Suggestions for Win7 Tweaks: ProTools 10 recording computer

[troggg]

Avid Windows Guide - Windows 7 Optimizations and Troubleshooting is at:

Windows Guide - Windows 7 Optimizations and Troubleshooting.

I'm doing it in the next few days, I'll let you know.

btw, I believe you want the SIIG Firewire 400 card, not the Firewire 800 card -- that could give you a lot of problems. I also went the Mackie Onyx i route, but I got the Blackbird rack. I'm pretty darned sure Firewire 400 is the way to go.

I'm not sure what's driving your decision to use RAID over two Raptor drives; you should check if PT10 plays nice with RAID, it might not. Ideally, you want three hard drives, for Operating System, Audio, and Samples. That would probably give you a far smoother user experience than essentially one drive and an eSATA backup.

There is no need for higher-priced Vengeance RAM unless you play games, too; you would be better off with 16 GB regular Corsair XMS RAM than 8 GB of high speed gamer RAM PT10 doesn't even like.

Basically, from what I can gather -- all my stuff has just arrived or is just arriving today or tomorrow -- PT10 on the Windows 7 side values safety and data integrity over pure speed. It can't always take advantage of latest/greatest CPUs, hard drives [particularly if they're SSDs, though some use these successfully, it's hit or miss], or RAM -- and it really doesn't like overclocking of CPUs video cards, or RAM [although someone will chime in that they do it successfully; however, I can guarantee they didn't just switch to Windows from Mac].

Good luck with it!

[Colonel Monk]

Originally Posted by troggg

Avid Windows Guide - Windows 7 Optimizations and Troubleshooting is at:

Windows Guide - Windows 7 Optimizations and Troubleshooting.

I'm doing it in the next few days, I'll let you know.

btw, I believe you want the SIIG Firewire 400 card, not the Firewire 800 card -- that could give you a lot of problems. I also went the Mackie Onyx i route, but I got the Blackbird rack. I'm pretty darned sure Firewire 400 is the way to go.

I'm not sure what's driving your decision to use RAID over two Raptor drives; you should check if PT10 plays nice with RAID, it might not. Ideally, you want three hard drives, for Operating System, Audio, and Samples. That would probably give you a far smoother user experience than essentially one drive and an eSATA backup.

There is no need for higher-priced Vengeance RAM unless you play games, too; you would be better off with 16 GB regular Corsair XMS RAM than 8 GB of high speed gamer RAM PT10 doesn't even like.

Basically, from what I can gather -- all my stuff has just arrived or is just arriving today or tomorrow -- PT10 on the Windows 7 side values safety and data integrity over pure speed. It can't always take advantage of latest/greatest CPUs, hard drives [particularly if they're SSDs, though some use these successfully, it's hit or miss], or RAM -- and it really doesn't like overclocking of CPUs video cards, or RAM [although someone will chime in that they do it successfully; however, I can guarantee they didn't just switch to Windows from Mac].

Good luck with it!

Thanks, I will check that out - I think I have looked at it before, but with all things Digi and ProTools there's alot of caveats and what ifs...

Interesting, I was at first specifically looking for a FW card with Oxford chipset, as Protools harps long and hard about having your drive connected to one - but we are not going to be using FW for the audio drive. Just the connectivity to the Mackie.

The SIIG card also has FW 400 on it - and in another forum (or maybe this one) it was said that the Mackie seems to prefer the Texas Instruments chipsets... I guess we will find out, haven't done much FW with windows myself..

A clarification - the RAID drive will ONLY be used for operating system, and I'm not using it in a configuration for speed - rather it's a RAID mirror for reliability... Can't see that being of much import for ProTools, but you never know I guess...

The glyph drive will be the audio drive via eSATA and won't be used for backups.. The old drive 500GB drive I have will be for storage of system images in case there's issues.... As soon as I figure out how to use ghost from my USB key I'll make some images..

What else.... We have been talking about using a fast internal drive for the audio, but the Glyph is widely regarded as one of "the" drives to use with ProTools and we already had it when I built this box.

On the RAM, well, huh.... I have to say I'm surprised to hear that PT would be so finicky... Really, I didn't specifically target that pair, it just happened to be what they had at Fry's - I like heat spreaders. Don't have a plan to overclock, I want a stable machine. So far, the motherboard has set the speed of the RAM to 1333 and so I have decided to leave it there unless I have a reason not to.

Overall, since this box will primarily be for recording it seems it should be plenty powerful for that. Not sure how much production work it will see as long as our studio is in the rehearsal space and we're only there to rock.

Anyone have tips on the Mac vs PC drives?

One thought was to reformat the Glyph to NTFS and exclusively use it with this computer, and partner would need to copy the sessions to a FW drive for production and mixing at home....

Thanks

[troggg]

You're taking your Mac past into PC land. While that may be comfortable for you in the short term, it may hold you back in the long run.

Macs make use of FW800 way more than PCs. You hardly see it at all in PC interfaces. If you really dig into it, you'll find that not too many PC DAWs or interfaces recommend using combo 400/800 cards. If anything they advise keeping away from them.

The eSATA drive for recording makes no sense in a desktop machine. PT10 will dummy down when it sees it. Once again, Glyph is a big presence in Mac land not often encountered in PC land.

It's your life, but if you're going PC you may as well go PC all the way. It will be less frustrating in the end.

[Colonel Monk]

Originally Posted by troggg

You're taking your Mac past into PC land. While that may be comfortable for you in the short term, it may hold you back in the long run.

Macs make use of FW800 way more than PCs. You hardly see it at all in PC interfaces. If you really dig into it, you'll find that not too many PC DAWs or interfaces recommend using combo 400/800 cards. If anything they advise keeping away from them.

The eSATA drive for recording makes no sense in a desktop machine. PT10 will dummy down when it sees it. Once again, Glyph is a big presence in Mac land not often encountered in PC land.

It's your life, but if you're going PC you may as well go PC all the way. It will be less frustrating in the end.

Interesting....

I actually don't have a Mac past - while we've used them for recording I'm not the operator. I haven't used anything but a PC since the late 80's at the college computer lab....

I'm aware that FW doesn't have a presence in the PC world - every device I own is USB. But for some reason the audio world insists on developing a good portion of the hardware with FW in mind...

OK, so sounds like I should return the SIIG FW 800 Card that I bought. I didn't know it would be an issue. The mobo does have a FW 400 interface on it, perhaps in the short run it'll work till I can return the card I have for another.

As far as the Glyph drive - I'd agree with you, but we already have it and as we're already over budget we wanted to try it out. I guess what makes sense about it is that: 1) we already have it AND 2) the eSATA interface is built into it, and is faster than FireWire by a factor of 2, so it seems from a purely technical point of view it seems it oughta outperform using a FW drive whether on a Mac OR a PC.

What I'm finding from the two replies to this thread, is that ProTools is a fickle bitch and "doesn't like" alot of hardware that in my mind just shouldn't matter.

My background with computers is that I'm an engineer, and I use CAD tools like ProE and SolidWorks that are VERY computer intensive, and aside of video cards they run on just about anything. My work computer is a 12 core processor with 16gb RAM, I don't know more than that because I don't own it, but a workhorse for sure. We use 10K rpm drives to speed saving.

So, as far as the drive goes, we will see how it works I guess and if necessary will buy an internal recording drive. That has made the most sense to me all along, but we were trying to make due until we have a chance to see it doesn't work.

Thanks for the replies, I have looked over the tweaks for PT10 in Windoze and they are numerous. Hopefully it goes smooth-ish.

C. Monk

Originally Posted by Colonel Monk

OK, so I guess the heart of the question, is what tweaks should make to Windows 7 Home Premium 64 to best support the recording function?

Here you go:
XPfree - Free information for Windows XP/Vista/Win7

There's also a DAW partitioning guide there.

[Colonel Monk]

Originally Posted by soulstudios

Here you go:
XPfree - Free information for Windows XP/Vista/Win7

There's also a DAW partitioning guide there.

Thanks alot - some good info there - I think the first thing I'll do is try to remove WMP that effing P.O.S......

Hows the weather there in NZ? Here in Santa Cruz California winter has yet to show itself - dry as a bone, and tons of sun..

CM

[troggg]

PT is a "fickle bitch" not to break your balls, but to insure that once you resolve compatibility issues you will have a stable, accurate recording experience for the long haul.

That's the theory, anyway!

My PT10 is threatening to arrive this AM even though there's two feet of snow on the ground and it was just shipped yesterday -- my buddy has an upgraded Amazon account so it was only $3.99 for one day shipping.

I'm on pins and needles to see if the fickle bitch accepts my Gigabyte passive 6770 video card and all the other components I've sweated over for way too long.

Alas, although we'd like to think that all our obsessing gets us somewhere down the road to recording our dream grooves, the reality is, once we decide what components to get, sweat to put them together, and train them to record, we're only at the starting line, not somewhere down the road . . .

[Bob Olhsson]

I set processor scheduling to background services.

I turn off automatic de-fragmentation.

I set the high performance power plan to not allow the computer drives or USB ports to ever sleep and just the monitors to sleep after an hour.

The only anti-virus software I run is Microsoft Security Essentials with it set to ignore every program folder that contains anything related to audio and every file type related to Pro Tools.

Finally I put a check in the compatibility preferences boxes for Pro Tools to "run this program as an administrator " and "disable desktop composition."

I haven't found any other tweaks to improve performance. With W7 its a good idea to keep video drivers up to date and I've had no problems with any Microsoft security or performance update.

[Colonel Monk]

Howdy Everyone:

An update on this new computer...

I've still got to implement some of the suggestions here, but needed ProTools 10 before we could install it. It did not show up last week on time so we just got to it last night.

I'm happy to report that we were able to make our first test recordings with the new computer, Onyx 1640i, and ProTools in just a few hours thanks to the info here on GS!

Biggest Issue so far? The iLok....

Had very strange problems with the Client Helper wanting to install drivers when drivers were already there, and some errors trying to add register the iLok via the internet.

It turns out, that PACE only supports Internet Explorer (uses Active X) which is OK but in Google Chrome, the only error we had was "Please Install Client Helper"..

After my partner had tried to install it to no avail, I sat down and it dawned on me that the browser was the problem.

New Mackie ASIO drivers seem OK, and PT recognized the Onyx very easily.

I think the biggest problems that others have encountered is adding an Onyx to the mix to an already established computer and having driver/device/buffer conflicts. I'm happy to report we have had none of these yet.

The FW 800 Card (SIIG FireWire 800 PCI 32T) has yet to give any real problems, though to install the LOUD ASIO drivers I had to revert to the "legacy" Microsuck FW drivers.... So it appears to be true that FW800 Cards/Drivers are not much good for Audio Devices...

Whether or not this will be an issue long term we won't know just yet - the test recording was only a few tracks, but tomorrow we will be doing 14 simultaneous at band rehearsal and I expect a few hiccups.

One other GEM that I was proud of, was finding a way to tether our iPhones without installing iTunes. I had read here that iTunes can mess with an audio computer - but our studio does not have internet access so I knew we had to figure something out.

We all have iPhones, and the computer has built-in Bluetooth, so I followed the instructions in this LINK and we were able to register PT10, add the license to the iLOK, download updates, etc etc and it worked really well. I'm just as happy to only have internet there on demand in order to maintain a clean machine.

Thanks again to all, I'll update again after tomorrow.

CM

PS While I do realize that our new Mackie isn't a really "nice" mixing desk, We found it very easy to get going, it has A LOT of flexible routing options and though I don't expect it to carry the character of a really nice analogue desk, I think it's a great step up from the 003 we were using. Having tactile control of levels and being able to create hardware monitoring solutions for recording (low latency) is going to be sweet as sugar. With that out of the way, can't wait to blow some coin on better mics and preamps in the months to come.