midi tracks to keep editing them. Very cumbersome process. Hoping I might get some insight here. My system is:

PIII 600
256 MB RAM
Maxtor 20 GB 7200 (ata/66 but no mobo support for it)
MAudio Delta 1010

I need to get a second drive for space reasons if nothing else. Will that likely help gigsampler performance in Cakewalk? Should I store the giga files on the dedicated audio drive or on a separate drive from the Cakewalk wavedata folder? All ideas welcomed and appreciated in advance,
John Burdick

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[Chadwick]

Hey John,
Have a look around this forum and the one at Sonic Control, there\'s a fair bit of info about trying to run Gigasampler and sequencers.
#1. \'Those who know\' usually suggest keeping your applications - like windows, gigasampler.exe and cakewalk.exe on a completely separate drive to the drive where your audio is.
#2. The Gigasampler \'midi\' tracks you refer to are actually streaming audio in a similar fashion to your cakewalk audio tracks - only with much faster response. If you ARE running six sequencer tracks for the gigasampler each with, say, three note stereo chords, then that adds up to the equivalent of 6x3x2 (36!) mono tracks which are starting and stopping every time your midi notes start and stop. Seems like a lot of punishment for a system, but the Giga will do it under the right circumstances apparently.
#3. \'Those who know\' also suggest three drives for your situation - One for the apps, One for the Giga files and One for the Cakewalk audio. In the end if you can get audio sequencer tracks and giga tracks on the same pc, your laughing if it only costs you the price of a $200 drive.

Again, don\'t take my word for it, look at some of the older forum posts and see if you can work it from there.

Good luck mate
Please share your results with us - I\'m sure there\'s lots of guys who want to do exactly what you are doing.

[hurchalla]

Getting that second drive should likely solve your problems, but make sure you keep your cakewalk audio files on one drive and the gigasampler instruments on the other drive. It\'s not a space issue, but a matter of having twice the data transfer rate of a single drive, because both drives are running at the same time. Gigasampler would be streaming from one drive and cakewalk from the other. But for this to work, you have to put the drives on seperate IDE cables. If you don\'t, the drives will take turns transferring on the single cable. I don\'t think a third drive for windows and apps will help much performance wise, but then, if you\'ve money to spend it doesn\'t hurt and it\'s a clean way to do things. I made a fairly lengthy post about drives a few days ago in the hardware posting area if you want to check that out. Best wishes-
Jeff