Opinions needed: Is software upgrade necessary?

[emu!]

Hello:

Questions for all you who REALLY know the ins and outs of the latest recording software.

History...it's been about 5 years since I seriously put down tracks using Cakewalk ProAudio 8 on my Win/98 desktop PC. Used a small Eurorack mixer w/phantom power for my cheap condensor mic. Five years ago, I was pretty happy and content with what I had. Now, I have a new Win/XP laptop. I want to keep ProAudio 8 since I know how to work it so well. The Cakewalk forum has users who use XP with PA 8, so I would like to install it on my laptop. What I am concerned with is adding effects. If I understand correctly, the DX type effects for PA 8 are not really being created anymore. Now, everything is VST. So I will need a VST/DX wrapper, right? Never used a wrapper. Does this wrapper software slow things down drastically, or cause lockup problems? Any other concerns I should have?

Thanks for any advice.

[pengipete]

Any bottleneck is more likely to come from the laptop's soundcard and drivers. The are really only designed for playing back music and DVD and you could get serious latency problems with VST's and VSTi's.

In a built-in sound card the bulk of the work has to be done by the CPU and main RAM and then sent to and from the sound circuits. A dedicated soundcard of the sort often used in desktop PCs avoids this by having it's own memory and processor. In addition, any card suitable for home recording will have ASIO - a special driver that effectively bypasses the computer completely resulting in much faster signal transfers.

With ASIO drivers and the right card, there is no noticable latency even when using multiple inputs and running several VST's. It still helps to have a fast CPU and multicore ones are even better suited.

It's a good idea to have a few backgound tasks runnning as possible. Switching off wi-fi will allow you to diasble the firewall and AV software which can also cause big slow downs on a laptop.

Laptop hard-drives are usually slower than desktop ones - 5400 rpm as opposed to 7200rpm. This makes it especially important to keep the drive defragged and ideal set aside a dedicated partition just for direct recording.

Extra ram is the single best way to speed up any laptop. Aim for 2GB if at all possible and never go below 1GB.

In you situation I'd suggest that a "suck it and see" approach is best. You have the main software ready to install so give it a go and only spend extra cash if you really need to. There are thousands of legitimate free downloads including VST/DX wrappers available and some excellent VST and VSTi's. Try not to fall into the trap of having too many add-ons though as they can prove to be too ditracting.

If you are really struggling with latency on recording, there are a few tricks you can use that may free up a few extra clock cycles but ultimately you may need to look at an external USB connected sound card. It will really depend on how well your particular computer can handle the job and there's no way better than diving in and seeing how far you get.

Keep that mixer by the way. An external mixer is still extremely useful even when you have powerful software and opens up a lot of extra ways of recording and playing back sounds from the computer.

[StuH]

The wrapper won't be a bottleneck at all. It just scans your plugin directory and connverts at the start of the session. Not to worry.