how much memory does a song take up?

B

bill elder

New member
I'm thinking about getting an extra 20 gig hard drive for this aardvark Q10 I just bought. I was wondering how much memory does say a 24 track song take up? 1/2 a gig? 1gig? 2 gig? per song.
Does anyone out there know?
Also, is it compatable to have 2 internal hard drives or do i need to get a piggy back hard drive?
 
ok... by my off-the-cuff reckoning..... a 5-minute, 44.1k, 24bit TRACK goes about 40 MB. 24 of those = 960 MB Just short of a GIgabyte??Double that for 96k.

xoox
 
Memory and disk storage are two different things. Your question really seems to be, how much disk space does a song take?

The answer is -- it depends. The recording applications' project file overhead is negligible. Likewise if it's all MIDI data the size is so small as to be pretty negligible too. What really takes up space is digital audio. How much depends on what the bit depth and sampling rates are, how many separate digital audio tracks there are, and how long they are. I think the rule of thumb for "CD-quality" audio (that is, 16 bit, 44.1kHz audio data) is about 5 MB per track. So a three-minute song with ten tracks of audio would occupy about 150 MB of disk space.

For other sample sizes and sampling rates it's pretty easy to figure out. (Number of bits per sample X sampling rate X number of seconds X number of tracks) all divided by 1000 gives you size in MB.
 
Alchuck and camn covered the first part, but:

Also, is it compatable to have 2 internal hard drives or do i need to get a piggy back hard drive?
Click to expand...

Depending on what else you have in your machine (CD, CDrw, etc.) 2 internal drives should be fine. MOST motherboards support 2 IDE channels which can handle up to 2 drives each. (The floppy drive is separate, and not counted here.)

You can add a PCI disk controller card, and support even more drives! I've got 6 in my machine right now! (7 counting the floppy).

(all on an ATA100 controller card)
WD 5.1 GB (OS and Progs)
WD 30 GB (Backups)
IBM Deskstar 30 GB (Audio)

(on the motherboard's IDE channels)
Yamaha CRW8824 (CDrw)
NEC DVD (DVD player and CD reader)
NEC 100MB Zip drive (to transport files from work to home)

Queue
 
Ive been lead to believe that each hard drive should have its own IDE drive. So does this mean in my case (im getting 2 hard drivers, a CDR and a DVD drive with my computer) that i will have to get a PCI disk controler card? If so how much are they?
 
I think you mean "each hard drive should have its own IDE channel."

Most motherboards that have a UDMA-66 controller also have the old standard IDE controller with two channels. So you can use that for CD-R and for the application drive, if you are segregating your OS and applications on one physical drive and using another for the digital audio data.

Look up any of the DAW optimization guides out there and they should give you a pretty clear scoop on what's best.
 
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