memory | tracks | LP

[Mountainmirrors]

Greetings!
Just wondering-
I'm recording an LP right now and have 3 killer tracks finished(minor tweekes to come)...
Will my computer 40Gig, 256 ram, 750 processor handle it if I keep on recording songs, or is it a custom to save tracks to disk to work on at a later date?
If so what's the recommended procedure?
I've only had 3 songs at a time in my computer.
(somewhat computer illiterate- DOH!)

Gratefully,
Jeff

[HighDesert Trax]

Wave files, that you save take up a considerable amount of space. Pending on what or how much space you have avail. on that drive will determine how much you can save or, how fast the recall time for the waves you are working with will refresh/reload into your software.......That being said, I personally run a 60g. H/D as my c-drive saved to a temp. folder for recent works or in progress stuff. Then Save or back-up to a another 120g. H/d for storage, this seams to work great for me. The more free space, Ram & power you have the better for comp. based recording.......

How fast can you afford to go........? lol
Hope this helps some........Good Luck...

[dobro]

I reckon you'll be able to save a whole album on a 40 Gig drive no problem, as long as you don't have the drive filled up with other stuff, and as long as you're not recording symphony-length music. You should definitely be backing this stuff up, though, either to a second hard drive (fast and easy), or to CDR/CDRW (slow but reliable). I do both - one for speed, and the other for insurance.

[Mountainmirrors]

How should I back it up to CDR? Will it save each individual track if I save a session?
I've never tried it, although that's just what I need to learn.
In Nero, do I drag over the entire session in one swipe or each individual track?

[dobro]

You need a CD burner to make CDRs and CDRWs. I use Windows Explorer to do all my backups with. If you've got a Cool Edit session in a folder, it's really easy to find the folder in Explorer, right click on the folder with the whole session in it, left click on 'Copy', right click on the CD drive folder you want to save the session to, and then left click on 'paste'. It takes a while depending on the speed of your burner.

I don't know about Nero, cuz I've got EZ CD Creator, but I could do it all in EZ as well I guess.

[Mountainmirrors]

- so if I save as a 'data' file to CD the session, it will save every track in that session?

[dobro]

Put each Cool Edit session into its separate folder. When you save the folder as data to the CD, everything in the folder - all the tracks in the session, the pk files for those tracks, plus the session file for the session - will be saved as well.

See, by putting the whole session into one folder, you can save everything when you save the folder - one easy operation. The alternative doesn't work as well - if you highlight all the various files in a Cool Edit session, you can save them to a CD easily enough, but then if you save more session files to the same CD, everything's mixed up together and *very* difficult to sort out. But if every session is neatly packed away inside its folder, well then dude, you're sorted!

[Mountainmirrors]

I just burned a session to disk. The properties read that it was a 16 KB file.
Does this sound like it was a successful backup?
I guess the only way to see is to open it up with CE...

[rats]

If it was only 16 kb what you probably did was save the .ses file which is only the "session" data info which is the info that tells cool edit where all of the .wav files belong and where to get them from. You need to save all of the files, the .wav files associated with the song, the .pk files (if you want), and the session data. Like said earlier you should save each session to a different folder somewhere on your hard drive aong with all of the .wavs that are associated with it to be more organzied.

Depending on how long your song is and how many tracks you are using will decide how much data space you will need. My typical 4 minute song with maybe 20 tracks generally will exceed the space requirement on your average CD so I end up zipping the folder with all of the session data and .wavs before burning to disc. By zipping the data I can usually get the session down to less than 80 MB or whatever the common CD-R holds.

[dobro]

Yeah, Rats is right - all you managed to do was save the session file, which is only one small (but important part) of the whole thing. You neglected, however, to save the individual track files and their pk files. In other words, you saved the information for playing the tracks of your session, but none of the tracks...

That's why I suggested putting the whole thing into a folder and saving the folder.