Drop-outs but I still have CPU and RAM left. Help?

^basically that.

I'm experiencing drop-outs on my instruments, in both SONAR and FL Studio 5. It appears that I'm not running out of CPU or RAM, which I thought would cause this. I even tried loading them in two instances of the vst plugin (NI Bandstand). Anyone have any advice? :(

Probably the fault is in your hard disk.

Check DFS settings (how much and how fast samples are taken from your hard disk).

What hard disk do you have? 7200 rpm? A laptop one maybe at 5400 rpm? SATA? ATA? etc...

I agree, check your hard disk. You also might want to check if either sonar or the plugin have limiters on the amount of cpu and ram they use. Some programs limit your your use of ram to 75% in an effort to keep audio from dropping out.

Sonar uses up a crap load of ram depending on how much audio you are running. I use it as well and I also get audio drop outs from time to time even with 2gb of ram and a quad core processor (I never run out of cpu anymore). Depending on what operating system you use up to half your ram might be used just to run it which might be why it seems like you still have ram and cpu to spare.

Lastly, it could be your sound card. Make sure your not pushing its limits by having Sonar or FL Studio 5 run a diagnostic for preferred settings. Anyway, it never hurts to upgrade ram. Its cheap, easy and solves a lot of problems.

^basically that.

I'm experiencing drop-outs on my instruments, in both SONAR and FL Studio 5. It appears that I'm not running out of CPU or RAM, which I thought would cause this. I even tried loading them in two instances of the vst plugin (NI Bandstand). Anyone have any advice? :(

FL is fine for me. I had Sonar and it had dropouts sometimes though. :(

I know my computer is not even close to being ideal for this stuff. It's laughable actually. :(

I did manage to upgrade to 1 GB RAM a while ago, but unfortunately it only clocks at somewhere around 870 MB. I've talked to some knowledgeable people, and they said it’s because of my video card (it's not a separate hardware like most...or something). It still has its original soundcard, which you can imagine is less than crap, because the comp w/ my SoundBlaster card crashed. I was going to switch the two but haven't done that yet, that is if it's still capable of running.

I've been kind of putting off upgrading this computer because my parents like to play ping-pong with my living situation. And also cause I'm getting my own, hopefully by January, though I just got "let go" from my job today. :dry:

K, I tried moving the DFD buffer size to 339 kB, and still am having the problem.

(P.S. You're going to have to walk me through pretty much any suggestion you make, because I suck at computers.)

I should also mention that it only seems to happen on my .mp3's that I export, for the most part.

Sorry for the double post, but this warrants a "bump".

Here is an example of what happens...

HERE

the guitar riff should play the whole way through but it doesn't.

So I listened to your example and it seems like the guitar drops out when you start to add more instruments. Even if they are midi instruments adding things like reverb and eq will eat up your computer's resources. I'm not sure if this is happening but if during the mix-down when you export as an mp3 song might be playing while at the same time condensing and coding as an mp3. Adding those processes eats up resources. You might want to export your audio as a 16bit wave file (24bit or higher might not be supported by your sound card which may be another reason you get drop outs during export).

Unless your video card is very old with less then 128mb of ram then I don't see any reason to upgrade it. I had the same problem you had before I upgraded my computer and you have to realize that Sonar is a very advanced program that requires close to studio standard specs to run smoothly. A good sound card will not only make recording better, but mixing and overall output of sound will sound better and run smoother. I will repeat what I said before, you need to upgrade your ram. To run programs like that you need to have a least 2x the recommended amount of ram. So if sonar recommends 1gb of ram you should have 2gb.

I hope this makes sense and helps to fix your problem.

yeah, thanks. :) I'll cut off all the reverb and stuff when exporting and just get an audio editor or something. This was made in FL5 by the way, and this is the first time it's happened. Maybe I'll just un install Sonar for the time being until I can upgrade, as long as I don't need it to run some of the plug-ins.

NEWS: I just discovered that it was indeed the reverb I was applying, which was Perfect Space. Looking back, it wasn't very smart of me to record it with that on when I should be adding that afterwards.