How much memory per song

[mikeh]

Is there a formula to determine memory needed per song? Songs may be all digital/analog or may be combined with midi. I record to a PC (Cakewalk) and am considering buying a zip/jazz drive to store client projects. Currently every project is on my hard drive. I don't want to eat memory with old projects. I would like to charge clients for the zip/jazz cartridge and keep space free on my hard drive (for my material). Or, is it better to store to CDR? Some projects are 1 or 2 songs, other may be 6-8 songs. Normally, once clients leave with a 2-track final mix they rarely come back to re-record a given song.

Up to now I've used the PC as a glorified tape deck - out from the computer (via Layla) to an analog board and use outboard effects (hey, I'm a dinosaur) into DAT or a consumer CD. I want to better utilize the computer.

Thanks in advance for your time and knowledge.

 

[JC Lives]

Hey mikeh. I would recommend using cdr's. they are a heck of a lot cheaper than zip/jazz drives. Depending ont the size of a song, you may not even fit it on a zip disk. I do not remeber the actual space/time formula. I think it is something like 10MB per track minute.

As an example, while playing with a demo version of n-track, I recorded a 3 1/5 minute song using 7 tracks (one stereo). With all the assoiated files for this song, it was over 107mb's. As you can see, this would not fit on a zip disk. I t would fit on a jazz but at 90-100 a pop, that could get rather expensive. Recordable cd's are now well under a buck. Do the math.

Peace and happy recording

Joe

 

[mikeh]

Thanks for the reply. I just noticed I posted this question twice - oops.

 

[John Sayers]

Yeah - I use CDR as backup. The one thing exclusive to cakewalk(I think) is the archive function. I keep all outakes on my trackview but archived. I can always go back to the original tracks but it means my bun files are large, like 300 - 500meg. I've noticed that when you store a full bun file and then later reload it again it dumps all the waves back into Wavedata but it is more stable on playback as it's sorted out all the files when creating a bun file.
cheers
john