How many tracks at once?

G

Garak

New member
What is the limit to the number of tracks that you can record with a PC?

I guess the final limit would be the pci buss. You can add all the scsi HD's you want the pci buss is the limiting factor.

Lots CPU power and RAM is needed aswell.

Has anyone recorded 16, 24, 32 or more 24bit/48khz tracks at once with a PC?

What dose it take do so and what software are you using?

I want to build a machine for recording live shows and such. Most people I have seen doing this are using adats and d88's and other hardware multitrack recorders.
 
you can have as many tracks as you will ever need.

And you SHOULD use an adat or something... unless you are WAY more bomb than me... cuz your comp will crash, and the show must go on, eh? And man, do you really want all that beer in your machine?

SO most peeps who record live shows use outboard stuff.

You can get a nice solid comp with an adat or tdif card.. and record live to ADAT or DA-XX... then take the tapes home... fly the tracks into your machine... and there you go.

OR you could get a hard disk recorder... like that tascam 24 track dealie/??? and then take the drives home to edit. That would be even easier.

but a whole comp?? maybe a laptop.

.25
xoxo
 
I think the speed of the hard drive would be a bigger stumbling block.....one word...look into firewire.....

I would also consider a standalone HD recorder or ADAT for recording live shows....mostly because of portability.....some stability issues to deal with, especailly PC as opposed to Mac.....
 
PC's can be just as portable as anything else, I lug computers around enough to know that. My biggest beef is the fscking montior. As for crashing if you run anything but windows 98, 95 or ME you should be fine.

PC seems cheeper.
3 or 4 delta 1010lt ($659 CND each)
$1000+ IDE RAID (Maybe two)
+$1000 or less for the rest of the computer and I already have most of that

should be cheeper than 3 or 4 adats and I still need gear todo editing.
Much cheeper than the Mackie 24 track HD recorder at like $10,000 Canadian.
And I'm going to rent a 32 channel mackie board and a snake+ splitter when ever I'm doing this. And just for saftey I'm going to do a 2 track mix to my laptop's shitty onboard soundcard.

As for the beer that won't be a problem, the gear is going to stay in the back of the boss's cube van(I work for a live audio company but recording isn't part of my job) thats why I need to rent the snake and mixer.
 
check out the December 2001 issue of Recording...."Laptop DAW" by Bill Stunt.....
 
I am currently running 12 tracks just fine, with no sign of problems. I have one good 7200 rpm drive for data, and a cheap little boot drive, and immediately upon completion of a session, I dump everything to backup. 1Ghz P3, Delta 1010, Delta 44, Asus CUSL2-C (and a GForce 2 for games). Aside from initial problems with M-Audio's drivers, everyting has been just peachy. I have seen people with the same mobo and proc running 24 tracks, and it works just fine...even with an ide drive. (if you can step up to RAID 0, you should...it's cheaper than SCSI, and it's plenty fast enough.)
 
Yea I have a simlar setup. Right now I have a delta 44 and I think I'm going to pick up a Delta 1010lt after xmas.

I think I'm going to go with with a 12 track setup for now. That should give me enough to do most small bands. 7 drum mics, 2 gtrs, bass, 2 vocals.

But later on I'm going to add another delta 1010. I can't really see needing any more than 16 inputs but usually when we do battle of the bands their are a few amps miced up on stage to pick from and 5 vocal mics and I would rather not have to repatch for every band.
 
I'm of the rather opinionated opinion that comparisons of this sort should be standardized in a direction that addresses comparison of a function that all platforms share. The rest of the comparisons (with plugins) can be made with respect to that standard as a certain amount of horsepower is inherent in the ability to store x tracks at y bit depth at z sample rate. This "PC horsepower" can then be applied to other factors in the recording process, be they effects, or virtual synths used at recording time.

But saying, for example, I got 16 tracks with 3 plug-ins on each track at 24/96 doesn't have any meaning without a tedious and in most cases useless comparison of each plug-in used on each track with other SW variables still unaddressed.
 
The question isn't how many tracks can a computer handle? its how many can you record at one time?

I don't use realtime effects very often so they don't even come in to this.

What I'm asking is what dose it take to record 32 tracks or more at 24bit/96khz?

In other words what dose it take to convert audio to digital and then write it to the HD?
 
That's even more specific. Thanks for that clarification!
How many can you record at once?
How many can you play back at once?
Two statistics that are representative of a particular HD subsystem attached to a particular MB/CPU/RAM combo.
 
24bit/96kHz -> 288kB/s
32 tracks @ 24/96 -> 9,2MB/s

9,2MB/s sustained transfer rate can be achieved without (too much) snake oil and fairy dust. A modern 7200rpm IDE will do it. Just keep it well defragged.

However, 9,2MB/s is assuming that you don't play back any tracks while recording.
 
You do of course need enough A/D converterd to handle the task. Even the cheap c-port setup supports multiple units, i.e.you can use several c-port setups in one computer, so I presume that most multiple I/O units can do the same. According to the specs, you can have four c-ports in one computer, giving you 32 analogue inputs and 8 digital inputs, all at once. You also get 32 analogue and 8 digital outputs but recording and playing a total of 80 tracks at once may be asking for trouble.
 
Ola, what's the formula you use for calculating bps? If you multipy 24 by 96, you don't get 288, you get 2304.
 
You get 2304 kbits per seconds. One byte is eight bits. As we meassure HDD space in bytes, dividing the bits/s by 8 makes for an easier calculation.

24bit/96kHz

(24/8)*96000 = 288000 = 288kB/s
 
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