The Musician Forums > Music Technology & Pro Audio
Setting up your PC for Recording
KitC:
@ jaime - if you look around the classifieds, you might be able to grab a deal on a very good soundcard like M-Audio. The M-Audio 2496 is a very good card for the money although brand new cards will set you back twice your intended budget, it comes standard with RCA I/O (note that the s/pdif digital connections are RCA also). A very good alternative is the Behringer UCA202 which is USB2 and has RCA I/O but it is usually bundled with other Behri products. Someone is offering the Behri FCA202 which is a firewire equivalent of the UCA; if your pc has firewire, I recommend this card but there are a few caveats about onboard firewire, namely, Via firewire chipsets on most mobos are notorious for poor handling of audio so be forewarned.
An alternative to your 1/8" problem is to fashion some 'adapter' plugs, sort of like a mini patchbay. Most electronics stores carry stereo 1/8" to mono RCA y-cables; I suggest connecting these semi-permanently to your soundcard and just use the rca connections as your 'point-of-contact' with other gear like mixers - just add rca to 1/4" adapters if needed. It's much cheaper to replace these y-cables than a soundcard.
@nicolle - my 'office' is a midi project studio which sorta resides in my bedroom, the end result of downsizing on gear and the direct result of going virtual. There are plans of relocating to a place more conducive for visitors, so to speak. I can, however, set up a sort of demo in collaboration with BAMF at his studio over at Sto. Domingo. PM me your location and maybe we can figure something out.
nicolle:
--- Quote from: KitC on April 22, 2007, 10:43:29 AM ---@ jaime - if you look around the classifieds, you might be able to grab a deal on a very good soundcard like M-Audio. The M-Audio 2496 is a very good card for the money although brand new cards will set you back twice your intended budget, it comes standard with RCA I/O (note that the s/pdif digital connections are RCA also). A very good alternative is the Behringer UCA202 which is USB2 and has RCA I/O but it is usually bundled with other Behri products. Someone is offering the Behri FCA202 which is a firewire equivalent of the UCA; if your pc has firewire, I recommend this card but there are a few caveats about onboard firewire, namely, Via firewire chipsets on most mobos are notorious for poor handling of audio so be forewarned.
An alternative to your 1/8" problem is to fashion some 'adapter' plugs, sort of like a mini patchbay. Most electronics stores carry stereo 1/8" to mono RCA y-cables; I suggest connecting these semi-permanently to your soundcard and just use the rca connections as your 'point-of-contact' with other gear like mixers - just add rca to 1/4" adapters if needed. It's much cheaper to replace these y-cables than a soundcard.
@nicolle - my 'office' is a midi project studio which sorta resides in my bedroom, the end result of downsizing on gear and the direct result of going virtual. There are plans of relocating to a place more conducive for visitors, so to speak. I can, however, set up a sort of demo in collaboration with BAMF at his studio over at Sto. Domingo. PM me your location and maybe we can figure something out.
--- End quote ---
hi!
thanks a lot...maybe the demo at BAMF studio at Sto. Domingo would be fine for a start. is there a fee?
redcomet_m:
@nicole
well, i believe Master KitC is a very reasonable man to negotiate with nicole, im sure you could work something out
So to continue KitC's insightful narratives, lets start with memory. If you have the budget get maximum memory that youre mobo can handle although i doubt it will help since the program is 32bit and XP is 32bit unless you work on a 64bit OS and 64bit proc. Id suggest dual core proc as it helps with real time performance.
With regards to hard drives, do simple but clean disk management. Its better to have a system drive, a programs drive and a project/files drive. Disk size is upto you since you have the money not me. But id do settle for a huuuugggeeee project/files drive because all of the biggest data will be handled there. And it doubles as a swap disk to so...oh and get the latest i believe its sata.
Externals are ok but even FW800 cannot match SATA II perf unless youre the mobile type.
Graphics card...hmm do we need that? I dunno, can onboard grpx handle sound editing. Maybe KitC has an answer.
Now thats PC users, Mac users...buy an IMAC, external drive and external audio interface and your done :) if you could, boost your memory. Thats all folks
KitC:
Very nice insights, redcomet!
I'd like to add that although XP is a 32-bit OS, most (if not all) audio programs in the windows platform still operate at 32 bit with the exception of Sonar which is 64-bit ready. In terms of RAM, this mean the OS can only address a maximum of 4 gigs (actually 3.2 gig addressable) and you have to use the 3 gig 'switch' because XP only recognizes 2 gig by default. Does this mean the end of the world for audio usage? No. Because unless you are streaming huge samples from ram, 2 gigs is actually more than enough. One can actually work at 512 megs, but you will have to trim down the amount of background services so that you gain more ram real estate.
About SATA drives... early motherboard implementation of sata often caused problems with audio devices. This is because of how the host controller interface 'sat' on top of the pci bus allowing the drive to communicate with the entire system. The Nforce2 mobos were a 'victim' of this implementation that's why it was often recommended to go PATA with Nforce2. Present day mobos don't suffer from this design quirk
anymore.
I'd go with redcomet's advice on having a separate system and data drive. Not a single drive partitioned into 2 drives, but 2 physical drives. Also have some means of storing data. Right now, cdr's are the safest bet but use known media. Writable dvds are becoming popular as a storage medium but there are reports that these don't hold data as long as cdr's. When in doubt, use branded media manufactured by a reputable firm. (There are branded fakes, however, like branded TDK's and Verbatims but when you go into the manufacturing details, these were often manufactured by a particular taiwanese firm/s. They're easy to spot since they're so cheap.... And stay away from generics!)
Graphics? Decide early on if you're building a gaming machine or an audio workstation since high end video cards are notorious for stealing all available processing bandwidth. Onboard graphics are becoming more powerful, but they often share onboard ram and they sometimes have limited resolutions, like you may have a 19" monitor but if your graphics can only do 1024 x 800, that's simply a waste of monitor real estate. You will want higher resolutions if you want to see more of your work. Interestingly, going multiple monitors is increasingly becoming the standard way of working as it allows you to have a track view on one screen and a console/mixer view on the other - a very efficient way of working sometimes. One more thing, audio applications DO NOT need flashy 3D graphics capabilities but often require very good 2D performance; Matrox vidcards are often good in this regard.
redcomet_m:
thanks sir kit
ive searched among the plethora of local websites and ive summed up the items indicated and came up with a conservative estimate. The CPU alone will cost you round 40k-ish. pretty decent so here are the candidates:
2.16GHZ core2duo: 11500
gigabyte 965GM-S2: 7400
GEIL 2GB PC-533: 7000
Seagate 160x2: 6000
320: 5000
INNO3D GT 7300LE: 2300
total: 39K smackers
Again this is pretty conservative, you could still trim this down if you decide to settle for Pentium D or AMD AM2, or get one IDE DISK so you would have enough leg room to buy a new monitor if you dont want to use your ol' crappy crt monitor. Man sarap magbuo :) though my purpose is very much different than this, pegging my choice around 55k, i felt that pro audio and pro graphics isnt that very far apart in terms of budgeting a workstation.
Anyway, we could still argue on this since there might be issues.
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