Different problem with Presonus Capture

AustrianJohn

Having found a solution to my PC not talking to my mixer at all, I have successfully recorded many tracks, but I've now hit an intermittent problem.

During a practice session I was recording two acoustic guitars and two vocals plugged into a Presonus AR16 USB mixer, attached to my Acer Aspire E1-771 laptop, using Presonus Capture software. The first three tracks we worked on recorded successfully. The last three tracks recorded, but had significant sections of stuttering during the recording. An error message flashed on screen but as I was busy playing and singing I didn't notice the detail - but it was complaining about the disk.

Testing since that session has not repeated the problem. According to the task manager the disk uses about 2.4 MB/s during recording, and up to 5 MB/s on playback. Sequential write speed in the winsat test 82.57 MB/s, so there's lots of headroom there.

My guess is that something ran in the background (e.g. Superfetch or iDrive backup).

Is this type of problem common in recording? What can I do to avoid it in the future? Is a Mac significantly better than a PC for audio work?

spark240

Im using a Mac mini, and I have used Capture & Studio One quite a bit, never had any drop out issues.

My pal uses a PC and has endless reboots etc....Ive no idea if Mac is better than PC but just saying. 

wave100

There's a few things that can cause those types of issues on PC laptops - are you on Win 10? There are tutorials on the web about optimising PCs for music (I believe there is one on the Focusrite site, which I haven't seen, and videos on t'tube by Robin Vincent from Molten Music, which I have)
Could range from thermal throttling kicking in to some rogue driver - network drivers are notorious. There is also a thing called DPC Latency which can cause dropouts, Robin Vincent explains it well in one of his videos.
I would also definitely disable any tasks running in the background while recording.

Are Macs better for music? I use both and I must confess I got a second hand Macbook Pro as a music laptop to avoid all of the above, it has been very reliable so far. But it's like comparing a 10 grand car to a 30 grand car - of course it's going to be better. And Macs aren't without their frustrations too.

AustrianJohn

Thanks @wave100 I've gone through Robin Vincent's video now. I had done some, but not all, of his recommendations before. I'll see how it goes. I like your car analogy.