8 traks at once on PC - system requirements?

[Van heinous]

I want to record 8 tracks simultaneously into PC via the gadget labs 8/in, 8/out card.
recording will usually be a drum kit and bass.
Assuming
1) a 4 minute song, or thereabouts
2) 48k sample rate
Will my PC handle all this? It's a 400mhz, 128meg ram, 8 gigs HD space avail, hard drive is standard (i.e., non scsi, ultra-wide, etc.)
I'm guesing the keys to this are RAM and drive space...
Does this sound reasonable on this system?

 

[ola]

Assuming that you record at 24-bit/48kHz, eight tracks would not be a problem in an ideal situation, based on the below calculation:

24-bit/48kHz = (24/8)*48000 = 144kB/s, per track.

Eight tracks are thus 144*8=1,152Mb/s Most disk (IDE as well as SCSI) can handle that throughput without problems. IDE's usually manages between 20 and 33 Mb/s in an ideal situation (e.g. write only).

Four minutes gives you a total space of 1,152*60*4=276,5Mb of data. Again, no problem. Just make sure that you never run out of disk space. I think that you may loose the entire recording if you hit the end of the disk. A neat little write error and you can start over.

Conclusion: If you have the gear, why don't you just try it? No, seriosly, it works in theory and the values ar far from the theoretical maxes so it'll probably work like a dream in practise as well. Remember to keep your disk defragmented. Also, the software may be reading from the disk to run and that will use throughput resources. Still, eight in would be OK.

As long as your software handles multiple tracks well, the 400MHz/128Mb RAM should definetly suffice.

Finally, remember that if you play eight tracks and record eight tracks simultaniosly, the theoretical throughput value would simply double but in practise, the disk can handle far less as it has to jump between disk clusters while reading and writing. Eight in and eight out may be what your computer can handle but I'd hazard a guess that it's the limit. Just a guess though. With a healty system and clean (defragmented) disk, you might manage 24 I/O as would be the limit with three Wave 8/24's. I don't see the need for that in a homestudio situation though. However, I think that you may want to watch out if you're monitoring many tracks while recording as they're read from the disk.

SCSI might be a good idea for the future although some claim that a good IDE will take you all the way.

Good luck

/Ola