Cakewalk Forum

Cakewalk home studio says it can use unlimited audio tracks, but obviously this has to be limited by your system. I cannot seem to find any description as to how many audio tracks (NOT midi) in cd quality can be used based on processor speeds. For example, say I want to use an older PIII 850 mhz system to record audio (with home studio 2002), how many audio tracks could this handle? 10 or more? With a few effects?

Is there a general rule for how much speed for each track is needed?

Thanks,
Dan

Depends on how you work. I can get about 20 tracks with a few simple effects running but you must remember to archive everything that is not being used and shut down plugs ins once they have been applied to tracks.

Make sure you PC is optomised for audio. A 7200 rpm HD will be better than a 5400 one. More Ram will help and disabling certain graphics features will allow more CPU power.

Someone ran an experiment on one of the other forums once and got up to a couple of hundred simple tracks running, but on a more modern and fully optimised PC.

Andy makes some great points.

Also - You say a few effects, however certain effects are much more cpu intensive then others. A certain reverb may take twice the power as five compresors (example) this depends on the complexity of the effect and how well it's written.

That being said, I would be hesitant to say you will get "x" numbers of tracks on your system. Hard drive speed, ram ammount of free space and how fragmented your system is will play a major part.

CPU certainly plays a part in this, but this is a situation where the whole system will be important.

I would say on my old 900Mhz machine (30G 7200, 256) I had no trouble getting 14 tracks with some effects. The machine was optimized and was not running much besides PA9.

Experioment, take notes and optimize!