can my pc handle it?

[emomusician]

Hi!

A year ago I sang for a national touring band, and we had cds out in stores and stuff and played with alot of big names. During that time, I could not hold a normal day job.. and my wife was the only one working. We wound up moving in my sister in law and 2 kids to make ends meet.. but that was a complete nightmare. I wound up having to sell all my music gear. I had a carvin custom guitar, a fostex mr8, several condenser mics, and some other things. I had to sell them due to trying to keep my house. Eventually, the band kinda fizzled.. and I just got out before it died. I work a full time job now, and touring and all that jazz its done with. I want to do some solo stuff, and I want to record again.

I can either go the multitrack standalone route, or go the pc route. I do plan on buying a new pc at some point.. but the recording gear will probably come first.. so as long as it will work with this current pc... then I'm good.

I was looking at the 1010 or 2496 pci cards as a starting point. All I am really going to be doing is guitar, piano, vocals, electronic drums. I have a pretty dated pc.. with a 1 ghz processor, 384 mb ram, 2 40 gig hds. Would my pc be able to record with either of those cards with no latency? The only real reason i even want to go the pc route, is for using plugins like amplitube and stuff that I don't think can be used after the signal has been recorded.

Thanks!

 

[Robert D]

Hey, welcome to life after touring. It's funny how that works, you can make decent money playing t40, or you can starve doing your own stuff. It's so hard when you reach the quit your job and go promote the CD point. It's still such small odds that it'll really take off. Glad you survived.
To answer your question, yes, you can do plenty of recording on a 1Ghz machine. It wasn't that long ago that I was milking a P-III 700Mhz box for all it was worth, and getting 48 tracks out of it. You should add some RAM though. 384MB is going to give you a memory bottleneck, particularly when you start using those plugins. Double it. Also, make sure the drives are 7200 RPM, or you'll also be disk bound.

 

[emomusician]

Yeah, it had its ups and downs. sometimes we'd make 50 dollars, another night we'd make over a grand.. depending on the venue, crowd, how much merch we sold. Sleeping on folks floors, and in the van. Its not as glamorous as people make it out to be. Its alot of work, that most of the time goes un rewarded. We were of the post core/screamo genre thats really popular now. We played 2 stints on the vans warped tour.. on the tour itself.. not the ernie ball local band stage. I would not put that on any band... you'd think its great. But, not when u drive 12 hrs to the next stop only to have to build your stage in 100 degree heat. We had more success just selling cds in line outside the event. We could've probably got signed to some major labels, we had talked to epic at one time. We even had a song on the soundtrack for mtv's made. We just started getting unorganized, and members started leaving.. and once that started happening.. I felt it best to get out while I still had some dignity and a full length album to look back on. Needless to say they didn't last but a few months longer after i left.. with 2 different guitarists, and 2 different singers. You can hear our stuff on myspace.com/norami

"Cause above the conquest" I believe is from the cd i recorded with them.

anyway, with the pc issue out of the way.. what would u suggest? a PCI interface or one of the USB deals?