| Home recording and general music post from the archived Yabb Recording Website Message Board. Some of the info here may be outdated but many of the audio recording and home studio tips are still good. Note: The only tags I made and attempt to convert are italics, bold, center and underline. So if you see some gibberish surrounded by brackets, just ignore it.
Recording Website Archived Yabb board Post
Febuary 2001 Yabb Message Board Archive
Subject: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/04/01 at 13:19:02
Hi Tim- hope those 110hz traps are treating you well. I have been tracking to CEP, and very often I'm getting the error "performed an illegal operation; exit this program & restart CEP". At the risk of being vague, is there a common soultion, or is it probable that it's specific to my PC? I have no other programs running at the time. I'm editing 15 tracks with 128mb ram & 450mhz AMDK62 - 10gig HD which is 70% full & defragmented. I don't think I'm pushing the PC am I?
Thanks for any help.
Maury
BTW, try not to be rude to me, ok?;D
(sorry, Tim, I couldn't resist...the fact that anyone here could think you're rude is just plain funny).
Maury
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Tim_Z | 04/04/01 at 13:43:31
Hi Maury
As you know I don't do a lot of tracking on Daw, so I really haven't had much use with CEP, but I will say that I also occasionally get the same "performed and illegal operation" message. A few times it has really been a pain. I don't know the what or why about it, but it does continue to reafirm my desire to stay away from DAW use for multi-tracking. Did you also get the message that says you can continue from where you left off by sinply restarting CEP and clicking on continue? That is a nice feature, and at least means you don't lose what you were working on. Sorry I am not much help here. I know Silent Bob uses CEP, so maybe he has some further insight. You will certainly get more responses if you post at the Syntrillium page at the Audio Forums Forum.
Rregarding the 2L pop bottles, well in the very least they are a great conversation piece. You should see the look on musicians faces when they come in and see them. I have over 50 bottles stuck all over the walls using a hot wax glue gun. I am not sure yet how well they are working, but both Scott and I feel they have made some improvement. My gut feeling is that there is probably a better solution though. I let you know more as I get more familiar with them in the room, we just put them up on Sunday.
Good Luck Maury
Tim
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by eddie | 04/04/01 at 14:16:39
Yep, I have the same problem with the "ilegal operation" with CEP. I have 1.2a version. And from the 1.0 version they (CEP team) didn't fix that bug.
I have Intel Pentium III 633Mhz, and 128 MB rams.
Hard drive 15 GB on 7200Rpm...:D
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/04/01 at 14:48:33
Thanks Eddie & Tim - yeah, I guess if it's a bug in CEP I won't panic - nuthin I can do about it so why get worked up - I'll just keep tracking on my MD8 & transfer to CEP for mixing - that way if CEP throws a fit, we have backup. I was so embarrased last weekend - I got that error 6 times during a session where a band was paying me for my services & I wanted to crawl in a hole :P They were very understanding, though, and I deducted the down time from their bill so they liked that. I'll keep a close eye on it- thanks for the help! Have a great day,
Maury
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by jb | 04/04/01 at 14:51:59
you might also try going to Syntrilliums home page and
post on thier forum. Syntrillium employees respond to
questions/problems there.
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/04/01 at 14:57:48
Thanks JB!
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by JR#97 | 04/04/01 at 15:27:05
How many tracks were recording at once? I've noticed that if I turn the screen update off, that i cut down on some pc overhead. What speed is your HD? I used a 5400 and a 7200 rpm and the difference was night and day. Personally, I prefer tracking to either Vegas Pro or Samplitude. They seem to run more stable for tracking.
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/04/01 at 15:53:51
Thanks JR- actually I was only editing tracks that were already there. I wasn't tracking anything, just changing levels, pan, etc. I don't even know what speed my HD is- I'm looking into it- thanks,
Maury
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by JR#97 | 04/04/01 at 16:03:55
In that case, the problem is CEP's background mixing. I crash mine all the time if I don't let the green bar do it's thing and then wait for my HD to stop "clicking". There are some tips though.... you can choose to have playback be at a little lower resolution and that helps. I do that if I'm just editing and not mixing. I also do temporary mix downs of tracks for mixing to cut down on the number of open tracks. Cache size makes a difference, too. I can't remember how to set it according to your RAM, but on their site, they have a faq that describes it. Happy tracking!
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/04/01 at 16:26:01
;D thanks man!!! your probably right - I'll check it out asap. I appreciate the help,
Maury
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Steve_S. | 04/04/01 at 16:36:10
[size=2]Yeah, I agree with you JR#97. I used to crash a lot with more than 10 or so tracks playing at the same time on my PII 450 128meg ram setup. One thing I did before I got an extra 128 megs, is mute tracks that weren't critical to the current work I was doing. That green bar thing that you talked about is absolutely true. If you keep trying to play when the meter is very low, you can get lockups......[/size]
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by DanS | 04/04/01 at 17:49:41
Gee, I don't get this kind of message with VST.....;):D;D8)
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by pcrecord | 04/05/01 at 07:38:45
:)
Ok !! I've used cakewalk for years and got some problems like that. Yes, the first clue was to wait for the pc to finish it's actual work before asking for something else. But who wants to wait ? Some tips can help, defrag is a good one. An amd 450 and 15 tracks is ok if you do pan and volumes but if you add reverbs, Eq or other software effects !! Well the nightmare begin ;) (I had an amd 400 once)
Oh yes !!! In the few last versions of cakewalk, there's a tool called 'compress audio data'. What it does ? It scans all your tracks, remove the silents and make a single file with all your tracks in it. It help performance cause it cuts the track in pieces and puts all the beginings tracks of the song at the begining of the file and so on. That way the hard drive don't have to read two places far away from each other. Now save the project and you can delete the old files and gain disk space cause the new one has been cleaned (don't be afraid it's not a file compression as mp3, so if you loose quality, it comes from transfer errors. As far as I can tell it never messed a song or it's quality. If you read the file you'll hear the seperate tracks all glued together so it's hard to retrieve a part that you deleted after you saved your project, but it's possible. I have to say, the same process happen when you save the project as bundle (audio and data in one file) the next time you open a bundle, audio is put in one file.
I own a PIII 933 with 256 megs of ram now. I don't care with this tool anymore but it helped me a lot in the past. I still do defrag.
Marco
pcrecord@yahoo.com
:D
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by JR#97 | 04/05/01 at 14:38:04
I'll agree with the posts that say to use something else for mixing... I prefer Vegas Pro or Samplitude. Cakewalk is good, too, but the 9.0 needs a pretty beefy machine... beefier than mine anyway. I will say that CEP's crash recovery is the greatest thing since... since... beer hats and Kevlar hockey sticks!;D
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/05/01 at 16:01:49
Hi JR#97 - I'm a little confused???
you mention the advantages of mixing in another program...as in record to CEP, but transfer files to , say, Vegas & then mix there? What are the advatages? Is it personal preference, or is CEP's mixer less user friendly? Thanks,
Maury
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by JR#97 | 04/05/01 at 18:43:11
Hey Brah,
Check out my CEP and Vegas Pro reviews in the reviews/software section. To paraphrase, CEP has no legit real-time mixing with effects. You can sort of fake it (see my review) but it's a pain. CEP is a great editor and I love having a multi-track EDITOR. Vegas and Cakewalk aren't editors. You can cross fade in clips, etc., but you can't do surgery. So I basically track to either Vegas or Samplitude, edit in CEP, and then mix in Vegas with CEP as the designated Editor. The interface of Vegas is very well done. Good use of space and very intuitive. But what makes Vegas my mixing software of choice is it's real time mixing capabilities. With CEP, it's a lot of try, guess, and then try again when it comes to adding effects. With Vegas, you can add effects to a track and/or subgroups....nice.... I did figure out how to get a pseudo mixer interface going in the CEP multi-track view though(see my review). Basically I use each program for it's strengths instead of fighting through each program's weaknesses. I also used to do a lot of video and Vegas can not only sync to video files, but it can write to them as well. No need to ever use that crappy multitrack in Adobe Premiere. The only reason I ever use Cakewalk is for it's midi capabilites. I've tried Cubase VST and it was such a steep learning curve.. maybe I'm stupid, maybe I'm impatient, but I didn't see what it could do that I couldn't do elsewhere. Same with Samplitude and it's object methodology. Wavelab 3.0 is sort of an enigma... it features multi-tracking, but it doesn't follow the normal audio software way of doing things. Again, stupid or impatient. Wavelab's mastering section is genius though. Before Vegas I used to do all my effects in Wavelab 2.0 instead of CEP.. partly because CEP 1.0-1.1 were very unstable with DX plug-ins. I'm sure you're looking for specifics though, so feel free to ask away!
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/05/01 at 23:13:53
Hey man- thanks for the help - you really have this whole "people helping people" thing down! I think you covered my question very well - I'm off now to read your reviews & if I have any more Q's I'll post again. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to help.
Maury
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by JR#97 | 04/06/01 at 10:25:53
No prob! For the most part, I don't know Jack anymore (but I do know Jill.. hehehe)... I've been out of audio/video for almost 2 years now. But I still like to chip in every now and then.
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by joey | 04/09/01 at 09:56:23
hey maury
I also track on a MD8 and mix to CEP. I find it works pretty well. You can go to http://webhome.idirect.com/~castlemr/itsaboutthattime.mp3 to hear a song I'm working on now with my band. There's no vocals yet, we'll probably be recording them on the weekend. Check it out and let me know what you think. Even if you don't like the style you can comment on the general sound and maybe give me some pointers. Later.
Subject: Re: question for Tim Z or anyone using CEP
by Maury | 04/09/01 at 10:58:08
That's pretty cool Joey! I have my computer all apart cause I'm walking out the door to get some more ram, so I had to listen to your song on my wife's PC & her $10 speakers :(
Very dynamic song & recording sounds very good. On her system, the whole mix sounds a little narrow - the only criticism I could offer is a matter of personal taste; if there are 2 guitar parts going thru the whole song, try panning them hard left & hard right - that gives a wider stereo image & this song would sound HUGE! Let me get back to you after I listen to it in my studio & really know what I'm hearing. For what it's worth, I hear every instrument clearly on her speakers, which is where LOTS of stuff sounds like hell. Translation - nice recording & great mix. And thanks for the interest in my opinion
;D
Maury