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The World of PC Recording
By Dave Casey, TASCAM Product Specialist
A Tutorial Guide on Creating, Optimizing
and Maintaining Computers for Audio Recording
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Reducing the graphics acceleratio
Right click “My Computer”, go to “Device Manager”,
choose “Performance”, click on “Graphics”. You
will find a sliding scale that will allow you to reduce the amount
of processor power dedicated to your graphics. Most audio programs
do not require intense graphic support, so you might try some experimenting
here.
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Try moving the slider to the left, if there is no improvement
in your audio performance, slide it back to where it was set
originally. Be sure to restart after making changes.
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Make sure that DMA is activated for all IDE disk drives
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Right click on “My Computer”, and go to Device
Manager. Click on the + sign next to disk drives. This will
show you all of the IDE drives in your system. Double-click
on each one, click the Settings tab, and check DMA. Doing
this will activate the Direct Memory Access (DMA). If your
hard drive supports DMA, activating this will make a huge
difference.
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Turn off “Auto Insert Notification”
When activated, this feature will automatically launch the contents
of a CD-ROM when it is loaded into a CD-ROM drive.
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Convenient for most, but in the audio world this draws unnecessary
system resources away from the audio application by repeatedly
checking the ROM drive for newly inserted disks. Right click
on “My Computer”, and go to Device Manager. Click
on the + sign next to CD-ROM. Double click on each device,
and click the Settings tab, unchecking Auto Insert Notification.
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IRQs & Not playing nicely with others…….
A PC uses a system of ID’s for all of the devices that function
within the system. Each device is given an Interrupt Request number,
or IRQ number. This is how the processor addresses each of these
elements. Occasionally, certain installed devices will end up with
the same IRQ (IRQ sharing). A lot of the time this is not a problem,
but certain devices require a lot of attention…and simply cannot
share.
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