computer questions

Post by jb » Tue Apr 05, 2005 7:17 pm

Bah, that's just a weak version of what we had back on the PS1, but with multiplayer.

Post by jb » Tue Apr 05, 2005 7:19 pm

One should note that the mac mini hard drive is 5400rpm. So make sure you get an external. I've read that firewire is more "robust" for audio recording than USB 2.0, if you go that way.

tonetripper · Post by **tonetripper** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 9:01 pm

ken wrote:boing!

PSP Vintage Warmer is the bomb.

Ken

If used ever so subtle on a mix it can be a nice finisher to your levels. I've been using it on the back end of my mixes as of late and nothing else in Cubase and the results have rocked. Great for squashing that dynamic range ever so nicely without crapping out.

;p

Rabid Garfunkel · Post by **Rabid Garfunkel** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 9:36 pm

One more spiel in favor of recording onto a second hard drive... while the software and OS and such are occupying the arm of the boot drive, if you're recording onto that very same drive additional latency/dropped portions of the recording and so on will creep in, fuxoring your recording and making for very cranky sessions.

Think of the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. That's the drive's arm if you're only using one drvie for the whole system.

Get the second hard drive. Keep it optimized (lots of big, happy wide-open contiguous sectors of emptiness are your friend for recording and editing).

Rock on.

Koushirou · Post by **Koushirou** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 10:05 pm

im currently looking at some laptops and external HDs as well. at dell they're offering a $150, 100 gb external USB HD. should i just buy this or shop for a firewire? is the firewire really that much better?

Koushirou · Post by **Koushirou** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 12:11 am

also, i re-read this thread.... and in the first reply jb suggested 512mb ram, 2.4Ghz computer.... yet others suggest mac mini which is 256/1.42...... so if a mac mini is competent enough for recording, why go for jb's recommendations? did i misunderstand something? keep in mind i won't be recording more than one track at once, i'll just be overdubbing or whatevers... thanks...

Kamakura · Post by **Kamakura** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 7:25 am

It all depends if you want to go the mac or pc route.
Out of personal preference I'd have a mac anyday http://www.macvspc.info/
Whichever you choose, the more ram the better, with 512 as a minimum. For media (video/audio) a dedicated drive is a must though USB2 is prety much as good as firewire, DO NOT buy a USB1 drive.

As to processor speeds:

Microprocessor - MTOPS
Intel 3.2 GHz Xeon (or Pentium 4) - 9,067
AMD dual 250 Opteron - 16,400
AMD quad 850 Opteron - 32,000
Apple 1.25 GHz G4 Power PC (e.g. eMac) - 17,917
Apple 1.67 GHz G4 Power PC (e.g. PowerBook) - 23,941
Apple dual 1.42 GHz G4 Power PC - 38,340
Apple 1.8 GHz G5 Power PC (e.g. iMac) - 21,753
Apple dual 2.5 GHz G5 Power PC - 56,250

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 9:40 am

Yeah, don't be fooled by the gigahertz rating. In the PC world AMDs haven't increased their speed in years. In fact, the computer I'm using right now (fairly top o' the line AMD64) is SLOWER than the PC I had two years ago, yet it still kicks the ass of any other computer I've used. On a MacMini your bottleneck is going to be the ram, not the processor.

I prefer the PC route personally (not explicitly a recommendation) because you can build an amazing PC for $800, a shit PC (512mb ram, 2.4Ghz) for $200 and VST link them together (supposedly). Also these days 512 mb of PC3200 DDR will set you back about $39, so there's no excuse to have unused ram slots on your motherboard. As I type I'm looking at 4 brand new sticks of ram sitting on my desk, smiling back at me.

All that, as well as the fact that I can't buy a Mac in this town.

Post by jb » Sun Apr 17, 2005 1:13 pm

Koushirou wrote:also, i re-read this thread.... and in the first reply jb suggested 512mb ram, 2.4Ghz computer.... yet others suggest mac mini which is 256/1.42...... so if a mac mini is competent enough for recording, why go for jb's recommendations? did i misunderstand something? keep in mind i won't be recording more than one track at once, i'll just be overdubbing or whatevers... thanks...

I would love to have a mac, but I don't think I can afford the one I want and I don't want to settle. You'll be able to do recording on a mac mini. It's not like the audio programs won't start up or anything like that. But whether you want to go for a mini for recording depends on your goals for your music. If you're in the least ambitious about your recording, you're going to want to beef up that mac mini or just go ahead and get an iMac, since by the time you've maxed out the options on a mini you're up to the price of a G5 iMac anyway. Notice that I think everybody who suggested the mini also said "get a firewire hard drive"-- that's because of the slow HD in the mini.

Basically what you want in a computer for audio is: The fastest CPU you can afford (I acknowledge that this doesn't necessarily mean "the most gigahertz") + The most RAM you can afford + A hard drive that spins at no less than 7200 rpm.

If you're going to record in the same room as your computer you also want all of the quiet gear you can possibly cram into the case. A quiet power supply, a quiet case fan, a quiet cpu cooling system, a case will some kind of muffling substance in it, hard drive enclosures that have rubber stuff to dampen vibrations, a fanless video card, etc etc. And it's still gonna make noise, just maybe it'll be quiet enough for you to not go insane listening to it on that perfect vocal take.

You can hear computer fan noise on Iron & Wine's first album.

The mac mini will be very very quiet-- however your external hard drive probably won't be. So find a drawer to stick it in, or a pillow to put on top of it or something. Computer noise in your recordings is aggravating. If you're just doing one vocal track it won't be so bad-- but if you're recording a vocal track, an acoustic guitar, some shaker stuff, and some backing vocals... all that fan noise will accumulate, because each track will have some fan noise on it and it adds up to a big whirring sound screwing up your mix.

If you have a thousand bucks, check out the audio PC's they sell at sweetwater.com. They tweak the OS for you, stuff it full of quietizing gear and everything, plus they include a recording software suite for you. Next PC I buy will probably be one of those babies. Prolly the big-ass rack bastard, because I'll want something I won't have to upgrade for like, five years.

Koushirou · Post by **Koushirou** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 5:07 pm

i know im asking a lot of questions but this is a lot of money so i wanna make sure i make the right choice.

i read a review of a gateway m520x (p4, 2.8GHz, 533MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, 512mb ram, 40gb/4200rpm) which said that it was outperformed by a dell inspiron 6000 (pentium M730, 1.60 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB, 512 MB ram, 60gb/5400rpm). does this make sense? the dell is not only cheaper but is lighter and has better battery life so i'm wondering what i'm supposed to believe. thanks......

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 6:40 pm

Koushirou wrote:i know im asking a lot of questions but this is a lot of money so i wanna make sure i make the right choice.

i read a review of a gateway m520x (p4, 2.8GHz, 533MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, 512mb ram, 40gb/4200rpm) which said that it was outperformed by a dell inspiron 6000 (pentium M730, 1.60 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB, 512 MB ram, 60gb/5400rpm). does this make sense? the dell is not only cheaper but is lighter and has better battery life so i'm wondering what i'm supposed to believe. thanks......

Centrinos are a serious random factor. Unless Intel has dropped some new technology they are still based on the P3, but with a much lower voltage. This extends the battery life tremendously. Also, your screen will be smaller and dimmer. Centrinos employ power saving hard drive modes and on-the-fly underclocking that could potentially fuck with your recording. To compensate for the difference in speed (2.8 GHz v. 1.6 GHz) they increased the on-die cache size. Supposedly a large cache, coupled with a fairly fast bus speed and an underclocked processor means that you spend much less time moving data from the ram to the cache. The hard drive speed will still be the system's bottleneck; the Dell's faster hard drive probably gives it a boost.

Make sure those benchmarks involve writing and reading data to disk concurrently, as well as some heavy processor usage. Remember, GHz means next to nothing these days.

Koushirou · Post by **Koushirou** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 5:42 pm

question: if i buy the inspiron 6000 with 512 MB RAM, will I be able to upgrade the RAM in the future or should i just spring for a gig right now, even if it'll be a little tough on my wallet? thanks

blue · Post by **blue** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 4:19 pm

i wouldn't bother much with the RAM, unless you plan on having lots of other crap open while you're mixing.

also, it's no surprise that the dell walloped - 5400rpm > 4500rpm.

CPU doesn't matter while recording much, but matters a lot during mixing. if you have another machine you can mix on, you can prolly skimp on CPU.

i have FW and USB2 on my machine, with 1 drive (same manufact) plugged into each, and i can't tell the diff. but i never record to them anyways - i have a parition on my local drive for recording to.

make a recording temp partition, and move crap off of it when you're done. on windows, this is invaluable, because you will be defragging that sucker a lot.

[edit] actually, i have recorded to my usb2 drive for the SF live shows. those were 8-12 tracks for 4 hours or so uninterrupted, and they did fine.

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 4:52 pm

How do I tell what rpm my drives are? I've got two hard drives (60g+30g), and I can't seem to find out any specs on them through control panel.

I've only had problems with latency once I got up to 60+ tracks. And usually it came in the form of a skip when a big group of tracks came in.

Leaf · Post by **Leaf** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 4:56 pm

It says on the hard drive, often, on a sticky.

Hoblit · Post by **Hoblit** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:36 pm

The Sober Irishman wrote:How do I tell what rpm my drives are? I've got two hard drives (60g+30g), and I can't seem to find out any specs on them through control panel.

I've only had problems with latency once I got up to 60+ tracks. And usually it came in the form of a skip when a big group of tracks came in.

Turn off your computer, open it up, unplug your hard drive from power source, unplug your harddrive from communication cable (IDE or SCSI), unscrew it, pull it out, and look.

also, you never need 60+ tracks. Ever.

blue · Post by **blue** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:46 pm

dont be unplugging stuff.

just google the model number.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 11:58 pm

Mac mini is basically the same innards as the laptop I use as my only computer anymore. It's just fine for recording. But of course it isn't a laptop. The iBook G4 can be had for around $900 and comes with lots of fun recording software (like GarageBand) which is really quite good, especially with version 2.0 which came out a couple months ago.

IMO, since you're the one buying the computer, it should be up to the other people to deal with it. You're buying it for you, not them. If they're so opposed to a Mac, they can get their own computers. ;) (Unless I totally misunderstood the situation or something.) Anyway, most people who are opposed to Macs are really just opposed to the "image" of Mac users, or haven't used a Mac in like 10 years and remember it as being "dumbed-down."

Religious battles aside... Catching up on some of the technical minutiæ:

The RPM of a disk directly affects how much data can be read from (or written to) it at any given time. Higher RPM means you can handle more tracks at the same time. In my experience, 4200RPM is only enough to handle 2-3 tracks at once. RPM has absolutely nothing to do with latency, though.

Having more RAM means needing to touch disk less often, which will buy you even more track handling capability.

CPU cache size actually doesn't impact performance for audio all that much, with the exception of softsynths and VSTs, which both reuse the same chunks of data a lot. For streaming data off of disk (like for traditional multitrack recording), cache doesn't help all that much. Even then, cache doesn't really help that much with most modern softsynths anyway. More cache certainly won't hurt, but it's not really that big of a priority when specing out a system.

Firewire is a teensy bit slower than USB 2.0, but it does a much better job of sustained data rate, while USB 2.0 works best in short bursts. So, Firewire is definitely the way to go for recording. I highly recommend the <a href="http://macally.com/spec/firewire/storag ... l">Macally PHR 100AF</a>. I have two of those for my laptop's external storage (one with a 250GB 7200RPM and one with a 300GB 5400RPM) and they work wonderfully. They're also only about $35 each from newegg.com. They also make versions which speak USB, though they cost more.

As far as recording interfaces go, the Tascam US series (122, 224, 428) are all good, and quite inexpensive. I have a 428, which provides four inputs (all preamped, and two also support high impedance sources like guitars without a DI box), S/PDIF in and out (which I use to connect it to my stereo system), two separate MIDI buses, and a control surface. It also has only 12ms of latency (at least on my Mac, which has a much better USB chipset than most PCs) which is definitely good enough (and all modern software compensates for recording latency anyway).

Software-wise I can't help much on the PC side. On the Mac I love GarageBand and Logic 7, and to a lesser extent Soundtrack (though I haven't tried Soundtrack Pro), and I've used Logic 6 on the PC and it seems quite capable, though not nearly as usable/efficient/powerful as 7 (which is Mac-only). Back when I used a PC for recording I used a combination of CoolEdit Pro and Acid. I've messed around a bit with Albeton Live and it seems like it's either really good or totally incompatible with your head, and it's totally incompatible with my head. There's a free demo available, in any case.