Will my Laptop cope?

S

Squiksilvery

New member
Hello

I use a Presonus Firepod at home. I have been asked to record a gig, so will require the portability of my laptop. It is however, somewhat old! Its a 700Mhz PII, with only 128Mb of RAM. Logic 5.5 seems to run ok, but will it manage to record 8 mics for an hour non stop?

Also, how much hard drive space will 8 mics at 44.1kHz 24 bit, over an hour, take up?

Thanks

Ed

www.edbol.co.uk
 
I think you might at least need more RAM.

A rough calculation for HD space would be around 5gig or so. That's an estimation though.
 
Squiksilvery said:
Hello

I use a Presonus Firepod at home. I have been asked to record a gig, so will require the portability of my laptop. It is however, somewhat old! Its a 700Mhz PII, with only 128Mb of RAM. Logic 5.5 seems to run ok, but will it manage to record 8 mics for an hour non stop?

Also, how much hard drive space will 8 mics at 44.1kHz 24 bit, over an hour, take up?

Thanks

Ed

www.edbol.co.uk
Click to expand...

i know this might sound like a wiseass answer but...


give it a go?

just set it recording and see how far you get.
 
Squiksilvery said:
Also, how much hard drive space will 8 mics at 44.1kHz 24 bit, over an hour, take up?
Click to expand...
The math is simple. Break it down:

44,100 x 24 = 1,058,400 bits per second
60 seconds per minuts x 60 minutes per hour = 3600 seconds per hour
therefore
1,058,400 x 3600 = 3,810,240,000 bits per hour per track.

Since there ae 8 bits in a Byte, you would divide that number by 8 to caclulate in bytes how much that would be. But since you have 8 tracks, you'd just multiply by 8 all over again, so those operations would cancel out.

Therefore...

8 tracks of 44.1/24 recording would require about 3.8GB of disc space. Add some buffer just to be safe (do you know it's going to be exactly an hour and do you know that all the formatted free space on your hard drive is actually good?) and you're talking 5GB of disc space needed for the job.

As far as whether you have enough horsepower to record that, your CPU and RAM should be enough in and of themselves. The questios are 1) how fast is your hard drive and 2) how fast and with how few unnecessary interrupts the data throuput is on your laptop. On older laptops like yours, those questions can swing either way. The <10Mb/sec data rate you need for 8 tracks of audio is not really that much of a throughput demand, but if you have a slow harddrive (with not a lot of cache) or a laptop motherboard design that is wasting CPU cycles, you might have some dropout.

The only way to know for sure with that age of motherboard is to try it and see.

G.
 
Also, with older computers like that (especially with little RAM), if something even small happens in the background, you're likely to get skips in the recording. So maybe defrag the disk, and definitely close down every other program running.
 
thanks!

Yes, quite, I will try it! I didn't want to set it all up for the band at their gig, later to tell them it didn't work! ha!

The old Sony Vaio has 16 gig left to play with so I should be ok to record an entire gig. The hard drive was removed and replaced with one from a much newer laptop which overheated and fried itself; so perhap its quicker than one would expect from the age of the machine it lives in.

Many thanks to all respondents
 
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