guatamaham

Live/tracktion Cpu Utilization Weirdness

ok. so I was running a virus scan on my disk after a reboot (just a normal procedure for me since I seldom reboot anyway :-)) and I'd just downloaded the Reaktor demo so I wanted to check it out. I threw in some sequence clips and started throwing in Reaktor instances. I know it's heavy on the CPU so to my surprise, I could get 4 instances of Reaktor to run. BUT when I turned the virus scan off, the CPU meter in Live shot up to 120% and audio started to crackle like hell. then I could only get two instances to run before audio crackled from CPU overload.

I tried the same thing in Tracktion, which is a new "baby" sequencer costing 1/5 of what Live does; it could run 6 instances of Reaktor with room to spare (which should go to show you that Live 4 could use a little fine-tuning in the efficiency department). but when I turned Virex off, it did the same as Live - CPU overload and I had to delete two Reaktors to get it to run right.

I did more tests including using different VSTi's in each program and running a Live set where everything was bounced to audio clips and only a couple effects (no instruments) were being run. they all exhibited the same behaviour.

anyone know what gives? is this a Mac thing only (I'm running a 1.33Ghz Pbook w/1.25GB of RAM under OS X)? should I just scan my disk every time I run Live now? is there some Mac optimization that I should be doing that would account for this weirdness?

thanks in advance!

Emagic 6|2m Recording Level/noise Help

I'm kind of new to the world of computer recording and using a decent interface (i.e. not my 1/8" audio input!). I like the emagic 6|2m I'm using so far. but I seem to have some issues with extra noise and getting levels set correctly. can anyone out there that has this card give me some pointers on how to set up the levels in audio/midi setup? all that I'm doing now is setting the input levels (of the instruments I'm recording) so that they're close to 0, but not clipping. that provides a good level with nice headroom, but there's also a bit of static there that I always seem to have to filter out.

thanks in advance!
Joe