zommbee,
This is a great site to find plenty of info... once the search function is back. Try
http://www.audioforums.com/ too.
Now, your questions:
1. What's the minimum PC I will need to support 8-16 digital tracks?
I think you'll be able to handle that many tracks with almost any Pentium II or Celeron and above. Probably AMD CPU-based systems too but (except for the Athlon) you'll often be advised to stick with the Intel CPUs. You should probably also have a minimum of 64 MB RAM, but 128 would be better and only another $60 or so more right now. Also a UDMA drive controller, at least a UDMA33 with a compatible UDMA hard drive will help a lot. Almost all new computers will have this level of hardware.
2. What soundcard(s) will I need?
At the very least you'll want something that'll do a reasonable job of recording and being an all-in-one card. The Sound Blaster Live and the Turtle Beach Montego II are sort of the lowest level you should consider. Depending on your needs, these are also cheap enough to serve as a second card for playing games, playing audio CDs from your CD-ROM drive, etc. Most higher-end cards with really excellent audio specs do not have MIDI synthesizers on them, which is OK if you already have outboard MIDI gear, or don't really use any MIDI stuff. A coomon configuration is one of these better cards used for digital audio i/o and a Sound Blaster Live, which has a very decent MIDI synth and also is a terrific sampler with its Sound Fonts support.
Look around on this site. Some manufacturers of note are Echo (see
http://www.echoaudio.com/ ), Gadget Labs (see
http://www.gadgetlabs.com/ ), M Audio (see
http://www.m-audio.com/ ), Aardvark (see
http://www.aardvark-pro.com/ ), SeaSound (see
http://www.seasound.com/ )... I'm leaving out a bunch, but here's a start anyway.
One caveat -- getting a SB Live and another audio card to coexist can be a real pain. If you've never messed with PCs and expansion cards and IRQs and all that, you might want to seriously consider spending the extra couple of hundred bucks or so to have a DAW built by SoundChaser or Wave Digital. I've just lost countless hours in the last week and a half trying to get my home-built monster to behave properly and I'm still not quite there yet.
3. I have Cakewalk Pro from 3 years back -
not sure what version. Will I be able to do multiple analog tracks (8 minimum) and also sync to MIDI equipment?
I think so (3 years - maybe version 7?) But I strongly recommend updating to version 9 -- I think it's only about $75 to upgrade and well worth it for all the improvements.
4. Is there any way to employ
my Mackie 1604vlz mixer in a digital setup, or is it now closet clutter?
Oh, absolutely it's still useful. At the very least you'll likely want to use its mic preamps. A couple of soundcards have built in mic preamps (notably the Aardvark Direct Pro,
the Echo Mona,
the SeaSound Solo EX and Digidesign's Digi001) but most have only line level inputs.
5. I assume all my DSP stuff (effects boxes) are ancient by digital standards (ART, Lexicon, Digitech, etc.). So is it now done through the tracking software? How does all this come into play?
You can still use 'em if you like 'em -- using the Mackie to route the signals to and from the PC as if it were a Tascam just like before... and you also have the power to use DSP plug-in effects too (DirectX in the case of Cakewalk). You'll have the best of both worlds!
I could use a reading source for all of this. Any books?
Not many that cover the whole picture from a desktop DAW perspective in an up-to-date way... there's one called Digital Home Recording (edited by Carolyn Keating, Miller Freeman Books, 1998) that I thought was very well done. Electronic Musician magazine puts out an annual called the Desktop Music production Guide that you might still be able to pick up. There's a Buyer's Guide they just put out too, on the newstands as we speak. There's probably some more on the horizon.
Hope that helps you get started! Good luck!
-AlChuck
