I have a music recording on a laptop question. Can anyone help?

Question

Why does the audio keep stuttering when recording on a laptop with a firewire interface&external hard drive?
Already tried setting the latency.
Anything else anyone can think of will be a big help!

Info on what I am using:
AMD 64 athlon

All programs closed

Cubase LE
Prosonus Firebox

Answer 1

There's a whole host of issues that can affect the performance of your system. Check the help in cubase under "performance" or other keywords. They should be able to give you many pointers on how to make your system work ideally. I would be wary of installing the software on an external hard drive because no matter how fast your interface is, it will never be faster than the bus on your motherboard, so you want to use the onboard hard drive for using the program. (the program uses the hard drive while running to cache data which can affect performance)...other possibilities include a fragmented hard drive (need to do a defrag...right click c:->properties->tools)...not enough memory...too many background processes running...computer virus hogging resources, or virus scanner hogging resources...in your windows taskbar (lower right hand of screen where the time is) there should not be more than a few icons there...all those programs are running in the background and are hogging processor time...on my system I have become familiar with every process that runs so I can know exactly what is and isn't important...the ones that aren't get killed before I record. Also, cubase should have more options than just "latency" to improve performance such as number of buffers and buffer size/depth...sonar has a bunch of differnt things to muck with...

Answer 2

First, if you are watching for a "well satisfactory pc" you will have to anticipate to spend slightly greater than $1500. A top satisfactory pc will price among $2000-2500 relying at the manufacturer. Go for your neighborhood electronics retailer (Best Buy, Circuit City, and so on) and ask the authorities. Most of 'em are sincere and inclined to support you get the great deal feasible. They may also advise a few program and different components you could want. Good good fortune.