If I was building a PC specifically for Chronicstage use, what should I build?

[bangraman]

It's an odd question, but I'm building a 'syncer' machine, especially in the light of problems I've had with Chronicstage which vary from machine to machine. Some of it is clearly performance issues, others could be down to other (necessary, since all my machines are fairly pared down in terms of what's loaded) resident software interfering with Chronicstage.

So I've decided to start from scratch, a self-built with a clean slate. This machine's first use will be with Chronicstage. I will also put iTunes and j.River Media Center on there a short while later. Again in light of the problems I've had with network stored files and Chronic, it'll be working off it's own hard disk(s, if necessary) to store music, so we're looking at a minimum of 400Gb capacity.

It is highly unlikely to be doing anything else in it's lifetime.

What should I build (new parts)? Should I go Vista or XP?

[Guest Stuge]

Get Fastest intel processor(Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor) + 8gb ram is a must and stay with XP because SonicStage~ChronicStage gave me a lot of headache in vista

Bangraman :Your post doesn't look very serious .

Ok ,If you are serious ,What is your budget?

[Richard]

It is highly unlikely to be doing anything else in it's lifetime.

If it's only going to be using SS, then you can probably forget about putting on Itunes or the Iriver software right? The OS could be either Vista or XP as SS works fine with both, but you may want to stick with XP for the time being for greater driver compatibility for the other hardware you will be putting in the machine. As regards the disc(s), I would go for SATA or SATA2. You may or may not want to configure these as an array - again your may want RAID 1 (mirroring) for example to give you some better performance and limited recovery options.

Edited June 6, 2007 by richyhu

[bangraman]

Budget: As little as possible, while allowing Chronicstage to run properly - or at least, as properly as possible. The RAID array on the Precision which I tried Chronic on before this didn't actually make much difference in terms of application response, so I guess I'll be sticking with a single drive - or a dual RAID0 stripe at the most.

Anything else I'll be doing will be less resource-intensive, more efficient and better performing (iTunes, iRiver Poo2, j.River Media Center, etc) than Chronicstage, so to all practical intents and purposes I am building this machine specifically for Chronic, and other apps will be loaded later once I'm happy that Chronic more or less works.

[pata2001]

Any cheap over the shelf $300 PC will do.

My recommendation:

-Use WinXP, you don't want to waste money having to buy more memory just for Vista. Besides SS is presumably more stable under XP anyway, and I think iTunes still has problems with Vista

-Once you're set on XP, 1GB RAM is plenty. You can even get by with 512MB, but I'd go 1GB if you decided on integrated graphic with shared video ram.

-Almost any modern processor will do, even single core. SS is not optimized for multi-core, so buying multi-core CPU for SS is a waste of money. Of course, many current CPUs are dual core already. A cheap A64 or A64 X2 is probably good enough. If you have to go intel, then get the E4300. I dont recommend a P4 simply because of its power consumption, although having HT is neat in a single core CPU.

-Hard drive, try to go with a RAID 1 or 0+1 setup, just for reliability and backup sake. Doing RAID 0 is simply stupid. If you want to go single drive, then I would get an external drive to do a regular backup or sync.

That's it. Just get a mobo with an integrated graphic, and you're set. Pick an optical drive of your choice (Lite-on tends to have pretty fast ripping speed, but not-so-good burners). I would think you should be able to spend only $300 to $500 max.

[cool_rock]

hy guys have u gont nuts. well i have a p3 system 733 mhz and i m using xp 20gb harddisk 256 mb ram and i have dl sonicstage 4.3 its not as heavy as others and i had transfered all my music to my nwe005 using the ss 4.3 so no need to go for a core or p4 system p3 is ok. with ss. and also network walkmans dont support self build pc so dont waste u r money and get a new sony player instead of that. or get a p3. the best of best well ss even runs smoothly on celeron whats the its not as heavy hm getting more ram is better. but u have to installed and uninstalled it succseffully to make it work. that the simple trick

[Guest Stuge]

hy guys have u gont nuts. well i have a p3 system 733 mhz and i m using xp 20gb harddisk 256 mb ram and i have dl sonicstage 4.3 its not as heavy as others and i had transfered all my music to my nwe005 using the ss 4.3 so no need to go for a core or p4 system p3 is ok. with ss. and also network walkmans dont support self build pc so dont waste u r money and get a new sony player instead of that. or get a p3. the best of best well ss even runs smoothly on celeron whats the its not as heavy hm getting more ram is better. but u have to installed and uninstalled it succseffully to make it work. that the simple trick

It is because you are accustomed of using P3.Encoding of music in P3 will take a hell lot of time .I will go with Pata's advice.

[bangraman]

Reason I'm not going with a prebuilt of course is - no preloads, I'll start with 'virgin' Windows. I'll go XP, that's fine. Thanks for the responses via PM too.

OK - what I have in mind is a low-end Core 2 Duo, say the E6600. Add that to a MATX board with built-in video like Intel's DQ965GF.

2Gb. WD Raptor 10K 150Gb boot, Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB for data.

What say you?

[pata2001]

Reason I'm not going with a prebuilt of course is - no preloads, I'll start with 'virgin' Windows. I'll go XP, that's fine. Thanks for the responses via PM too.

OK - what I have in mind is a low-end Core 2 Duo, say the E6600. Add that to a MATX board with built-in video like Intel's DQ965GF.

2Gb. WD Raptor 10K 150Gb boot, Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB for data.

What say you?

How much do you want to spend? 1GB of RAM is probably more than enough, and IMO a E6600 is somewhat overkill for just Sonicstage. I would do video encodings on a PC with a Core 2 Duo CPU in it. Other than that, just make sure you have a good ventilated case (WD raptors are running quite hot).

[bangraman]

The suggestion I got from one member was that I should run Chronic and my library on separate drives... so the Raptor & Seagate combo. I have a couple of unused Antec P180's and I also have a few PSU's spare and I know drive cooling isn't an issue with that combo, but I was thinking about picking up a P150 case + PSU for this use and I'm not sure how well that cools two drives. Although I'd have to say if it's an assumption of heat based on the rotation speed, the 15,000rpm SAS drives which virtually all my Dell Precisions are equipped with runs fairly cool (although they make an almighty racket during reads / writes) given proper airflow, which as far as I know even the P150 manages.

The Intel MB in question is fairly cheap as is the processor, memorywise I'd be more comfortable with 2Gb in any case, and then it's just the drives. No individual OS cost as I'm a corporate in terms of my M$ buying habits. I think I might have spare opticals. I haven't got a quote off my regular supplier but the total cost based on the current parts pick would be pretty much what I had in mind.

If I haven't missed any Chronic gotchas, I'm placing the order on Monday.

[pata2001]

The suggestion I got from one member was that I should run Chronic and my library on separate drives... so the Raptor & Seagate combo.

I don't know, but IMO Sonicstage usage is hardly hard-drive intensive, so IMO a RAID 1 setup is still a better choice for reliability sake instead of buying the raptor + seagate.

SCSI drives are intended for coporate use, so they're very reliable even though they have high rpm. The raptors are consumer grade drives, and although I never had one, the reliability of WD is not that good in my experience from their other hard-drives. I'd rather get 2 of the seagate drive and do a RAID 1 instead.

[bangraman]

I don't know, but IMO Sonicstage usage is hardly hard-drive intensive, so IMO a RAID 1 setup is still a better choice for reliability sake instead of buying the raptor + seagate.

SCSI drives are intended for coporate use, so they're very reliable even though they have high rpm. The raptors are consumer grade drives, and although I never had one, the reliability of WD is not that good in my experience from their other hard-drives. I'd rather get 2 of the seagate drive and do a RAID 1 instead.

RAID1 involves an overhead and I'm not keen on doing that in software. The difference between RAID 0 and 1 by the way is that in 0, data is striped across the drives (which don't individually max out the SATA bus) which means that the cumulative data throughput of the array increases when compared to a single drive. There is obviously no redundancy in a RAID0 array but you do it for performance.

RAID 1 is when the same information is written to two drives. This provides no performance increase - in fact, it results in a decrease especially when handled without a dedicated controller. Since I said reasonable performance was what I was going for and redundancy wasn't mentioned at all I'm not entirely sure why RAID1 was brought up. I do keep backups of my library on a NAS and that is a separate issue.

[bangraman]

Allrightythen,

Specs have crept up a bit since a visitation to my 'where parts go to zzzzz' cabinet. I rang the guys I usually buy parts from and got a pretty good deal for an E6700 (since no 6600 in stock), 2Gb of PC5300 and the Raptor / Seagate. No intel board in stock, but they did offer me a P5B quite cheap. This is a really nice board and I was mulling over this deal in that I'd have to find a GPU...

... Until a look in the cabinet yielded a couple of spare 8800GTXs, which I believe ought to be sufficient even for Chronicstage. One 8800 then. This is kind of a waste but it saves me having to buy another card. The cabinet also yielded the Enermax PSU and the Antec P180 case, plus two rather ancient-looking Liteon DVD+-RW's... never mind, I won't be ripping on this machine.

I was also experimenting with one of my Vista Business laptops which has never seen a single media application so far... and with a 4Gb library, Chronic was going smoother than my desktop despite this lappy only having a Core 2 Duo 2.16. So clearly Vista presents CS with no (overt) problems, but is hampered by other media software resident on the system for one reason or another. All the more reason I think for building a "ChronicStation". In the light of fairly painless operation with Vista I've decided to go with Ultimate first, downgrading to XP if I have problems.

A tad over-spec perhaps, but Chronicstage certainly has no excuse now for not working on the computer. So there it is, folks. Separate drives for library and Chronic to run off, a reasonable spec throughout, dedicated to Chronic to start with. We'll see how this goes. Thanks for the pointers, especially the helpful tips via PM. I'll keep you updated whether this reduces my Chronicstage frustrations any.

[cool_rock]

It is because you are accustomed of using P3.Encoding of music in P3 will take a hell lot of time .I will go with Pata's advice.

well i dont encode my music alot bocz i directly dl mp3 on my mp3 player from my harddisk well i hadnot ever used to rip music from cds. and it took me only 30 mins to transfer my 1 gb of my library to my player

[bangraman]

So... the Chronicstation is up and running. Slight problem with the chosen PSU as it happened to be dead, so I cracked open a spare new Tagan 800W supply. After a brief struggle with NVidia's finest (but not in terms of driver support) and after a pang of regret that I should have actually bought something more basic and better-Vista-supported, it seems to be a stable build. The issue that is left is indeed entirely down to the 8800GTX and I may elect to buy something else.

Response of Chronicstage is... acceptable. No more, no less. It does definitely feel sluggish, but it is not unacceptably slow as on the Dell H2C and the Precision 690. So clearly it's a software compatibility issue with whatever I have already on the Dells. However, it is merely on the 'man it's slow' side of acceptable even in absolute terms, and since totting up the spec of this machine it sits comfortably alongside that of $2500-class gaming machines from Velocity Micro / etc. that strikes me as rather ridiculous as far as the performance of Chronic goes.

However, it does actually achieve what I set out to do which is to make Chronicstage usable (from my point of view, not necessarily yours) so I think we can cautiously call the Chronicstation a success. From now, I'm going to play around with how much and of what subsystems Chronic is actually making demands on this machine to see if I can speed up any element of how it works.

One problem with the P5B is that the onboard 'high definition' sound is, like most other Intel HD implementations, quite mediocre even for casual use - they may have respectable codec specifications but somehow the analog side ends up 'meh'. I'm tempted to stick an X-Fi in here but would it muck up Chronicstage? I don't see why not but... well, I never know with Chronic. What do you reckon?

[ceres]

So... the Chronicstation is up and running. Slight problem with the chosen PSU as it happened to be dead, so I cracked open a spare new Tagan 800W supply. After a brief struggle with NVidia's finest (but not in terms of driver support) and after a pang of regret that I should have actually bought something more basic and better-Vista-supported, it seems to be a stable build. The issue that is left is indeed entirely down to the 8800GTX and I may elect to buy something else.

Response of Chronicstage is... acceptable. No more, no less. It does definitely feel sluggish, but it is not unacceptably slow as on the Dell H2C and the Precision 690. So clearly it's a software compatibility issue with whatever I have already on the Dells. However, it is merely on the 'man it's slow' side of acceptable even in absolute terms, and since totting up the spec of this machine it sits comfortably alongside that of $2500-class gaming machines from Velocity Micro / etc. that strikes me as rather ridiculous as far as the performance of Chronic goes.

However, it does actually achieve what I set out to do which is to make Chronicstage usable (from my point of view, not necessarily yours) so I think we can cautiously call the Chronicstation a success. From now, I'm going to play around with how much and of what subsystems Chronic is actually making demands on this machine to see if I can speed up any element of how it works.

One problem with the P5B is that the onboard 'high definition' sound is, like most other Intel HD implementations, quite mediocre even for casual use - they may have respectable codec specifications but somehow the analog side ends up 'meh'. I'm tempted to stick an X-Fi in here but would it muck up Chronicstage? I don't see why not but... well, I never know with Chronic. What do you reckon?

I have a x-fi xtreme music installed on my p5wdh deluxe. No problems with hda cohabitation or Chronic. Be aware of current driver issues with x-fi in games. As far as music playback is concerned there shouldn´t be a problem -at least not on 32bit os-.

[bangraman]

I received the Elite Pro today so will fit it and hope that nothing goes kaput.

The 8800 in Vista is not good. Fails to come out from sleep about half the time. I'm going to have to buy another card after all.

[bangraman]

Some updates:

The 8800GTX has been replaced by a 7900GS. Much more stable in sleeping. In fact, I'd probably say fully stable as I've not had a display-related issue since putting in the 7900. Clearly overkill was a bad idea. I did not install the X-Fi, but rather have put a spare Fireface 800 on here for the occasions that I may want to listen directly from this PC. Once again, seemingly no driver issues.

The prognosis for general everyday usage: Very slow. This is with a 14,000 track library, a subset of my main library. I can imagine that if I put my full library on here, Chronic will probably choke. iTunes and j.River have no issues with my main library but that's beside the point at this stage. The slowness is not so much in the library listing, it's the pauses between doing anything at all that gets me. Significantly less than the Dells I had it running on for sure, but just the accumulation of these pauses when navigating folders, loading the player, unloading it, etc is really starting to get to me at the moment.

I'm a bit incredulous of comments made in forums saying they're perfectly happy with this kind of response. For MD users it's unsurprising since the speed of their transport has to catch up with even Chronic, but for flash/HDD player users who have apparently used other machines, I find it hard to believe that this is acceptable if you have more than a handful of albums in your library and you refresh them on a regular basis.

If anyone has speeding up tips, please post'em.

[vkone]

Some updates:

The 8800GTX has been replaced by a 7900GS. Much more stable in sleeping. In fact, I'd probably say fully stable as I've not had a display-related issue since putting in the 7900. Clearly overkill was a bad idea. I did not install the X-Fi, but rather have put a spare Fireface 800 on here for the occasions that I may want to listen directly from this PC. Once again, seemingly no driver issues.

The prognosis for general everyday usage: Very slow. This is with a 14,000 track library, a subset of my main library. I can imagine that if I put my full library on here, Chronic will probably choke. iTunes and j.River have no issues with my main library but that's beside the point at this stage. The slowness is not so much in the library listing, it's the pauses between doing anything at all that gets me. Significantly less than the Dells I had it running on for sure, but just the accumulation of these pauses when navigating folders, loading the player, unloading it, etc is really starting to get to me at the moment.

I'm a bit incredulous of comments made in forums saying they're perfectly happy with this kind of response. For MD users it's unsurprising since the speed of their transport has to catch up with even Chronic, but for flash/HDD player users who have apparently used other machines, I find it hard to believe that this is acceptable if you have more than a handful of albums in your library and you refresh them on a regular basis.

If anyone has speeding up tips, please post'em.

Hi,

wow. I have just recently enterd the Sony Walkman World and I already second your SS impressions. I get lockups and slowdown regularly no matter what I do.

I transfer ONE album, the left library column locks up and is refreshed. I transfer 2 albums -> the left library column freezes for a few seconds. When I highlight a bunch of albums and drag them over to my portable device the entire application locks for 20 secs or so. When I dare try to initiate something else in SS the programm crashes (vista ultimate 32).

I have already terminated all unnecessary tasks and processes - to no avail. At this time my conclusion is that Sonic Stage 4.3 is a bad piece of software.

[bangraman]

Well, I have some sort of resolution to my issues.

Thanks to a couple of posters on Head-Fi, who I worked out had similar library sizes, I figured out the maximum practical library size of Chronicstage. It's about 8,000 tracks, which at a typical 160-192K ends up about 40Gb. Having thrown in different bitrates, it's clearly the number of tracks that is the issue, not their sizes.

Below this level, I have to say Chronicstage is not so Chronic - if you disregard it's inherently inelegant and rudimentary nature - and does what little it does quite smoothly, provided you don't have other compatibility issues. Other compatibility issues included additional codecs and media splitters being present on your system, but those issues are already covered and known.

I'm not sure if the ~8K track soft limit (by soft limit, I mean that Chronic will continue to work beyond this point but gets slower and slower) has been discussed before, but this is my finding so far. I'm now assuming everyone who has no major issues basically has less than 700 or so albums in their Chronicstage implementation. The count may be tied to your disk / processing power too, so I am not 100% sure that the ~8K limit applies to everyone else.

Library management in Chronic is still unwieldy though, so I would hesitate to call this beyond 'barely usable' as far as the industry state of the art is concerned. However I have now discovered that the terminal slowdowns are avoidable, which is good news.