Digital Performer, How can I stop the jitters? Options

[egbdf]

Hello,

I'm new here and would like some advice with Digital Performer. I have a Power Mac G4, 667 with 768 Megs of ram. I am using the latest version of Performer (3.1). I've tried my best to use only the extentions that are necessary to run the program, have given Performer lots of memory to use but I am getting lots of jerkiness, stuttering and dropping out especially when I try to record a midi part while having oher midi and sudio tracks playing. On one particular project I have maybe 4 stero and 6 mono audio tracks going along with about 5 or 6 midi tracks. I have NI's B4 running in the background and linked to Performer so I can enter a part for it on a midi track. Occasionally Performer just stops for an instance and then continues. The wiper sticks and jumps and the playback stutters and jerks. How can I optimize Performer to run smoothly in this situation or is my setup just not up to the task.

Thanks in advance,

Pat

[deleted]

The info I am getting from this board is excellent! I have a SCSI card in my G4 667 but I have a scanner hooked to it - and it's not an "accelerated' SCSI card.

Well, this board is made for that: helping each other, freely, happily, etc. :-)
What's your SCSI card's properties? Maybe you could use it with an external SCSI hard-drive too, a fast one, preferably. So much comfort.

and I have increased the audio buffer to 1024 - this seems to have made an improvement (I do notice a little latency when I "play" into a track with this setting (and when the midi tracks play back the timing is not as "tight" as I'd like it to be).  Is the solution here to just advance the midi tracks a bit?

Once again, as Levon pointed out (damned, he's fast!), just try to decrease this setting to 512, at least, and set your MIDI/Audio delay with the sample project coming with the DP install disk (VERY important setting!). Then, you're done ;-)
BTW, this has nothing to do with monitoring through a mixing board (avoiding any latency side effects, with a plugin or not).

Also, what are your feelings about an external firewire drive (of at least 7200 rpms)

The faster, the better, IMHO... SCSI first (no CPU usage), if you can afford it, then Fast-IDE (different partition from the system, or even better, another IDE bus (ie n2)). Then Firewire, in last resort (ie, you're using a powerbook).
I'm using a 120Go "Ice" Firewire hard drive right now, no problems so far, but there's always a doubt, i don't know why (newfound? superstition?).

Sorry for the lack of vocabulary, and possible misunderstoods.

Bye.