professionalish recording questions

[Fujiwara Takumi]

Hey,

I have a friend running cubase on a newer PC. It is running a Presonus FP10 FKA Firepod soundcard, which is some sort of external soundcard plugged in via firewire. He says he can get it to record at the 44 hertz but when he ups it to a preferred 96 the system will record for about 30 seconds and then quit, (digital audio stops piping to the PC). Apparently he can only achieve 24 bit quality at the 96,000 rate which is why he is attempting to. My friend is fairly certain it is a fault of the software, not the digital audio soundcard.

I don't get the impression that many people are in an environment like this or even those that are won't be attempting to record at this quality, but any help is appreciated.

He has tried to gain help through cubase and/or presonus but they've been pretty much unhelpful (in his own words Indian and uninterested). Hardware forums related to the specific equipment are bent more at an artist pitch and are as such not very technically helpful.

2.6ghz PC (Intel quadcore), 4 gig of memory, XP pro, SATA hard drives (250 gig)

 

[phide]

Could be an issue with the Firepod's ASIO drivers. An issue with the ASIO configuration probably wouldn't result in dropouts after thirty seconds, but shoddy drivers might be to blame. It could also be an issue with whatever controller his Firewire port is using as well -- is the FW port on the motherboard or on a dedicated card with its own controller? I generally recommend using a separate card for audio interfaces, Firewire especially.

Probably the best thing to do would be to find out what Presonus's recommended Firewire controller is and give it a try. If Presonus has no recommendation, then your friend is probably best off not buying any more of their gear, to put it bluntly. They should be able to furnish at least a short list of tested/approved controllers, and if they can't (or won't), they suck

Is your friend recording to the same drive Cubase is installed on or the boot drive, by chance? For a number of reasons, recording to a different drive is recommended, especially at high bit depths and sample rates. Some DAWs don't even allow you to record to the boot drive, though I don't know if Cubase is one of them. This might explain why 16/44.1kHz works but 24/96kHz does not.

Your friend's wise to want to record at 24 bits per sample, by the way.

 

[Fujiwara Takumi]

dedicated card with no other hardware on it.

i believe this is the second firewire interface he purchased as the other one was real junk.

recording to the same drive and OS drive i believe, yes. the second drive he has for backup only, i was wondering if it may be a bandwidth to storage issue, and if striped raid might mitigate that? I can suggest using the other drive as primary audio storage.

that said, how do you get the thing to record to the secondary drive?

 

[phide]

I'm not really familiar with Cubase, but if it's at all like Nuendo (which is more or less is), audio will be recorded to a subdirectory in the session's folder. In other words, if he creates a session in some location on drive X, audio will be recorded to drive X. Keep other applications from accessing that drive, which includes Windows drive indexing, and odds are 24/96 will work just fine unless he's using a shoddy Firewire card or if the ASIO drivers are trash.

EDIT: I think Cubase refers to sessions as "projects".

 

[Deleted member 176933]

The people @ cubase.net would be helpful (as long as you are a legit user). I would think it's more an issue with the firepod drivers as well... not cubase. There is a great community for "Music compuers" @ www.gearslutz.com. I have no experience w/ the firepod...but I'm sure someone there does.

Be warned...they bite.

 

[Fujiwara Takumi]

he had a lot of problems with the community as i inferred above, that's why I came here because you guys answer horrid questions generally very politely.

That said, good news. He put cubase and all the hardware drivers on the secondary HDD, leaving the OS to mangle the first and he said it is working completely flawlessly now at the higher rates. Thanks for all your help!