thots on my (newbie) recording setup w edirol FA-101?

[photonstudios]

hi all
i'm new here and new to all the details of things like ASIO vs WDM drivers and such but fairly tech savvy and wanted some opinions on the following proposed recording setup I'm planning for a home studio. I know this is a bit long and detailed and hope that since I've search the web and this forum already that you all don't mind giving some opinions on this setup:

Primary purpose of recording setup:
- to record, mix & master my own songs with myself playing guitar, bass & vocals and using vst soft synths and/or samplers/midi for drums and keyboards
- to score short films and independent feature films I'm working on
- to record voice overs and foley sound fx (sometimes simultaneously by several inputs) for the soundtracks for these films

Secondary purposes:
- to be able to record live or studio recorded (multi instruments simultaneously) bands with multiple inputs and monitoring


I WAS using a desktop AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz 1Gb Ram Win2000 with Sonar 3 Producer and Sound Blaster audigy 2 but started to run out of CPU when using multiple VSTs especially softsynth samp/romplers like SampleTank 1.1 - I also experienced flaky latency issues with the sampler on from my keyboard controller (Evolution 361C) - I could never figure out what drivers and buffer settings to work it right.

I now have a grunty new laptop and am looking to an Edirol FA-101 to work with it in the following scenario:

• Dell XPS laptop p4 3.4 Ghz 2Gb RAM
• win xp Pro - internal 60Gb 7200rpm drive
• 256Mb ATI Radeon video card
• maxtor 7200rpm one-touch 2 external HD firewire/usb2 for audio/video
• On-board sigma-tel C audio card
• Evolution m361c keyboard controller
• Yamaha QY-70 XG synth
• misc guitars and simple shure sm57 type mics
• Upgrade to Sonar 5 producer
• Upgrade sampletank 1.1 to Sampletank 2 XL
• purchase Miroslav Philharmonik sampler vst softsynth
• purchase Edirol FA-101 firewire audio/midi interface

my questions are:

1. Is this a viable recording solution for my purposes? i.e. do you see any problems or known issues with such a combo? (also I may want to score HD video -tho I might need to make a tiny quicktime of the bits I want to score if the audio needs the cpu power instead of me importing hd video into the new Sonar if that is even possible??)
2. I saw another post on this but unsure if I can power the FA-101 by the 4pin firewire on the dell or via a pcmcia 6pin card (tho this is not a biggie)?
3. my audio/video drive is the external maxtor - do I daisy chain the maxtor drive into the firewire on the FA-101 in the 4pin? or separately into the pcmcia firewire 6pin port? or use its USB 2 capabilities via the USB ports on the Dell? problems with each?
4. this question might best be asked in the cakewalk group but can sonar 5 play video files for scoring? Anyone here use it for that?
5. roughly speaking, will I be ok track wise and cpu wise getting the grunt out of this for multiple digital audio tracks and vst SampleTank/Miroslav tracks from this setup? Or will latency be an issue? - the new Sonar feature of track freezing vsts seems very interesting... because it will be likely I will want to monitor live recorded guitars with sampled drums and vocals while laying additional sampletank or miroslav vst soft synth tracks - does that add to latency issues?

thanks very much for any feedback/tips!!
-sami

 

[photonstudios]

oh yeah

one more thing...

ideally I would like to be able to mix 5.1 masters though I have never done this before and dont even know if Sonar 5 will be able to do this. I will be happy if this system can do great stereo recordings and 5.1 will be a huge bonus but not necessary yet... it would just be nice to know that if I need that I will be able to do it and then worry about how and what speakers/monitors to get for that once I am ready for that step... thanks again...