I doubt that it was caused by hookup to the PA Ed.

About the only thing that could happen bad when hooking up to PA would be the Ground Loop "buzz" situation and that will only affect overall sound quality with noise, it really can't make Audio "stutter".

A more likely cause of the stuttering to look at would be lack of resources. The hard drive and the amount of ram memory involved.

It may well be the case that you simply haven't run the laptop as long when at home at one run as when on a gig. You might try a shakedown run at home with no PA, putting the program through the exact same paces as if you were at the gig and see if the laptop can reliably get through more than one run like that.

Another possible cause can be background programs interrupting things, this is especially a possibility when using a softsynth for the MIDI output. Virus scanning programs are somewhat notorious here, when I gig live I turn the Virus scanning program OFF. I also turn off WiFi on the laptop, as many program updaters may be seeking to make a connection to "phone home" -- and these can often generate interrupts, especially so when there is no WiFi connect available, as would be typical on the gig.

Using XP, I created a second User with its own Hardware Profile for live gigs. This Hardware Profile starts up with WiFi disabled, Virus Scanner disabled, a few other things that aren't needed on the live gig. A simpler and safer Hardware Profile, selected at bootup, not only does it eliminate the above possibilities of interru[tions, it boots faster and is all about "just" using only BIAB for performance.

Since my laptop uses shared memory for the Video, I also went into the BIOS and limited the video down to only 16mb of ram usage. Plenty for using BIAB or another audio/midi program, but frees up the rest of the typical 128m allocation for use with the music programs instead. I found this to be especially useful if using the Forte DXi synth, which loads its samples into ram and doesn't seem to do a good job of clearing that ram as you load more and more songs. Installing more ram into the laptop helped a bit with this problem, moving from 512m to 1g physical ram made the biggest difference here, eventually upping the ram count to 2g I found that difference to be only slightly better in comparison.

Lastly, sometimes shutting off Video Acceleration slider sometimes helps with softsynth stuttering problems.

BTW -- use of a hardware synth like the Ketron SD2, not only sounds much better, but in my case it totally eliminates any stuttering problems with BIAB, Powertracks or Realband. I think that is because the hardware synth does not put as much load onto the host cpu.


--Mac

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