PC Audio 106

Well here we are, mid-holiday, which for some of us will mean new music tech toys to play with, and some extra time to spend making music. Ironically, it’s sometimes the simplest things that can end up wasting time that could be better spent being creative, so with this in mind here are some handy utilities that you can use ahead of time, to ensure your PC is performing at its best.

Despite their apparent simplicity, USB devices can be a great source of frustration at times. Plugged into my PC currently are a USB 1.1 eLicenser dongle, MIDI keyboard, data keyboard, an undefined USB printer, plus a USB 2.0 iLok dongle and 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive. Also, in the past I’ve plugged in various other USB flash drives from manufacturers including SanDisk and Kingston. How do I know all this? Well, I occasionally run a great little donationware utility named USBDeview (www.nirsoft.net). I’ve used it to highlight and uninstall unwanted drivers for USB devices that haven’t been plugged in for years, as well as to eradicate duplicate driver installs resulting from previously plugging in the same device into different USB ports. USBDeview will spot USB sticks that studio clients may have plugged into your PC at some point without your knowledge, as well as the date/time that device was added (handy if your PC gets a virus infection and you’re trying to track down possible causes), and you can also use it to selectively enable or disable specific USB devices at will, or to spot dongles that are plugged in but not recognised due to a dodgy USB port.

DEFRAG DRAG

A Disk Defragmenter utility is already built into Windows, and regular defragging can improve hard drive performance, especially when it’s getting rather full. By default, this somewhat basic Microsoft utility runs automatically to a predefined schedule (typically once a week at 1am on Wednesday morning). I always turn off such scheduled tasks, as I might well be in the middle of a session at 1am, but I do periodically run an alternate defragmenter on demand when I’m sure its activity won’t interrupt a vital activity. My choice is Piriform’s freeware and the rather more elegant Defraggler (www.piriform.com/defraggler), a handy utility that not only defrags entire drives/partitions, but can also be used to defrag individual files. For instance, I recently spotted a dozen downloaded 1GB sample files that had each ended up split into over 15,000 fragments — these were well worth defragging to speed up their loading times! Defraggler also provides a handy set of extra functions including a Health readout for each of your drives, displaying their operating temperature (anything below 50 degrees Centigrade is fine), and any read/write errors that have occurred in the past, to hopefully give you some warning of drives that might go belly-up in the future. Just make sure you un-tick the ‘Install Google Chrome as my default browser’ during Defraggler installation (don’t you hate it when developers try to sneak in unwanted extras?).

Another handy disk utility is the free version of HD Tune (www.hdtune.com), which also incorporates a similar set of health readouts, although I primarily use this to check the sustained transfer rate performance of my various internal and external hard drives, SSDs, USB flash drives and other memory sticks, using its built-in benchmark test. For mechanical hard drives, I use this to double check that their drivers have been correctly set up, so I achieve the maximum possible number of simultaneous audio tracks during recordings and playback. Once you’ve clicked on the HD Tune Start button, you may find results that vary widely or stay relatively steady during the course of the benchmark. However, the most important figure to note is Average Transfer Rate, and typical results for modern mechanical hard drives should be between 100Mb and 200Mb/s, and between 300Mb and 400Mb/s for an SSD.

Particularly interesting may be some of those USB flash drives — mine vary between 25Mb/s (a SanDisk Cruzer 8GB model) to an elderly one given to me at a trade show that managed just 1.1Mb/s and went straight in the bin after the test. Don’t discard slow SD cards — I’ve got one for my Zoom H4n portable digital recorder and another for my digital camera that both measure a pitiful transfer rate of just 0.7Mb/s, but this is perfectly adequate for four-channel recording and taking photographs. It’s worth noting, the main factor that can scupper hard drive performance is not having DMA (Direct Memory Access) enabled for each and every drive, so if you get any HD Tune results that seem significantly slower than expected, check this by launching Device Manager, expanding its ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers’ section, and then double-clicking on each of the entries. On its Advanced Settings tabs, the ‘Enable DMA’ box should always be ticked.

REALTIME CHECKUP

Finally, if you really want to find out just how well your PC is currently set up for real-time audio, try running Resplendence’s LatencyMon (www.resplendence.com). Now up to version 6.00, this splendid utility monitors how long it takes to execute a host of behind-the-scenes routines, recording the timings of those that take the longest. It’s an incredibly easy test to run (just click on the Start button and leave it running as long as you like while you run your audio software), and if the message ‘Your system appears to be suitable for handling real-time audio and other tasks without dropouts’ subsequently appears then you’re good to go. However, if not, or if you want to interpret the highest reported execution times in more depth, you will have to put in some effort. In essence, even if one task takes a significantly higher time to execute than the others, this will make it more likely that your audio exhibits occasional clicks and pops.

The secret to being able to run your audio interface with lower buffer sizes (and hence lower latency) is having well-written audio drivers in the first place (and here you’re at the mercy of the interface manufacturers themselves), but also avoiding any other device drivers on your PC that occasionally hang onto the CPU for longer than normal. One notorious culprit is the wi-fi adaptor, and in this particular case, disabling wi-fi and receiving your Internet feed more directly via an Ethernet cable may be the only cure (although in the case of some laptops this may not be possible, making it a poor choice for an audio PC). Overall, it’s well worth running LatencyMon to give you the reassurance your system is up to scratch, and if you do find a timing issue then Resplendence itself offers loads of helpful advice on its web site. Here’s hoping you get lots of music written, and no PC worries!