Computer Capabilities

[SK1985]

Hello All,

I'm a singer-songwriter in the process of setting up my own home studio as a more cost effective means of recording material rather than pay the exorbitant amounts of money most producers/recording engineers appear to be charging.

A friend of mine, who already has a home studio advised me I needed a computer with the following capabilities - 2GHz Dual Core Processor; 2 GB of Memory & a 160 - 200 GB Hard Drive. A laptop which I've been offered has the following capabilities - 1.46GHZ Dual Core Processor; 2 GB of Memory & a 160 GB Hard Drive. My friend displayed concerns that anything short of his recommendations would not be sufficient due to the large nature of audio files and the amount of memory the programme Cubase uses.

My question is thus would the laptop be able to cope with the demands of any home recording studio in the future given my friend's concerns?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated, and any recommendations in the selection of a suitable interface would also be welcome. My music is largely Celtic/Folk/Acoustic featuring vocals/guitars/violin/double bass/Bodhran with the occasional accordion.

Many thanks,

SK

[altitude909]

Sure, modern laptops these days have more than enough horsepower. A Macbook ($1099-1399) or an Imac (1199+) would probably serve you well. Cubase is a little on the advanced end of things if your just getting into this so you may want to start with something like garage band or even logic express.

[tmix]

SK
I can understand to a certain extent your friends recommendations ,myself not knowing how CPU intensive your recording program is, but I can tell you your laptop can work.

I record mainly the same sort of things you describe.
I play in a 7 piece Celtic / Folk / Jazz band. I also record a lot of traditional Celtic and Jazz.

I have a meager Desktop set up that is a Pentium 3 700 mhz with a gig of ram. I do however have 2 hard drives which helps with the streaming of the audio.
I can easily record 16 tracks simultaneously and playback over 24 -30 tracks depending on the amount of plug ins and unrendered edits.

Laptops are good for location recording, but I prefer desk tops for the studio. The generally can be loaded with faster hard drives and more of them ( I think laptops run slower hard drives).
Plus they are a lop easier to service and tend to have less issues with internal electrical noise migrating into the audio.

Obviously this is my opinion, others will say differently.

About recording in general...
I LOVE IT, but you may not. It can be very distracting to the music making vibe, so I encourage you to start as simple as possible. There is sometimes nothing more frustrating than to fight a bunch of gear to make some music. Sometimes it is just better to find a home studio where you can play and let someone else man the gear.

Just a thought..... I understand cost can be horrid....

Tom

[Schmange]

All I used for years was Cubase 5.1 on a Beige Mac G3 running at 667Ghz w/ 768mb Ram, so.. yeah it'll work. It's just a matter of how you use the program. With such a slow computer you could record a ton of tracks but could only have maybe 8 of them playing at once. You couldn't use VST effects live so you had to record the effect to it's own track.
Multiple harmonies had to be bounced down like old Beatles albums doing reduction mixes.

It's basically, the more power, speed and ram you have, the more tracks you'll be able to record simultaneously and the easier time you'll have using all the extra goodies like EQ, Reverbs and synths etc..

[dementedchord]

the biggest problem i see is the hard drive... should be 2 of them one for the prog... and one for the audio... and perhaps a 3rd if you want to use large sample files... the onboard drive in the laptop tends to be slower as well so that can sometimes be a problem...