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Re: fast editor for huge wav files

Subject: Re: fast editor for huge wav files
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 13:24:37 -0500
From: Gianni Pavan <>
>
> Hi all,
>       I'm editing a large amount of huge files (1-2 GB) and CoolEdit/Audition 
> =
is
> too slow when loading and saving. I'm thus looking for a fast wav editor=

> able to do simple operations (often I just need cut & paste) but very fas=
t.
> Any hint ?

Soundfiles do test your large file handling.

This sort of thing is often more a function of disk drive speeds and bus
speeds than the software. The first place I'd look is at your disk
drives. I know it made a very big difference in the speed when I moved
to SCSI Ultra 160 drives. And I was not using all that slow a drives
before.

In backup operations my disks have done a copy of 25 gigs to a new disk
in about 12 minutes. That's got a read from one disk and write to
another in it, and is somewhat dependent on the file sizes involved.
That speed above is for about 75,000 files in my main OS9 disk. It's
much slower cloning OSX system disks where each file has to be analyzed
and all disk structure preserved so the new disk will boot. I normally
set that going when I go to bed and it's always done when I get up. I
clone my OSX main once a week.

The fastest drives are the SCSI Ultra 320's now. Note that to use these
effectively you have to have fast bus speeds, and capable processors. At
this point I'm somewhat hampered by my 400Mhz G4 machine. But, I'm
holding off on getting a G5 for a while yet to make sure the initial
teething problems are taken care of and the design stabilizes. I am,
however, only buying Ultra 320 spec components now. Eventually I'll get
a new card and shift up another speed notch.

You will still have to wait. Current desktops don't often get much
better than 40 meg/sec in real speed from disks. And that takes the high
speed disks. A lot more than disk speed enters into that. 1-2 GB still
amounts to a fair number of seconds to read the file, and then it get's
written to working scratch files and so on. If at all possible you might
want to consider splitting the files.

Since I use macs I cannot comment through actual experience using
CoolEdit/Audition. And rarely am working with files bigger than a 500
megs. Both Peak and SparkXL do not keep me waiting long at that file
size. Though it's not instant.

And note we have not even gotten into runoffs between various filters
for speed. I don't often use filters singly, but use SparkXL's FX
machine system to do it all in one pass. I don't have a good feel for
relative speed of filters. I need plenty of time to think about what I'm
doing anyway.

Walt




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