2 questions: Drums and Mbox

  • Thread starter Thread starter Diesel10
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Diesel10

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I have a couple questions and any help would be much appreciated.
My home studio is for recording singer/songwriter type stuff, with guitar, bass, piano, vocals and a drum machine track.
I have been recording with a Roland VS840 and Roland 660, but I'm thinking it's time to move on (mixdown is a pain).
I recently got a Mac PowerBook G4 and maxed out the RAM and am thinking about getting an Mbox (whenever I've seen Pro Tools I really like it, though I've never used it myself).
So my question is:
is there a way (or a program) to do the drums on the computer? How easy/intuitive is this (or difficult)? How much does it cost? What's the best program? I never really took to the Roland 660.
Secondly, I've been told that computer recording will take up much of my hard drive space and that I should get an extra external hard drive dedicated to the music (I originally had 40 Gb on my HD and now have about 19 left). Does this sound right? How big a hard drive would I need (say to keep 30-40 songs available)? Is it easy to work with one and the Mbox?
I know there are a lot of questions here, but I am kind of at a loss. Thanks in advance for any advice.
 
The file size depends upon your number of tracks and and bit depth etc. Approx. for every song you work, it may take 1gb. So if you want to work 20 songs and you just have 20gb left, then you are in trouble, your computer will act sluggish. External hard disk isn't a bad idea, but a little expensive compared with internal ones. A 80gig hard drive woudl be perfect to fit your applications.
Moving to protools is good, why dont you try DIGI 001 instead of Mbox? It has more better features than MBox for a little more money.
 
I think a portable drive is a good solution if you need more space. They have firewire and usb, but firewire is definately the better choice because its a lot faster. I've seen 80 gig storage for less then $200 and you can take that over to your friends house and just hook it up, all you need is the driver.
 
Thanks for the good advice on hard drives.
In response to Jeyan, I would love to get Digi 001, but have been told that it will not run on a PowerBook which is what I have. Apparently there is some sort of card that needs a tower to install Digi001 and therefore the Mbox is the only solution.

Anybody have any answers about drum programming/tracking on the computer so I can ditch the 660?
 
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