Basic PC recording question

V

vmml

New member
Hello everyone,

I'd like to know from those more experienced how vital it is that the computer you use to record audio be used soley for audio.

Reason I ask is because presently I use a Dell 420 Workstation and it's fantastic for my needs in graphic design. It's a PIII 800 Mhz 512 ram system.

Can I expect many pitfalls along the way using this computer for both audio and design? Is anyone doing it like this with any success? I don't think I could afford another workstation at this point.

Thanks
 
when I was recording on pc, it was a multitasking machine, it worked fine. just dont try to design a cd cover and record at the same time (although it would probably handle it fine!:))
 
I'm a bit of a proponent of the dual boot setup. All depending how many tracks you expect, how stable you want your system to be. You can use it for graphics and audio, but generally it's better to get every last ounce of power out of your machine. Computers are a hairline from crash and burn a lot of the times, so having a clean OS can reduce downtime and stress. I put together an article on dualboot awhile ago, it's not that tough to setup, and IMO worth it. One of the files doesn't work, but it's just a bootdisk. I'll fix it this week.

www.sigmacomputers.on.ca/dualboot.html
 
I've done the dual boot thing before (for other reasons) and got *really* annoyed at having to reboot to do different things. That's true though - you want to have a reasonably clean OS for recording, but you should be trying to keep it that way anyway. Every few months I format and reload (all my audio and documents are on a seperate drive) and I've had no problems recording on my main machine.

One thing to consider though - how often do you upgrade that machine? I ran into a problem when I tried to upgrade my regular soundcard to a SB Live so I could have a seperate output for rear speakers. The new card interfered with my MOTU audio interface so I can't use it. I'll probably go back to two seperate machines again soon because once you have a stable DAW you don't want to go messing with it.
 
That should be fine. I started with mid 90's Dell Optiplex GXpro with a 180mhz Pentium Pro processor and 96mhz of RAM. I used a Soundblaster Live! Value sound card and got some great sounding recordings. I put in a 13.2 gig 7200 rpm hard drive and it worked even better. The only time I'd run into snags is during editing. It took what seemed like forever to add effects and preview them. Since those processes are basically RAM intensive, you shouldn't run into trouble with 512 megs.From what I've been reading on this site it's important to get an actual digital recording soundcard such as a M-Audio Delta 44 or 66. I am going to get one myself as I just bought a soundblaster for my new system before I knew about the REAL recording cards. I used that computer for everything and my son still does. My best bit of advice to you is to keep your system clean. Defrag often as intense editing fragged the drive pretty good sometimes. Make sure you shut down any programs running in the background like antivirus, screensavers, pause schedulers, etc. Especially shut down antivirus while burning CDs. Good luck to ya !!! Have fun !!! Jam on !!!
 
dang man ,

have you played unreal tournament on an audio optimised system? it rocks.

the problem is that you don't want too many programs on your pc, cause some will just cause conflicts with each other. Also, some joysticks are known to cause problems with software.

Other than that, many programs put little bits of information in memory at startup, which take away from recording power.

A lot of programs working on the hard drive and saving to the hard drive will fragment the drive quickly, and this is TERRIBLE for audio. why? because the audio you are recording in real time has to fill up those little cracks left by deleting a file before it can go on to the next crack and the next crack till it finally finds contigous space.

Also playing back files like this will suffer, cause the hard disk is looking all over for the audio
 
I always recomend keeping any PC as clean as possible. Definately use a seperate data drive for audio.

However... I do have weaknesses for certain computer games. Installing games on a DAW is a bit risky because it can change your DirectX setup, so I do a backup before I install anything with less than a stellar reputation in this area. If you have a big data drive its easy to make a Ghost image of your system drive before installing something new.

You can also setup different hardware profiles via the control panel. This is less drastic (and less hassle) than a multi-boot but has some of the benefits. I did this for awhile where I had a hardware config for music which disabled my network card (home LAN). I did this based on recomendation of some Cakewalk documentation that network cards on a live LAN can be "noisy". However after awhile I began trying recording with the card enabled and found no difference, so I just deleted that configuration.
 
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