Monday, August 21, 2006

Optimizing Windows for audio work

If you plan (or doing so already) to use your PC (Windoze PC) for serious audio work like sequencing, playing back multiple audio streams (multitrack recording/ playback) etc...It would be a great idea to optimize Windows to perform these tasks.

A standard Windows installation is NOT ready to perform serious audio work. Since audio is a realtime thing we dont want to be pestered with dropouts, glitching and stuttering.

A good thing to start with anyway is disabeling any real- time virus scanning software. Virus scanners generally tend to slow down a PC and can interrupt audio (and video!) streams.

Secondly setting windows processing priority to "background tasks" is one of the best (and most needed) tweaks! Things running in the "background"/ realtime such as your audio card's (ASIO) drivers get higher priority (and since it's audio we are working with...). Here is a link on how to perform this tweak.

You can read all about Digital Audio Workstation (D.A.W.) optimization at musicxp.net.

Happy DAW tuning!

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