Recording?

[Gates20]

Yeah, my brothers band was recording into his computer, and suddenly, it quit recording, i thought he messed up his sound card, so we bought a new one, i installed it and it still wont record, the mics are good and everything, if you have any sugjesstions on what this is, and how to fix it, please it would help me out alot.

Thanks in advance
Gates

 

[jrbarnett]

It would help to know exactly what it was doing while recording? Were you recording at the time and it stopped part way through the recording of a track or did you finish one and it refused to start recording another?

What recording package were you using? What operating system is the computer running? Is there lots of memory and free disk space on the computer as sound files can be quite large? Could it have been a trial application that expired after x days?

John

 

[Gates20]

The computer has 128MB SDRAM 700Mhz processor,they was using cool edit pro, yes there is alot of free space on the hard drive, and no it wasn't a trial application, they have the full version of cool edit pro, there recording staight into the computer. They got special peices that allow them to plug there instraments into the sound card, they pluged a mic up and put it in the drums, and as soon as they hit the drum, it quit recording. the program says its recording, but it ain't recording any sounds being put into it.

 

[ceh4702]

Normally in Windows there is a speaker icon in the start bar at the bottom of the screen. If you right-click on that a bow shows up and you can click on "OPEN VOLUME CONTROL". When you open the volume control you will see a bunch of options for stuff like volume control Line-In, etc. Click on the OPTIONS MEUN at the top and select PROPERTIES. You can see several options show up one of them are some RADIO BUTTONS for PLAYBACK RECORDING OTHER. the default setting is playback which is for listening to music. Select RECORDING. Then make sure the method you are using for recording is selected. One of the most common is Line-IN. Then Click ok and the RECORDING VOLUME CONTROL will appear and you should be able to select whether the LINE-IN or the other options are selected. I think the default on this for windows is CDROM. You have to select what you want to use, like MICROPHONE and LINE-IN.

This might help.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[fenix]

sounds like the drum hit overpowered/redlined the levels for that track and this caused the problem. Since it was working before this, this may have corrupted the program, or referencing the above post, this action might have 'muted' one of the master audio settings if the software for your program is a little unstable.

Close all programs and reboot the machine, if that doesn't uninstall/reinstall the recording program. Hopefully you have saved all your settings and recordings and tracks worth saving.

Also, 128 MB is on the low side. I would recommend doubling or tripling your RAM for audio recording, and of course, you don't want any other programs running while you are using the recording software.

Another thing that might help the overall performance is to define the virtual memory amouont instead of letting Windows expand and contract it as needed and as not needed. This causes alot more processing (that can be used for other functions), to take place. When you need more RAM, a portion of the hard drive acts like RAM.

If you define the amount of VM, than it sets the amount of hard drive space to a fixed amount. I have 312 MB of RAM on my 98 machine that I used to run Cakewalk on, and when I set my Virtual Memory min and max to 500, it fixed some performance issues I was having.

I'm gong to guess that you are using W98...........System Properties/Performance/Virtual Memory. (it will warn you that this action might make your system unstalble, but don't worry about that) You set the Min and Max to the same value, usually the standard is 1 1/2 timnes the amount of RAM installed, more or less. If you don't install more RAM as suggested, I would definitely define your virutal memory.

jam on, mon !

 

[fenix]

antoher point to consider,,,the 'device' you mentioned that they plug their insturments and the mic into, (I assume this is some kind of mixer), got damaged with that drum shot that might have overloaded a circuit and blew a resistor, transistor, capacitor etc. etc.

Go directly into the sound card (bypass the mixer) to see if it is the mixer than blew.