How much memory per song

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mikeh

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Is there a formula to determine memory needed per song? Songs may be all analog/digital or may be combined with MIDI. I record to a PC (via Layla/Cakewalk). I am considering a zip/jazz drive to store client projects. Currently all projects are on my hard drive and I don't want to eat space with old projects. I would like to charge clients for the zip/jazz cartridge and free hard drive space for my own material.

Or, is it better to store to CDR? Some projects are 1-2 songs some are 6-8 songs. Normally after a client leaves with a final 2-track mix they rarely return to re-record a song, but I feel obilgated to maintain the master recording.

Thanks in advance for your time and knowledge.
 
I seem to remember the rule of thumb for audio being 10MB per minute. Times however many stereo tracks there are (mono tracks for 24/96)... so a 3 minut, 8 track song would be 120MB... kinda a small song... can you even fit that on a ZIP?? Id go with CDR. Permanent, and BIG.

xoxo
 
CDR is a good choice. Removable drive bays are pretty popular, too. For a couple hundred clams you can get ~20G of HD space-- plenty of room for a full-length recording project. Just charge the client, pop in the fresh drive, and record away.
 
Thanks for your replys. It seems due to a computer hiccup (or my stupidity) I've posted this question twice. Sorry!
 
If you're doing serious multitrack recording of full bands CDR may not even cut it sometimes unless you want to mess with compressing it all to get it to fit on one CD. Besides that, I don't want mountains of CDRs sitting around. I'm looking at one 6+ minute song on my hard drive right now where 8 tracks of drums and one bass guitar track are already taking up 400MB, and there will be at least 4 guitar tracks and 3 vocal tracks on top of that. The last time we recorded that song it was over 1GB. I plan on getting an OnStream drive very soon, I'd take a look at that.
 
I have a zip drive and it's way too small(capacity). Plus, the media is expensive as hell compared to CD-R.
 
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