Is my PC too old for Multitrak Recording?

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Firefox 5

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I recently found out that If I want to start MultiTrak Recording on my PC, I will have to start out by Upgrading my Sound Card, for approx. $200. I need to know if I'm throwing $ away by trying to upgrade this dinosaur and if it will be able to do the job at all if I put the $ into it. What I have is:
HP Pavillion 6355, P2 (333Mhz processor)
RAM is upgraded to 128MB
Hard Drive Space is now 13GB with the 9GB add-on
It has a Creative Labs CD burner added *
* the original CD rom drive had to be disconnected to add the burner because Win 98 only supports 4 Drives.
I like my PC just fine and I would like to upgrade it for Multi-Trak recording but, I don't want to invest the $ and than find out that my Processor is just too slow etc. etc.
Does anyone have any insight on this?
I mainly would like to use it for making my own music compositions using something like CakeWalk Home Recorder 2002 To start out with. (which I havn't purchased yet.)
PS: MONEY IS A BIG CONSIDERATION (I have limited resources)
 
You can't do much upgrading on an HP.

Let's see here... it's probably using PC66 memory (being a PII system < 350Mhz) which means that you'll need to replace the memory if you upgraded. I'd also assume that the board is based on a 440LX chipset (though probably an SiS knockoff), which means that you can't upgrade the processor past 333Mhz, which means that you'll need a new motherboard. Then I'd guess that the hard drives are 5400RPM or slower, so they *might* be inadequate, depending on your needs (they're definately too small). The HP case will be proprietary meaning that you can't just slap another motherboard in it, so it's gotta go. The power supply is probably a 230W or less so you'd need a new power supply. Video is probably integrated so you'll need a new video card...same with sound and perhaps modem/lan. Oh, and the OS will be OEM so you'll need a new copy of windows too.

So your upgrade path, in this situation, is simply to buy a new machine. You could perhaps salvage the monitor, keyboard, mouse, CDROM, and floppy drives...and perhaps still use the hard drives for OS and applications.

HOWEVER, your machine might be adequate for now. Try it out! I'm guessing that unless your Windows (windows 98 I'm guessing) installation is totally hashed, you should be able to work with up to 16 16bit/44khz tracks and maybe a few DX effects. Being an HP though, I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it :(

Slackmaster 2000
 
Firefox 5 said:

* the original CD rom drive had to be disconnected to add the burner because Win 98 only supports 4 Drives.
Click to expand...

I doubt that's a Win98 issue. My pc has 3 IDE and 2 scsi devices and works just fine with Win98SE.

Apart from that, I agree with Slackmaster. I think that your PC can do some multitracking. I have roughly the same configuration like you (Celeron 466, 128mb, 17gb 5400rpm hd) and it didn't fail on my yet while recording. It used to have a celeron 333 and I'm pretty sure that it would have been able to do with it what I've done so far.
Frankly, I just started home recording (finally got some songs written on my/our own) so I don't need much at this moment and the same may apply to you.
 
dont be so quick to dispose the computer...
i record on:
pII 266Mhz
196MB RAM
4Gig Hard drive.
AWE 16 soundcard (10 years old, and crap).

i do all of my RECORDING on this computer...with ntrack. however, after i get all of a song tracked on there, i move it up to my P4 (upstairs, actually my parents work computer)....which is networked....and i do all mixing/mastering up there with nice speakers, etc.

however, i plan on upgrading to a delta 44 sometime soon...and with that comes a new computer.
 
You can handle small-med size projects on your type of system, you will be limited in the # of tracks and use of DX8 or other plugins. But I used to do some fairly ambitious projects on a similar or less system with PA9.
 
A BIG THANKS!

A big THANKS to everyone who replied to my Post re: Is my PC too old etc, Especially to christiaan, shackrock and heinz for the encouragement to try. I agree with you guys that I probably have enough PC to at least get started. I know that ideally I should have a Newer and Bigger and Better PC to do this BUT, you have to start somewhere. I've done some video editing with this PC and I was told at that time that I needed another thousand dollars worth of software etc. But they were wrong and I made some pretty fine videos using very basic video editing systems. I dont expect to make miracles here, but if I can get some basic stuff going, I think I can expand it from there. You guys gave me the confidence to give it a shot. thanxagain,
Firefox 5
 
Here's a tip someone here told me about

Check out RME's website. www.rme-audio.com
Scroll down on the right side to (tech info)
Then scroll down to (tuning tips for low latency operation)
My system is an AMD K6-2 at 400 mhz. This article helped my system tremendously. You have to be willing to do a format and reinstall of @#$^$%&&*windows98. My computer is pretty slow too but this stuff really helped. Just a thought, Peace, Silver
 
Believe me, you'll almost certainly be able to do more on your old PC than you could on a 4 track portastudio! Try the cheap but superb N-Track Studio & see how it goes...I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Good luck!
 
Re: Re: Is my PC too old for Multitrak Recording?

christiaan said:


I doubt that's a Win98 issue. My pc has 3 IDE and 2 scsi devices and works just fine with Win98SE.
Click to expand...

That's because you have only 3 IDE drives. SCSI's a separate issue.

You still are limited to 4 IDE drives with Win98SE. With SCSI, it's similar to adding a firewire card to add drives and peripherals that way. It doesn't effect the computer negatively, cuz it's not IDE.
 
a good trick for mixing on a tired, old pc...

When you get a track sounding the way you like it (FX wise), "Paint" out a processed version of the track. In Vegas it is called "render to new track".

Even better, if you can bounce a number of tracks down to 1 or 2, say once you get your drum tracks levels and panning set, make a sub mix of all the drum trax.

Another trick is Fx on the bus. If you have a group of tracks that need similar treatment, put them all on the same group bus, and put the FX on the bus.

Queue
 
Polaris,

Never heard of this problem... There are a lot of motherboards on the market with an extra (raid-) ide controller onboard. That's the same like adding a extra IDE controller in a PCI slot. You mean that those extra controllers can't be used under Win98?
 
Last edited:
christiaan said:
Never heard of this problem... There are a lot of motherboards on the market with an extra (raid-) ide controller onboard. That's the same like adding a extra IDE controller in a PCI slot. You mean that those extra controllers can't be used under Win98?
Click to expand...

no I think the extra IDE controllers (like a PCI IDE controller) can still be used, however I think 98 is limited to 4 onboard.
 
Why dont u just buy urself a new computer Like hmmmmmm!
A nice tidy apple mac! They are the way to go for recorrding by far!
Now you can pick up a excellent little iMac one of the old style ones very cheap as they have bought out the new ones!
The iMac is well worth the buy over a PC any day!
For a start they have virtually all the audio software that PC's saupport!
but they also have more! Like the wonderful Digital performer 3! What and amazing programme and can be used with so much ease! it really is a amazing piece of software!
I used to use a PC then I bought a mac about 3 months ago!
All i have to say is once u got mac u will never go back!

C ya

craze
 
There is no IDE controller limit in any version of windows. Christian is correct in his figures. Each IDE controller typically has two channels, and each channel supports two devices. It should be known that devices on each channel are in a master/slave configuration, so only one device per channel can grab that channel at any given time....so if you need to perform operations using both devices on a channel at once, performance will suffer.

Multiple IDE controllers in the same box can work, but is often quite a headache. If you absolutely require more than 2 devices that will be used heavily, SCSI is the route to be taking. However, if you're just running 2 hard drives and a couple CDROM drives, you can usually get away with a single IDE controller (e.g. you will set the system up to minimize the amount of time that two devices will need a channel). In terms of ATA/66/100/133, because I know it will come up...in my multitracking benchmarking I wasn't able to see any noticable improvement with 7200RPM drives. Drives on UDMA/33 controllers performed as well in a multi-large-file situation as drives on ATA/66 and greater. Typically it is only necessary to purchase an controller like those provided by Promise and Highpoint, if your existing controller is absolute crap....or you've got a lot of devices. As long as everything is working properly and your HD is 7200RPM, it will actually be the last thing to bottleneck your system.

Slackmaster 2000
 
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