Hardware suggestions for Recording Computer

[cynical1]

Okay, the old kerosene powered computer just can't handle digital recording and mixing...time to build a new one.

Most of the machines I've built for myself and others have been graphics\3D workstations or game boxes. I'm a little behind the curve on building a recoding box.

Just a few questions on what works...and what doesn't work...based on your personal experience.

What CPU BUS works the best?

How much RAM is "enough" RAM for recording and mixing?

What sound card(s) do you recommend?

Anyone running sound cards in an array?

Should I opt for a special MIDI card, or just a good DI box and run it in the USB port?

Anyone ever run recording/mixing apps through a RAID?

Do most of the recording or mixing apps multithread on a box with two CPU's?

This may be too far out, but I've noticed certain apps are rated good in MAC, and some in Windows. Has anyone ever done any recording or mixing on a VMWare box? (I'm toying with the idea of running a Linux boot/VMWare MAC\Windows box)

Any suggestions or horror stories are welcomed.

This ain't gonna happen tomorrow, but I'd like to start my eBaying early...

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[andy]

I would say that a couple of Gigabytes is enough to run without having to worry about how much Ram is being used.

For a sound card, an external 'audio interface' is usually best- it will give you connectors for mics or D.I., and can be upgraded much more easily. I currently have 8 XLR+Jack inputs, enough to record a heavily mic'ed drum kit, or a band if needed. I love the capacity to record stuff in stereo too, and it didn't cost crazy money, fits one rack space, and just connects via firewire.

It is a Presonus Firepod, now named something similar, but still the same product it seems. I guess this is a recommendation as requested, but it may be a bit bigger that you are currently looking for. If not recording kits, a two input box should cover just about any other situation, and obviously come at a much lower price.

[cynical1]

I was leaning towards to interface box. Thanks for the insight. I've seen the different proprietary boxes that tie into a specific brand of software...but would prefer to go with a non-specific interface. I don't want to be tied down to just one software release...and their endless updates and revisions.

Right now I'm looking at just one or two inputs. Just a guitar and a bass. The mic interface would be nice too. Two mic interfaces would be even better as you can mic close and a few feet back...this is how I used to mic the bass in the old analog days...

The drums will be digitally software generated...but hey, at least they won't be drunk halfway through the song and start playing something else...

I'm looking at Sonar and EZDrummer. The minimum specs on both of these look conservative. From my experience, doubling manufacturers specs gets you into the functional range... Anyone have any good or bad experiences with this combination?

I've found the .vst plugins on multiple tracks is what eats your system alive. This is where I'm really short on knowledge to build for this condition. I'll be a generation or two back on the computer spec, but I'm pretty sure I can get this thing built to handle the basic stuff I'm gonna do without the system going into a hemorrhage...

Thanks for the tip.

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[ashcatlt]

This is one I'm not going to be a lot of help with, cause I've always just used what I had. I can tell you about that, anyway, might give you some idea.

This machine I'm on now is our home entertainment center. It's got all kinds of peripherals hanging off of it, and a bunch of little widgets in the system tray all the time. It's an AMD 850MHz, with 736M RAM.

Running Sonar or Cubase I can get maybe 8 tracks with EQ enabled and a plugin or two on each strip. Things start to bog down around there, forcing me to render things. This is not a huge deal for me. I used to do this at 66MHz and 8M RAM. I'm pretty used to the ocassional machine enforced cigarette break.

My studio machine is an AMD 2.21GHz with 2G RAM. The audio drive is SATA, but I can't tell you much more than that. It's stripped down to as bare bones as I can get it. No firewall, no auto updates or system recovery, no printspooler...

I have yet to run this thing out of processor or RAM. My projects sometimes get pretty big, with lots of VSTi instruments, busses all over the place with all kinds of effects, and at least 2 bands of EQ (HPF and LPF) on about every channel. It has easily handled 3 instances of EZDrummer on top of all the other weirdness. I still end up rendering some things, but more to clear up some of the clutter and keep my head from exploding.

I've got no specific sound card suggestions. Mine's a Steinberg VSL2020. Stereo line level analog in/out, SPDIF in/out, and 16 tracks of ADAT in/out. This usually connects to a Fostex brand standalone HD recorder via the ADAT i/o, and I use that for conversion. For mic pres I've got an ART Dual MP and a Soundcraft Ghost 32 channel monstrosity of a board. I don't think any of this is what you're looking for.

I've always been opposed to the idea of tethering the mic pres and/or DI to the computer. I'd like to be able to use these elsewhere, if necessary, and maybe patch in some other stuff (EQ, compression, whatever) before I get to the A>D. My inclination would be to find a reasonable converter without any bells and whistles and seperate rackmounted pres. This also would allow you to upgrade one or the other without having to do both. If I had to make the choice, I'd go for the best converter I could afford first. Some of the ART "tube" pres sell for $40 or less most of the time. Or, of course, you can build a really nice solid state mic pre for about $5.

My ex-studio machine - which now acts as a monitor cable extension - has 5 soundcards including the on-board. The others are basically SoundBlaster type PCI cards. I was using them for MIDI I/O, but I have also done some audio recording with that configuration. It worked as well as the CPU/RAM would allow to capture multiple tracks. There are lots of reasons not to use this type of card for serious recording, but I've gotten some more than acceptable results with them.

I question your use of the word MIDI, since it doesn't really make sense in context. Do you have any external MIDI devices? Keyboards, electronic drums, synth modules, effects boxes you want to control from inside the computer...? If so, you'll want at least one MIDI port. For this, a SoundBlaster type card would work fine, or you could get one of those little 1x1 USB thingies for about the same price.

Hope some of this helps.

[cynical1]

Actually Ash, that helps quite a bit.

I understand how graphics and 3D apps work having used them for over 15 years...and I know how to build a machine that will run them smoothly. I have about zip for experience in building a recording/mixing computer as I've done very little of it. And from experience, an AMD 1.2 GHZ/266 FSB machine with 768 MB of RAM doesn't cut it very well...not that I don't enjoy the constant cigarette breaks...but I'm running out of matches...

I'm thinking the AMD 64 X2 dual cores, around 2.6 or 2.8 ghz, along with about 3-4 GB of RAM should handle what I'm going to be doing for a long time to come. SATA drives are pretty much the standard now. I'm still curious about how Sonar and EZ Drummer will function in a RAID array. Should be okay...

Funny you mention Cubase and Sonar. I've tried every demo available out there over the past 4 weeks. Cubase was the buggiest piece of software I've used in a long time. Reaper was a resource hog. Sonar PE demo was the smoothest running mixer I've tried. I don't have the cahones in this computer to record directly into Sonar...but tracks recorded in Audacity mixed pretty well. What I liked about Sonar is that is stops itself from jamming up your machine.

I'm still researching a soundcard. The external cards look interesting, but never having used one before I need to read up on them. Thanks for the insight on your card.

And yes, I need a mic preamp. I've looked at a few, but not seriously. You know where I can get a schematic for a $5.00 mic preamp?

And no, I do not have any external MIDI devices. I'm still lost in the woods on MIDI anyway. The more I read about it the more lost I become. I'm planning on running everything into the machine and manipulate it from there. Thanks for solving that problem for me.

This is really just a way for me to lay down some tracks, get some ideas out and enjoy myself. I need a new computer anyway...shoemaker's kids syndrome...even my wife has a better machine then I do...

I figure if I stay a generation or two back I can get this built on the cheap. It's the audio part of this that I need to catch up on...

Thanks for the insights. It really does help figuring out what I need and don't need.

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[lpf3]

cynical 1-

I'm running ProTools LE 7.0 with the MBox 2 interface . I bought the factory bundle , but if I had it to do again I would have saved some money & got the cheaper one , without the factory bundle . At first glance it seems like you're getting alot , but most of the bundle is a bunch of demo versions & if ya want the real deal they're big buck upgrades .
ProTools itself is a very good recording program , with tons of editing capabilities & is pretty easy to learn . You can make excellent recordings with it . A lot of people also like Cubase , according to some reviews even better than ProTools .
The MBox is a USB interface ( I like the zero latency monitoring ) , but for a sound card/interface combo the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 seems interesting & not too expensive . ( around 130 bucks )
If you're building a recording computer , a dual core processor would be nice , at least 2.2 ghz . I have a single core ( Intel ) , only 1.8 ghz and for processor intensive plug ins ( like amplitube ) I run out of CPU power pretty fast .
I'm running 2- 80 GB hard drives , one for my OS , one for recording only . 80 GB is plenty for my needs but ......
(BTW mine is not a RAID setup . ) You can record to an extenal drive also - go with firewire instead of USB .
I was running 1 GB of RAM ,which was fine most of the time but I upgraded to 2 GB & I've found that I can record at lower hardware buffer sizes with no more problems with interrupts .
I don't know all that much about MIDI - I only use it to sync the clock on my drum machine , but then I just record audio to track(s).
I hope some of this helps , & have fun .


-lpf3

[andy]

My inclination would be to find a reasonable converter without any bells and whistles and seperate rackmounted pres.

Aha! Suddenly I understand some stuff a lot better. Simple stuff, but a penny just dropped.

[ChrisK]

I'm thinking the AMD 64 X2 dual cores, around 2.6 or 2.8 ghz, along with about 3-4 GB of RAM should handle what I'm going to be doing for a long time to come. SATA drives are pretty much the standard now.

For a given clock rate, the Intel Core 2 Duo processors are about 10 - 20% faster than AMD. This is helped by the cache structure (dynamic) on Intel CPUs. I used to buy AMD, I now only buy Intel powered machines.

3-4 GB of SDRAM is the minimum. Get a 64 bit OS if you need more. Use fast drives; if it's a laptop get a 7,200 RPM drive and if it's a desktop get a 15,000 RPM drive. Run the drive cleanup utilities regularly.

Consider the use of an 8 or 16 GB Ultra III SD flash card as the primary recording storage (move the files to the rotating drive later).

[cynical1]

I agree, the Intel clocks a bit faster. They also cost about 30-50% more. To me, this is money I can put into RAM or a faster HD. I've been building Intel and AMD machines for going on 15 years now. For the money I'll probably stick with AMD. CPU's, like cigars, can be a very personal choice. For me, it's just the cost versus benefit.

I thought about going SCSI to get the faster RPM. That's a possibility down the road. A 7200 RPM SATA drive is probably what I'll settle on.

I like the idea of recording to a flash drive. No spin and a faster BUS. Never thought of that. I've used flash drives as a dump for the virtual memory on slower machines, but never thought of recording to one. Very clever.

And it'll be a desktop machine. Laptops are great for reading your e-mail in the commode, but too limiting for my personal taste.

Are you running a 64 bit OS? The XP 64 bit ran well...which explains why Micro$oft is killing XP soon. I'm just not looking forward to Vista. And if I run Linux I'm gonna have to run a shell for the recording/mixing apps. I'd like to use virtual machines, but I don't know how it will handle all the external devices.

If you haven't tried it, VMWare Workstation in a Linux host is fast. You can run as many virtual machines as your computer has resources for...record on one session, surf the net on another, do your taxes on a third...and they all exist fine by themselves...in almost any OS... Once you have an OS setup as a virtual machine, save the file off and when it explodes, just drop the backup file copy back in. And VMWare Server is free off their site...the Workstation release is $189.00, but it's still a bargain.

Sorry, got a bit carried away... I just don't want to spend more time tweaking the PC then using it...those days are behind me. I just want the magic box to work... All of your suggestions help immensely.

Thanks for the tip on the flash drive. Very slick

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[ashcatlt]

With connectors, box, knobs and stuff it's a little more than $5 a channel. Still much cheaper than any of the ones they tested against.

I've tried to like Cubase a number of times since its debut, and every time come up disappointed. Sonar just works, and I think it actually sounds better.

MIDI is something I probably can help with. If you encounter any issues or have questions, just holler.

I'm intrigued by the idea of the SD card, but I'll have to look into that further. The card readers I have are USB, doesn't this limit the transfer rate?

[cynical1]

On the flash drive idea, the Firewire and USB 2.0 just fly past a SATA drive. ChrisK makes a very good point with this suggestion.

SIMPLE TRANSFER RATE EXAMPLES:

USB 2.0 - 480MB\sec
Firewire - 400 MB\sec
SATA 3G - 300MB\sec
SATA 1G - 150MB\sec
IDE DMA\ATA100- 100MB\sec

This is a bit misleading, just going by the numbers. Firewire uses a different architecture then USB 2.0. It's more intelligent in the BUS routing, less system intensive and actually 30%-70% faster then USB 2.0.

And a hard drive has moving parts...making it the weakest link in your computer. Even a 4.0GB thumb drive in a USB 2.0 slot would be faster then the latest SATA drives...

Once they perfect the design to allow greater storage capacity on USB\Firewire drives the old hard drive will be a thing of the past...you could run your laptop through the entire business day and never lose the battery charge...and that's not too many years in the future.

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[robertcorrell]

My first post!

Those transfer rates are wrong. You are confusing Megabits per second Megabytes per second (an easy thing to do).

Converting all to Megabytes per second (see Wikipedia entry on Serial ATA) gives you:

SATA 300 300 Megabytes/sec
eSATA 300 Megabytes/sec
USB 2.0 60 Megabytes/sec
FireWire 400 50 Megabytes/sec
FireWire 800 100 Megabytes/sec

I run Pro Tools with Mbox 2 as well. Have an Intel quad core with 4GB ram. SATA hard drives. Very capable system, but of course anything but a supercomputer will choke on overdone plug-ins and a high track count eventually. At the moment I track myself on guitar and bass.

I love Pro Tools (disclaimer - I am an author and have a book on it) but use other DAWs as well. Pro Tools 8 is out now - very good revision from 7.4. Lots more plug-ins from the start without having to buy anything extra. To each his own, of course. Pro Tools lets you get the hardware and software at the same time. Good points about that, but it also limits you. If you are looking at software first (well, that included Pro Tools too), backtrack the system requirements and go from there to see what computer you need. My advice is get the best you can (within reason - there is normally a price point where getting something better cost far more) and it will serve you well for 5+ years. Get something really cheap and you may be unhappy from the start.

Currently I am looking to get an outboard A/D/A converter and some other gear outside of the computer. Something like a Chandler Limited pre/eq. I bought a Marshall Vintage Modern 50 watt head recently and am looking to to enhance my sound "pre-computer" to take advantage of such an awesome amp.

If you are new to digital recording, prepare yourself for a whole new (and sometimes disappointing) world. There are many many things that are fantastic about it. Yet on the other hand, you get what you pay for. As good as the pres on the Mbox 2 are, they can't compete with the expensive stuff. Same for the converters. The world has opened up for inexpensive home recording, but there really is a difference between the levels of gear.

I'm not a fan of "sound cards" for recording pro audio, although you may be happy. My biggest complaint is interfacing with them. They are normally 1/8-inch mono or stereo and I run studio type gear with 1/4-inch mono, TRS, or XLR. M-Audio makes sound "cards" that go in your computer but have cords or dongles for pro gear connections. I have used the Delta-66 and like it (but it has no pres, so be warned). Otherwise, you can get a number of USB interfaces out there that are reasonable. Expect to pay more for FireWire. My Mbox 2 is USB. Would have liked the Pro but didn't see much need for the I/O at the moment. When I need it, I will get something bigger/better anyway.

Robert

[newey]

Robert-

Hello and Welcome!

Other than that, I have very little to add to this post. I'm on about Day 3 of trying to figure out Cubase.

Cynical noted that:

Once they perfect the design to allow greater storage capacity on USB\Firewire drives the old hard drive will be a thing of the past...you could run your laptop through the entire business day and never lose the battery charge...and that's not too many years in the future.

Some of the so-called Netbooks are using flash memory, either 8GB or 16GB, in lieu of a hard drive. While I'm sure flash memory will be improved over time, the last time I checked, it was rated for about 10K R/W cycles over its lifetime. Fine for recording, but for running an OS off of it?

[ChrisK]

Converting all to Megabytes per second (see Wikipedia entry on Serial ATA) gives you:

SATA 300 300 Megabytes/sec
eSATA 300 Megabytes/sec
USB 2.0 60 Megabytes/sec
FireWire 400 50 Megabytes/sec
FireWire 800 100 Megabytes/sec

These are peak channel rates into/out of the buffers. These are not sustained write rates.

Write speeds are not mentioned in this link.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_drive

It does mention that Intel flash is the fastest.
"While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5Gb/s bandwidth, Intel's Solid State Disk drives are close to saturating the SATA 3Gb/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed,"


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

"Data transfer rate: As of 2008, a typical 7200rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second.[32]This rate depends on the track location, so it will be highest for data on the outer tracks (where there are more data sectors) and lower toward the inner tracks (where there are fewer data sectors); and is generally somewhat higher for 10,000rpm drives. A current widely-used standard for the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0Gb/s SATA, which can send about 300 megabytes/sec. from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates."

Again, write speed is not mentioned. This is for read (disk-to-buffer) speed.


Here is data on the Intel flash drive.
download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/mainstream-sata-ssd-datasheet.pdf

It's up to a maximum of 70 MBytes/sec write and up to 250 MBytes/sec read.


In recording, it's mostly limited by write speed.

I was talking about the Ultra III SD flash with a 30 MByte read/write (well, into the buffer) speed. I use the 8 GByte ones for Ready Boost on a couple of Vista laptops that I have.

It really helps on my 1.2 GHZ Core 2 Duo Dell Latitude tablet running Vista Business (120 GB 5400 RPM 1.8" SATA drive, 3 GB SDRAM).

The fastest things are the SATA Intel flash drives

[ChrisK]

Most of the machines I've built for myself and others have been graphics\3D workstations or game boxes.

An interesting focus these days is using the GPU NOT for graphics. We use it for MatLab acceleration.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html

The Tesla C1060 box has 950 GPU cores and a performance level of 4 teraFLOPS (4 trillion floating point math operations per second).


But then, there's www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000842&subSection=News

IBM Tapped For 20-Petaflop Government Supercomputer

Called Sequoia, the massive system is expected to deliver 20 petaflops of computing power to the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of Energy. Sequoia will be used to simulate testing of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

A petaflop stands for a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, and a teraflop is a trillion calculations a second. To put Sequoia's computing power in perspective, what it can do in one hour would take all 6.7 billion people on Earth with hand calculators 320 years, if they worked together on the calculation for 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, according to IBM.

Sequoia will be built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and also will be used by the Los Alamos and Sandia national labs. The system will comprise 96 refrigerator-size racks with a combined 1.6 PetaBytes of memory, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million IBM Power processor cores. The system, which will cover 3,422 square feet, will be built on IBM's future BlueGene supercomputer hardware and software technology.

[cynical1]

Interesting. It never ceases to amaze me.

And to think...it all started with the ENIAC...



I'll be happy when I can run some .vst plugins without looking at an involuntary restart...

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[newey]

what it can do in one hour would take all 6.7 billion people on Earth with hand calculators 320 years, if they worked together on the calculation for 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, according to IBM.

How many years is that for chimpanzees with Selectrics? ;D

And to think...it all started with the ENIAC...

From Wikipedia:

ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes

A true tone monster! ;D

[robertcorrell]

Feb 6, 2009 21:44:17 GMT -5 ChrisK said:

These are peak channel rates into/out of the buffers. These are not sustained write rates.

Yes, thanks. Forgive me for not being precise in my post. I was correcting what I though were posted bus speeds rather than trying to compare sustained read/write speed for individual drives.

I agree with you and the original poster that when you bring the hard drive and other considerations into the equation, the practical difference in bus speeds diminishes, especially for a single drive.

[ChrisK]

Sure. No forgiveness necessary. (Now, If you'd asked for a pardon.....)

Bus speeds are almost always the maximum possible, on a good day when the wind is right, the moon is full, and the avocado is in season......

It's hard to definitively know what is needed. Flash, albeit small and expensive (and prone to wear-out), seems to be the likely candidate for the best fastest write performance.

Of course, the 64 bit OS infers SDRAM beyond 3 GB, up to 8 or 16 GB. Gee, do we still have/use RAM disks?

Or buffered aspirin.

[cynical1]

Feb 7, 2009 21:08:05 GMT -5 ChrisK said:

...Gee, do we still have/use RAM disks?...

Why yes, Virginia...yes we do still use ramdisk... We're both dating ourselves with this one...

Kind of funny you brought up ram drives. Considering my current issues with the old kerosene powered computer...and the spark of an idea from your flash drive posting...I went looking for an XP friendly RAM disc driver earlier in the week. They really do still exist. There are even RAM disk drivers available for 64 bit and 2003 server operating systems.

If you don't already know what a RAM disc is, then please read the rest of this post with a little trepidation... When using a RAM disc you have to keep in mind that you're working without a net...it only holds your work while the system is powered up. Should the system lockup, shutdown or have any issues while the ram disc is in use everything on this ram disc will be lost.

All warnings aside, I grabbed the Gavotte Ramdisk with GUI (ramdisk.zip). It's a free 150K download and blond simple to set-up and use.

You have to initiate the ram drive before you open your app, then from the desired app you'll need to target to the ram disk in order for it to push your working or temp files\folders there by default.

It did allow me to record a single small track, with no effects, in the Sonar demo. Something I had not been able to accomplish previously without it stuttering itself out. I don't have the ponies to push it too far, but on a 2 minute single stereo test track it worked fine. I only gave the RAM drive 50 MB, but I have to think this may have real potential on a faster machine with a few gigs of ram.

You can read up on how to and what is RAM disk here at the same place the download originates from...or at Wikipedia...

If you decide to use RAM disk, remember, it only stores your data until the power goes off. Volatile is the operative word. Remember to move your work to a spinning drive before shutting down.

Happy Trails

Cynical One

_{* Buffered aspirin only required if you encounter a power failure moments before saving your final mixed tracks off the ram disk to your hard drive...}

[gfxbss]

3-4 GB of SDRAM is the minimum. Get a 64 bit OS if you need more. Use fast drives; if it's a laptop get a 7,200 RPM drive and if it's a desktop get a 15,000 RPM drive. Run the drive cleanup utilities regularly.

i am noticing that you are mentioning sonar a lot. that is good because i would like to point out that i think sonar is the only recording prog out right now that will run on a 64bit platform.

so, when choosing processors and software, you may want to double check that everything will run on a 64 bit platform.

also, if you go w/ 32bit, i would like to mention magix samplitude. it is imho the best recording software out right now.

Tyler

[cynical1]

For now I'm probably going to stick with a 32 bit OS. Not sure on the dual cores for right now either. I've been reading that some vst and vsti plugins are not warm and fuzzy with 64 bit yet. I'd hate to drop big coin on a machine, only to find out I need more coin to use it...

I've tried most of the demos out there on the most common recording/mixing apps. I was completely underwhelmed by all of the Steinberg offerings...Reaper turns out to be an unstable resource hog...Acid wasn't bad...but the Sonar demo ran pretty well.

The fact that it runs on my current machine, coupled with most of the reviews and forums I've been to speaking highly of it, has me leaning towards Sonar. From what I've read, most vts and vsti plugins seem to work well in it.

I'll check out the demo for Samplitude. Thanks for the tip. If I don't blow a fuse it goes on the short list.

When I finish with the taxes next week I'll have a much better idea of exactly what kind of machine gets built...

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[gfxbss]

sonar is a great program, and that is what i was running until i worked with samplitude.

also, wanted to mention that you may want multiple hard drives w/ RAID set up to backup your main drive. im just saying this because i have lost tracks in the bast due to a HD dying on me....

Tyler

[b4nj0]

HyperOs.

I would not run a system without HyperOs. Micro$oft are listed as a customer, they must sure be wondering how these guys do it! Note that it does not work by hiding operating systems. the latest version even lets you run multiple operating systems from within one partition!! Clone a live running system anyone?

www.hyperossystems.co.uk/?affid=19129

This thread is about hardware recommendations so while you are there, read up on the "Hyperdrive" (Run totally from physical ram- Xp starts up in seconds, office documents open almost instantly, I so wish that I could afford one but....if I set out to build a new box, I'd economise on bells and whistles CPUs etc and invest in the Hyperdrive. Hardware will take years to catch up with this level of performance.

b4nj0.

[sumgai]

C1,

You've gotten the best poop on what to do and when to do it, so I needn't go anywhere in that direction. However, your questions about MIDI are more germane than you may know....

In point of fact, many intermediate/advanced recordists are using MIDI-based external controllers to..... er, control their software. This lets them do what they need to do with their hands (i.e. play their instruments) while controlling the computer's operations with their feet.

While I have a very good background and understanding of MIDI (and you can certainly ask me whatever you wish), there are other forums aboot the web that concern themselves strictly with this topic. Two of the more popular sites would be www.loopersdelight.com and www.fruity-loops.com. I don't hang out there myself, but where I do hang out, they get mentioned often. I'd be surprised if ash couldn't also recommend a few sites that will get you over the MIDI control hump.

FWIW, I don't record. I mean it, there's nothing in my repertoire that's worth saving for posterity, so I don't bother. But I do know a few tricks about using some of the foot controller pedal boards, so let me air some advice for you.

CAUTION: MIDI terminology ahead - definitions will be provided in parenthesis.

In the MIDI world, we have lots of options. But the two main things are Program Changes and Controller Changes (abbreviated PC and CC). That said, we also have clock signals, but many summary MIDI articles give them almost no treatment at all. That's sad, because we'll need that info right here and now.

Suffice it to say, a MIDI "performance" must be started and stopped. There are specific MIDI commands (or more properly, messages) for those two actions, but many, if not most, foot controllers can't directly issue those commands!

So what happens is, your software must be capable of interpreting a CC to mean a start (or stop) message - that's the configurable part I mentioned. Given that a foot controller can send out a CC on, say, Controller #80, you'd program your software to receive a CC #80 message with a value of 127 (the maximum value in MIDI-speak) as a "start message". Conversely, a CC#80 - value 0 - would be intrepreted as a "stop message".

Bingo, you're now able to start and stop your recording sessions with your feet, instead of having "dead air" time as your hand hits the space bar, then travels to your axe.

AFAIK, most valid software packages can do this, but not all. Check with people you trust and/or respect to get the real nitty-gritty, I'm not gonna be much help on that one.

HTH



sumgai



p.s. Yes, I am now monitoring the 'House most mornings, Lowerd willing and the wife don't find out!

[cynical1]

Actually, I'm only part germane...

I've never spent much time using or learning about MIDI in the past. I've watched keyboard players mess with it, but never bothered to store anything away in the memory banks. I have only the most basic understanding of how it works and what it can do.

I've used a virtual keyboard with MIDI-OX to do some simple washes and background stuff. The way I play keyboards it's better for me to program it in and let the computer play it back...

The footswitch stop/start thing is cool. That would be very useful.

Thanks for throwing that in. Not that I needed another toy to put on the list...

Good to see you back again. If anyone asks we'll tell them it was the cat using your logon...

Happy Trails

Cynical One