Recording audio on a computer places demands on the computer never anticipated by the computer's creators or operating system manufacturers. For example, if you record on a large disk formatted with FAT32 in Windows 95, Windows will format the disk with small block sizes. This is an attempt to avoid wasting space, since the entire block is consumed even if it only contains a single byte. With "normal" sized files, small block sizes mean less wasted space. With audio, however, small block sizes mean excessive reads and poor disk throughput. In a future article I will discuss the proper techniques for setting the right block sizes. For the moment I want to discuss Virtual Memory. Windows' default Virtual Memory settings are usually not good for audio. First of all, Windows likes to maintain a flexible swapfile size. This is good for typical usage because it allows Windows to increase the size of the swapfile as you load more and more programs into memory. With audio recording, however, disasterous...

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