Silent pc (Re: [ardour-users] Session export ?

[gerard van dongen]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:51:50 -0800, Matthew Sewell  
<matthewsewell at ojai.net> wrote:


> OK.  I will change the file system back to ext3 then and watch for
> fragmentation.  Is there a good tool for that?  I've never defragged
> ext3 before and I was under the impression that it wasn't really an
> issue.

I don't know unfortunately, it seems to be less of an issue with linux  
file systems than with windows or mac.
So there is not a big effort being put into developing these tools.
Somebody was developing a tool to viualize the state of a disk.
But I forgot who and where :(

>
>>
>> 14 tracks  = 48000 * 4 * 14 = 2.6 mB/s, So raw speed is not a problem.
>> One of the latest fixes in ardour is that the drive buffering can be
>> adjusted in your .ardour/ardour.rc
>>
>>   <Option name="track-buffer-seconds" value="3.000000"/>
>>
> What value would you recommend?  Does it depend on the physical size of
> the buffer in my drive?  I have an 8 MB buffer.
>
>
There is probably some relation, but I am not sure what it is :)

Try and find out, upping it to 5.00000 seems to help a lot.

All of this is trying to hit a moving target at the moment. There were a  
lot of changes in the code lately that should have improved performance as  
well.
f.i. the peakfile writing can now be done to a different location I think.  
This was causing problems with longer recording sessions.

The main point is that standard pc hardware should be fast enough to  
handle your recording needs. But the hardware and software should be  
optimized a little for that. There are many parts to this and it will only  
go so fast as the slowest link in the chain. So the easiest thing for  
people with lots of money is to buy top of the line stuff and then their  
weakest link is not so slow because they made all their links bigger, even  
those that were fast enough to begin with.
But you can also adjust low budget stuff to do the same.
But that takes some time and experimenting. In my experience I have either  
time or money, seldom both :) and often neither.

G