PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums RealBand RB keeps crashing out during solos/fills creation

Little bit of a rant .....

Yesterday I was working on a cover of Alan Jackson's The Older I Get and I started generating the solos and fills. At about every 3rd Realtrack generation for a section RB just crashed out. Had to start saving after every successful generation as I could not predict whether RB will play along with the next step.

This is the first time that I had such a bad experience with it.

Took me most of the day to finish a song that would normally take me about 2 hours!

Windows 8.1
Windows Audio Driver
DELL Pentium 3558U " 1.70GHz
8GB RAM
x64 Windows/Processor

Any new plugins in play?

Just wonderin, as a few times I have traced weird behavior back to that.
Judging by your specific issue the next thing I would suspect is your Temp Audio Directory location/space/settings.

Temp Audio Directory is in Prefs - Audio.

Associated with rharv's thoughts; have you defragged your hard drive lately? If you're using a solid state drive (SSD) instead of a hard drive you need to use the TRIM command as defrag is a hard drive utility.

Hi



You may like to read my post here on SSD problems

https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=539708#Post539708

Mike

NEVER defrag your multi track partition.

Hi John,
Could you share with us the reason not to do this?

If you're doing multitrack recording (bwf wtc) defrag will reduce the performance of playback as the data will write to the disk sequentiall (all files interleaved as the data comes in) but defragging will separate all the data so that the seeking is increased dramatically. Even for 'electronic' style projects, defragging your audio partition shouldn't be necessary, same with a sample library partition (as the samplelibs will tend to write contiguously during install.)

Overall though I try to keep a 'working' partition for audio and then move data off of that as projects are finished (to backups or backup partitions etc) for longterm storage & recall. This alone will keep your audio drive from being 'fragmented', and larger studios probably just format the working partition (or hot swap in a new drive) before starting a new project.

John is correct, especially concerning RB.

When you add tracks or edit a track the newly created data gets stored in the Temp Audio Directory.
Then RB plays as normal and jumps over to grab the new data from the Temp Directory as needed.

Once the song gets saved, the Temp data in use gets written to the main SEQ file.
This gets written in such a way that RB can simply read it start to finish linearly afterwards. (interleaved tracks etc). This is by design as it makes it easier on the machine (no disk thrashing type motions, smoother buffer, etc) and the program.

This is also why people who use the same drive for their Temp Audio Directory as they use for their OS and RB take a harder hit on performance and possible problems than those who use a second drive for the Temp Audio Directory. Especially as more and more edits get done and more and more tracks get added.

Save often.
It not only cleans things up but does help with performance.
The thing to remember is saving wipes out the current undo options .. so you have to consider that also .. but saving also creates a backup of the previous file, so you can always get back to that previous version at worst.

Personally OS is on C:, as is RB
The SEQ files are on E: or G: and F: is my Temp Audio Directory.

One drive handles the program
One drive handles the disk read operations for the SEQ file
One drive handles the disk write operations (for Temp Audio) and the Temp Audio playback.

Once saved, the interweaved file is all on the Read disk again (E: or G: in my case). And the Temp Audio drive gets a fresh start.
Granted it may be overkill for most users, but we record multiple tracks simultaneously all the time (usually 8, sometimes 16 at a time).
For us this setup has helped with stability/performance.
So I thought I'd mention one tip I always try to use; separate drives.

When I find this option in other DAWs I'll do much the same thing by the way. Just seems to make sense. If they let me select the Temp Audio Directory I think it through and keep it separate if possible.

I don't think the Temp Audio directory is actually 'cleaned up' of the chunks of data until you close out of RB. They just aren't used anymore once the song is saved. They get deleted when RB is closed.
I wonder if this is one reason some people swear by restarting RB every hour.
With the setup above we do 2-3 hour sessions of multitrack recording regularly (at least twice a week) and don't have many issues.

If you are crashing often, open your Temp Audio Directory in Windows File Explorer and see what kind of audio files are there.

Many moons ago before I new about defrag and interleaving this tool got me out of the woods never to defrag again.
AnalogX Interleaver.

Audio Temp Directory
C:\Users\HENRY_~1\AppData\Local\Temp\

500GB hard drive - 130GB Free

5% fragmented - left it there

Some more strangeness..
Song is 4.11 Minutes long.
Laid down the vocals yesterday. Recorded fine to just past 60% then started stuttering.
Ended up recording the song in two halves

Hmm
You are a bit close to the edge there, may well pay to defrag and gain that 5%.
its a bit tight if you are using a lot of temp audio and buffers etc.
just my thoughts
Mike

I've read for years to NEVER defrag SSD's.

As for the problems, I would start with your system, run Disc Cleanup, clear temp files, the recycle bin, all that kind of thing. Then run an A/V scan plus Malwarebytes. You can also check your system performance by running Geekbench and give us the score. Your CPU is a 6 year old dual core, kind of lower end but it should be good enough if the system is clean. If you haven't reinstalled or done a Windows repair in all that time you may need to do that. Windows is notorious for clogging up over that many years and many times you can't do anything about it other than do a fresh install. Many people do that routinely every year or two until they retire the machine.

Secondly, you list the Windows audio driver but you also list an M Audio Fast Track interface. Are you using the M Audio, does it have a native ASIO driver and are you using it? If so, what buffer settings?

Bob

M-Audio interface and Windows Audio driver may indeed be part of the issue ..
Good catch