Win 2000\XP slow performer with Audition?

Hoping someone can provide some info on what is happening.  Using Adobe Audition 1.0 and Cool Edit 2000(I know this is the AA 2.0 forum - happy to buy it if it will fix the problem). Put a new PC together - EMU 0404 card, digitally hooked up to Yamaha 01v mixer.  Windows 2000 (hoping it will run faster than XP)Sounds fine, no latency on recording with either AA or CE 2K. However, everything else in AA or CE drags terribly.  Open an MP3? Takes twice as long as on old PC I replaced (win 98, Echo mia card, about 1\5th the processing power and RAM of the new PC). Put a piece of a wav on the clipboard? takes twice as long to paste it somewhere.  Everyhting about operating the program is slower- even though the PC is WAY more powerful than its predecessor.  In fact, its predecessor(the old win 98 PC) started life a few years ago with Win2000 on it.  I got better performance with win 98, so I've kept it, until now.  Can't go back to win 98 on the new PC - no drivers for the EMU card.  Again, recording - zero latency.  Works great.  Every other operation involving some processing - about twice as long as the win 98 box.  Any ideas? I've tried CE 2000 on XP before - noticed it dragging too (different PC too).  I'd be happy to buy AA 2.0, if that would solve the problem.  THis new recording PC (the win 2000 box) has basially nothing else on it - not loaded down with applications and things running in the background.  3 Ghz Pentium 4, 1 gig of RAM. Thanks for your opinions!

Bruce

There have been a lot of discussions about processing speeds both here and on the Adobe forum, and I honestly have no idea of whether AA2.0 will help you here or not - perhaps others can explore this a little further with you. The only thing I will say is that AA2.0 won't under any circumstances run with Windows2000; it can only run under XP.

XP is not much different from 2000 under the hood, so once all the Lego interface has been switched off it should be as fast as 2000 or marginally faster.  You won't lose anything going to XP as is required for AA2.

As for your main problem, I would first check that your disk interface is operating in UDMA mode not PIO.

Paul

Thanks for those thoughts, gentlemen.  I do indeed have DMA enabled for the hard drive.  Also increased the wav cache size in Audition, turned off all unnecessary video candy in Windows and so on.  Other applications run just fine, but Cool Edit\Audition are mighty sluggish when editing even in single track view.  For example, to paste a small section of a wav that's on the clipboard (say 10 seconds long), was almost instant in Cool Edit\Audition running under Win 98. In Win 2000 (and I suspect, XP), it takes a good five seconds or more for the paste to happen. I would go back to win 98 if there were drivers available for the EMU sound card.  Thanks for the replies!

Bruce

Would whether the drive is formatted as FAT32 or NTSF make any difference?  How about whether the HD is compressed and files are being compressed on save and uncompressed on load?

Fat or NTFS - not sure there would be much of a difference there, as far as I've read, but having compressed drives, or folders would definitely slow things down.  Nothing is compressed on the PC that's sluggish with CE and win 2000.  

Bruce

This is not likely to be of much help. Merely expands the anecdotal base surrounding the issues.

I still use a Win98SE box for a number of tracking tasks and that box is 700 MHz PIII, 512 RAM, maybe six years old. Interestingly enough I was underwhelmed by the performance improvement in moving to 1.6 PIV 1.3 gig RAM.  There was an edge but not significant.  CE was not optimized (in my unschooled opinion) for any type of RAM memory processing . . . audio files being what they are it wouldn't make sense . . . anyway, the critical element of almost all instructions in AA is how well disk I/O is managed and some of the parameters controlling this have nothing to do with OS or software code.  so mileage will very, at times dramatically.

My migration to XP was relatively slow (fall of 01 to Jan 03 for the first personal XP system) and I still find (even with all of the consumer level crap in XP shut down) basic library functions to be 'slower' in XP then 98SE.  There is some legitimate debate as to whether FAT32 or NTFS is the 'better' format for audio . . . I haven't experienced a significant difference in either format . . . and since I still use a 98SE box I have about an equal mix of FAT32/NTFS drives (external USB/Firewire)

I have not found that, generally speaking, in a standalone (non-networked) box turning off any of the OS mandated processes improves performance in any noticeable way.  But I'd still recommend turning off all the 'default' drive management routines (read ahead, write back caches, even system restore points software)  With Audition loaded I typically show a CPU utilization of 2% (on no XP system I've ever used does 'background' ever get lower) and mem usage of roughly 91 meg (this un optimized XPSP2 laptop general shows 128 meg in static no program's loaded state)

The reason for mentioning that is that my first suspicion is that your drivers for the audio card are probably the proximate cause for your poor performance.  But even with nothing more sophisticated then the OS supplied task manager you can monitor CPU utilization of processes associated with the audio card.  Just loaded two instances of AA, a half dozen internet windows, this word processing program.  Loaded a 5 min wave, initiated a convolution routine (which I tend to find to be pretty CPU intensive), switched back to this document . . . CPU usage in AA ran about 97%, but memory for all processes never exceeded 9% (1gig) and hovered mostly around 6%.  As I said this is not an optimized system, is an off the rack four+ yr old think pad (1MHz/1gig ram).  The convolution routine posted (in AA) a time of 22 sec to complete.

So assuming you have adequate memory, if the OS is not running numerous constant (in real time if not computer time) examinations of what the drive is doing then you are looking to see if some 'logged' process is grabbing CPU cycles or RAM and not releasing it.  And I have seen conflicts between audio drivers and OS background processes do this.  In which case, depending on Emu info concerning their card you might be better off with XP then 2000 (the kernel is the same but there are enough differences that different flavors of drivers do seem to make a difference . . . I use an Aardvark on the PIV 1.6 editing bay and different systems are experiencing noticeable performance enhancements with older drivers (there are three variations written for the NT kernel, the latest (designed for XPSP1) seems to perform the worst of the three with the 2000 OS)

The other, rather real, possibility is that some portion of your new 'build' has corrupt code (not necessarily that the reservoir of code is corrupt but that the windows installer managed to not quite get it 'right' . . . companies that evolved primarily with DOS based drivers experienced hiccups when moving to NT . . . and some of the most common involved the 'install wizard' not merely the driver code itself.  so even if there is not absolute mismatch between the drivers and 2000 the installer might be missing a beat . . .

The last suggestion (which maybe should be the first) is check the IRQ structure . . . on some hardware the 'first' PCI slot will share an interrupt with network functions that even if you are not attached to a network are still invoked by OS processes.  So try to make sure (just in the general avoiding of headaches way, since you have headaches) you have a dedicated IRQ . . . uninstall drivers, delete them, uninstall hardware, do a boot cycle, at least a minimal registry clean, reinstall in a different PCI slot, reboot, reinstall etc.

Now all of that said, for my test of AA2 I did a 'clean' OS install, kept extraneous software to a minimum, used a newly formatted (not quite the DOD 29 pass 1's-0's/0's-1's but a bit more then Win quick format) drive for data.  My tracking experience was within expected parameters (based on info on this and the Adobe forum, not marketing claims), but destructive edits ran significantly (in non 'scientific' tests they appeared to take roughly a third longer) more slowly.  (AA2 was not demo, but co-opted for a week from a client (installed on my system before we installed it on his) so the time comparisons were merely 'gut' but then supported by moving back to AA1 and performing the same edits on the same raw data (as near as possible, the code for the various functions (compression FFT etc) have apparently been rewritten along with everything else . . . but attemptted the 'same' tasks) I used 10 min 96/32 file, so wasn't expecting blink of the eye response)  Performance hit was consistent, though not equivalent for each task (save, amp, dynamic, delay, convolve) the only thing that seemed to stay roughly the same was the performance of  spectral view. Which on my vid accellerated challenged cards has always been sluggish

But my impression is that my AA2 experience is not consistent with that of most, let alone all users.

So gut feeling is that if it's not specifically related to 'driver update cure', that there is something in the background that has priority for Disk read/writes  (AA2 will not help with this), or some manner of 'corrupt' install.  Or IRQ dueling . . . (not specifically related to Disk I/O).  But what you descriabed  is not typical response to AA plus hardware upgrade + migrating to an NT core

Wow - that gives me a few things to work on!  Before I read your post, I got disgusted and wiped the drive and installed XP just to see what would happen.  Just for fun, I chose to format the drive in FAT, rather than NTFS. Loaded SP 2, .Net (required for the video drivers) the video drivers, EMU drivers, installed Cool Edit 2000, loaded the file that tells the EMU drivers how to deal with the SPDIF output of the Yamaha O1V.  Removed all kinds of junk from XP - Outlook Express, all the eye candy(the screen looks like crap, but who cares if I can edit audio properly) And it seems to work nicely.  The huge time lag when editing wavs is gone - it's even faster than it's been all these years using win 98.  I haven't tried a heavy duty recording session, but so far so good.  And I have no idea which of those things may have helped deal with the problem.  Haven't installed AA yet - I suspect if CE works OK, AA will be fine too.

Only problem I had (you know there has to be one..) is the PC wouldn't shut down.  I ran regclean, which I've saved over the years (still works on XP).  It locked on me three times in a row.  Finally ran all the way through on the 4th try (hopefully cleaned up any gremlins in the registry), and the PC shut down correctly.  I'm not pushing my luck.  I think I'll leave it as is for awhile.  Looking forward to getting some recording done on the new PC. Thanks for all the help and suggestions!

Bruce