If you're under the impression that installing your audio apps on a non‑Windows drive will lead to better performance, you're in for a surprise. Recording audio tracks to such a drive, though, is a different matter...
Many musicians seem to be under the false impression that installing their audio applications on a non‑Windows drive is a good idea. Unfortunately, nearly all applications (except trivially small ones) rely on lots of Registry entries, and if these end up pointing to files on other drives, or even other partitions on the same drive, it makes it significantly more difficult to maintain backups without them getting 'out of sync'.
Let's say you install a new application on your non‑Windows partition or drive, and then have virus problems on your Windows partition and have to restore a Windows backup made before that application was installed. Although your application is still intact, it will no longer run, because the associated Registry entries no longer exist, and you'll have to reinstall the application over the top of itself to restore them. Even worse, if you have problems with the non‑Windows partition or drive and have to restore a backup of that, the Registry entries will all be intact, but pointing to non‑existent files. Once again you'll need to reinstall the application. So it's nearly always safer to keep application files and Registry entries on the same partition.
Why are so many musicians risking such problems? Well, the story goes that by placing your audio applications on a faster drive along with your songs and associated audio files, you'll get better performance, but this is rarely true. Audio applications generally load their own files into system RAM once only, when you first launch them. A few extra files might need to be loaded if you subsequently open another significant feature, such as a score or drum editor, but in all my tests over the years, I've never noticed any audio application requiring regular disk access to its own files — only for the audio files it's recording and playing back, and sample files that require streaming. So the only aspect of performance you might improve by placing an audio application on a faster drive is initial loading time, which you might shave a second or two off. I personally feel that's not worth the possible extra aggravation.
Spreading The Load
If you create a VST plug‑ins folder on a separate data partition, you can access its contents from any active Windows partition, enabling you to dabble with music while on‑line, or run the same instruments and plug‑ins from a stripped‑down, music‑only setup for maximum performance.
On the other hand, it does make sense to place your audio tracks on another partition or drive. Audio files eat up vast amounts of space (about 16 MB per minute for 24‑bit/96kHz files), and performance will soon suffer if files of this size are saved in piecemeal fashion to a typical Windows partition, among thousands of tiny system files. Since audio applications rarely access their own files during recording and playback, a separate partition for audio on the same drive can work, although placing them on a separate drive to Windows will generally result in you being able to run more simultaneous tracks, as well as making project backup easier.
Some musicians attempt to gain further performance benefits by 'striping' audio across several drives in parallel using RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), but, again, you have to be careful. A single modern drive is perfectly capable of running perhaps 80 tracks of 24‑bit/96kHz audio (and lots more at lower sample rates), so unless you need more than this, or want to run video alongside audio tracks, one drive will suffice.
When it comes to streaming samples (rather than loading them in their entirety into system RAM), a separate partition on the Windows drive can again work, although, if you have more ambitious requirements, placing these on a third drive will increase the maximum number of voices you can run.
If you want to run even more simultaneous software sampler voices than you can manage from a single drive, RAID is not a good choice, since you'll almost certainly be grabbing lots of small data chunks in real time from semi‑random positions on the drives, for lots of different sampled instruments. It's better to have several independent drives for sample storage and install some of your sample libraries on each one (perhaps across three or four drives in the case of huge orchestral libraries). Then each drive's read/write heads are free to dart about, grabbing whatever data they need, rather than being tied together. So when you're installing sample libraries, if you get options to choose locations for these separately from the application during an install, do think about the possibilities.
Trans‑partition Trickery
Sticking with the topic of storing sample libraries on non‑Windows partitions or drives, in March 2008 I gave several approaches to 'VST Slimming' so you could move VST Instruments and libraries off your C: drive and onto other partitions (/sos/mar08/articles/pcnotes_0308.htm).
My second suggestion involved creating an additional VST plug‑ins folder on your sample partition or drive, and then letting your sequencer know about this extra VST plug‑in path. As previously discussed, this can result in performance benefits for sample streaming, but in many cases musicians want to do it simply because it's more convenient to store all their libraries in one location.
However, I've since discovered that having a VST plug‑ins folder on a data partition results in some other intriguing possibilities for those who run a multi‑boot setup. If you have a general‑purpose Internet‑enabled Windows partition stuffed to the gills with firewall, anti‑virus and spyware checking utilities, but maintain a separate, stripped‑down music partition for maximum performance, any VST plug‑ins folder you create on a separate data partition will be visible from both Windows partitions.
While running a music‑only partition gains you more security from on‑line nasties, it does prevent you checking for updates on‑line (many VST instruments now provide a clickable menu link to let you see if a newer version exists). However, since your 'shared' VST plug‑ins folder is visible from all Windows partitions, its contents can also be accessed from your Internet‑enabled partition, so you get the best of both worlds.
For instance, I still mainly run Camel Audio's excellent Alchemy synth (www.camelaudio.com) inside Cubase 4 on my music‑only partition when writing music. However, I can also run its files inside Reaper (just 3.5MB) on my Internet‑enabled Windows partition, where I can click on Alchemy's internal links to check for updates, download presets, read the Support Forum, and so on.
This dual approach will work with all unprotected VST instruments and plug‑ins, and with protection methods where the developer provides a keyfile to drop into the VST plug‑ins folder. It will also work with many using dongle copy‑protection, since both the dongle and associated DLL file will be visible from all Windows partitions. (Plug‑ins from Waves are a notable exception, since they insist on their plug‑ins being installed on a Windows rather than a data partition.)
Even where a global VST plug‑ins folder doesn't let you run an instrument or plug‑in because the installation involves Registry entries that only live on the Windows partition where it was installed, you can force it to do so by installing it 'over the top' from each active Windows partition and entering the same data‑partition destination. I've used this approach with AudioEase's Altiverb, so I can update and audition its library on‑line.
However, be cautious about using such techniques with products having hardware‑specific challenge/response protection. For instance, Native Instruments products will enter a time‑limited Demo mode when run from a partition other than the one you used to install them. Although you could authorise such products separately from each Windows partition, some developers might view this as installing them on multiple PCs, so check with them first. Nevertheless, using a shared VST plug‑ins folder has certainly made my life easier.
WaveRT News
When the Windows Vista operating system was released, Microsoft were keen to have its new WaveRT driver model adopted by the professional audio community (and, no doubt, hoped that it would replace ASIO as a standard). However, while it could offer similarly low latency to ASIO drivers, but with lower CPU overheads, it had problems with multi‑device sync and, more importantly, it didn't support USB or Firewire audio devices.
Neither of these limitations endeared it to many professional audio interface manufacturers, and although a few did eventually release Vista WaveRT drivers (most notably Echo for their Echo24, Indigo and 3G families), to use them you also need WaveRT support in your audio sequencer. Unfortunately, sequencer support for WaveRT is still very thin on the ground as well, Cakewalk's Sonar (www.cakewalk.com) and Giel Bremmers' MultiTrackStudio (www.multitrackstudio.com) being the only WaveRT‑compatible hosts I've come across to date. Even worse, there was a limitation that prevented Echo's WaveRT drivers from working with Sonar.
Now there's finally some potentially good news on the horizon. MOTU (www.motu.com) have announced WaveRT drivers that will work with Sonar 8, but the most intriguing news is that they support USB and Firewire audio interfaces, which seems to be a first. All credit to them for managing to bypass this previous limitation!
WaveRT drivers for Vista have been thin on the ground, and sequencer support for the WaveRT format even thinner. Cakewalk's Sonar is one of the few sequencers that offer it, and now MOTU's new WaveRT drivers for their interfaces can be used with Sonar.However, while they do add WaveRT support, these new drivers also apparently remove the previously available options for buffer sizes of 32 samples and 64 samples. The new minimum buffer size becomes 128 samples, even for ASIO use, which may be a slight disappointment to musicians who had previously been achieving glitch‑free audio with MOTU hardware using ASIO buffers of 64 samples (producing just 1.5ms latency at 44.1kHz).Edrum Monitor
If you've got a digital drum kit or electronic drum sensors, you'll know how infuriating it is to get false triggers, and to end up with loads of data coming from drum pads allocated to different MIDI notes, but with no easy way to treat each one separately. Enter Edrum Monitor (www.edrummonitor.com), which runs on Windows XP, NT and 2000, and is compatible with any drum module that has a MIDI output.
It's simplicity itself to use. You add a track (up to 100 are available, including Dual and Triple options for drums with multiple zone sensors) for each of your drum pads, then click its Learn button and hit the appropriate pad. You can scale each track's velocity to balance up your kit levels, cap the minimum and maximum velocity values, and map each output to different notes and MIDI channels.
In the Settings dialogue, you can create complex velocity curves to adapt the response of each pad to your own playing style, either by clicking and dragging in the graphic curve window or by adjusting the 128 velocity steps of the graphic EQ‑like Full Control window. There's an anti‑machine‑gun mode that automatically tweaks identical incoming velocity values slightly to avoid multiple triggers of the same sample, and an Alternating Output so that you can send out up to four different notes on alternating hits. Each channel has its own Automatic Retrigger detection to avoid false hits, while leaving flams and rolls unaffected.
If you've got MIDI drum pads or an entire digital drum kit, Edrum Monitor is an invaluable tool that helps you set it up to exactly suit your playing style and requirements.Edrum Monitor also lets you turn game joysticks into MIDI controllers, and manipulate incoming data from standard MIDI controllers, while the meters on each track and the global MIDI status window are great general‑purpose tools for drummers and non‑drummers alike. Best of all, Edrum monitor is freeware, although donations are gratefully received.