[ardour-users] auditioning groups of tracks at once & disk tooslow

[Urbansound]

The disk system on your computer
was not able to keep up with Ardour.

Specifically, it failed to read data from disk
quickly enough to keep up with playback.
> ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
> http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org

I have seen this before on a differnt software some years ago.  The problem 
I had was I was using an older 366 mghz machine and the drive was equally as 
old.

The solution in that instance was ...

1) defrags to make sure that I was always writing to contigious blocks on 
the disk,
2) I reformated the disk to have, (I think), less sectors, or more bytes per 
fewer sectors, reducing the number of seeks and settle times
3) Record and playback data were targeted toward the outer-most diameter of 
the drive for faster rotational speed.

Obviously pushing the envelope in those years.  Machines today should have 
no problem up to a limit of reasonable, where the poster seemed to suggest 
70 tracks, which seems excessive.  I once had 28 tracks.   Paying attention 
to contigeous data on the disk, is likely the most important of these and 
assures the least number of errant re-reads on the drive, if the envelope 
has to use all four corners.

Mike