inventory/advice

[frockyton]

I'm getting a surplussed Vectra XW NT workstation for use at home. I should have plenty of stuff (128Mb RAM, 3- 2Gb Hard drives, Pro200 Mhz processor), not a smoker, but a sufficient machine. Anyway, I am pretty new to this, I have a Creative Labs soundcard in my existing machine, and if they are compatible I wanna re-use it. My questions is, if I am planning to do both MIDI sequencing, and recording of analog devices (vocals, guitar, analog synth etc...), what is the direction I need to spend my meager resources. The machine I'm getting has a built in soundcard, that actually has some cool looking inputs, for MIDI/Joystick etc..., but I am guessing these probably aren't capable of better than beeping and chirping. I have several preGeneral MIDI keyboards (Roland D-5, Kawai K1r, Roland EP-5). Will these be of any use? Am I better off to use the ones built into a sound card? ... I am recording to both bring demos to my band, and to hopefully do some fairly finished solo stuff. I might even try to do some band recording later as I get the knack of it/hoard enuff electronics.

 

[Track Rat]

Sorry to tell you this my friend, but your computer sounds like a poor choice for audio. You need more proccessor, more RAM and more storage (bigger hard drive). And most importantly, built in sound cards REALLY blow dead goats.

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

But you could easily use it for midi-sequencing only...

...a small-footprint type sequencing package like PowerTracks Pro will work quite well on it. Anything more, like Track Rat said, and you're pretty much SOL....

Bruce

 

[frockyton]

OK, well- I got more RAM than I thought. 25g Mb. And I am gonna use the Creative Labs Sound Card out of the stegosaurus the XW is replacing. Can you recommend a good source for info on how to best utilize the SoundBlaster? I will limp along with this until better times provide a better computer. One of my bandmates is using the ntrack freeware successfully. So I'll probably follow suit.

I'll leave the blowing dead goats to the experts.

 

[Eurythmic]

More RAM and bigger HDDs?

Now guys, don't get snobbish.

I doubt that you'll be able to accomplish much with a Pentium Pro. That will have to be upgraded.
And your soundcard may or may not work well for recording. I use a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 64Gold, which is definitely a good candidate for an upgrade. It is sort of at the bottom of the food chain as far as home studio setups go, but it does not sound terrible by any stretch of the imagination.

But the hard drives will be perfectly serviceable if they're in good shape. Put them on seperate controllers for a speed boost. I first used Cakewalk with a 3 gig Western Digital hard drive. Crapped out around 10-12 tracks, but it worked.

And I still only have 128 megs of ram. Sure, 256 would be better, but you don't get the kind of performance boost going from 128-256 that you do going from 64-128.

My CPU is a Celeron 466mhz, overclocked to 525. Again, not top of the line - but totally serviceable!

You don't need to have the best of everything in order to get a good sounding recording. Especially when you're just starting out. The main concern is getting a computer that will run the software at all. Don't get scared off!

 

[AlChuck]

I had a 200 MHz Pentium MMX last year with an AWE 64, and was able to get only two or three tracks going. I switched to the SB Live and it was better, maybe 5-6 tracks before it started going flubbery on me. So there is some chance of doing something. You can always do it a track at a time and start bouncing them together; it's a way to get something happening, much better than nothing.