Naked in the land of PC recording

  • Thread starter Thread starter MISTERQCUE
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MISTERQCUE

MISTERQCUE

Not Just Anutha Brutha
You should have at least 64-128 ram at 300 Hz.
What kind of recording do you want to do?
Do you have any out-board gear.Have you researched any of the recording software programs? In order for myself and the others
here at this BBS to help you,First determine your budget, including possible upgrades to
your 'puter,equipment purchases such as a good mic and pre-amp,monitors etc. A lot of the info you request can be obtained by using the "search"function here or if you try to be a lil more specific,some-1 can guide you to the light you are seeking.
Peace.

[This message has been edited by MISTERQCUE (edited 07-10-2000).]
 
hey thanks for the reply , but to be honest I dont know what you are talking about. Is a pre-amp neccesary? Monitors are probably a good idea, but wouldn't headphones suffice? No I haven't researched software, I am asking around to see what other people have found they liked, and then I will research from that. I am looking to record my band: live drums, guitars, bass, vocals, and sampler. I dont have a budget as of yet I am trying to figure out how expensive it will be to go the puter route versus the say, D-16 route. Producing a quality recording the simplest and most cost efficient way is my aim. Cat recipes, too.
 
It's drstawls neighbor, and he's getting NASHTY! (Richard Thompson's "Psycho Street")
 
Say no to crack. I'm an old school 4-track user with a broken ass Tascam and high aspirations of making the leap to PC recording, but I'm clueless. I just ate my cat. My PC has a Pentium I, and I expect I may have to upgrade (133 or so MHZ). Siamese cats are great with barbecue sauce. Any suggestions or recipes?

[This message has been edited by rats (edited 07-10-2000).]
 
Look- Ive got this cattle prod up to may ass and if you dont reply to my post I'll use it dammit! I swear it! Ok let make a little frigging clarification here. I've been using 4-track cassette recorders for years and love them. With that in mind I've considered picking up one of those goddam Korg D-16's, but figure for the money maybe just go out and get a new computah. How many MHZ should I require in the processor, how much RAM, Hard Drive space, what software is good for a beginner, sound cards, mixers? How much money am I looking at spending? Is anyone out there eating jello? Does anyone like shoving forks in their eyes?
 
Look I've got my dick up to this light socket and I'll stick it in I swear if you dont respond. Let your fingers do the talking, please!
 
As far as software, you can get your feet wet with n-track for not much money. I forget the link but I'm sure you'll be able to find it around here or elsewhere.

Other things you will need:

Sound Card- the coices are many. do some research. You could go with a card dedicated for recording (www.gadgetlabs.com www.midiman.com - there are lots of others but the Gadget Labs and Delta series are good for what they cost) or some people use cards like the SB Live! -this may be a good place to start.

YOU WILL NEED TO UPGRADE YOUR COMPUTER!! Do a search in the "Computer Recording and soundcards" forum (where this should be) and you will have your hands full of information to weed through. -but i'll suggest a Celeron processor (533 would be good) 128 Megs of RAM and a sizeable 7200 rpm Hard drive. Ther is a lot more to consider, but as you learn about it a piece at a time you'll know which questions to ask.

-jhe

[This message has been edited by James HE (edited 07-10-2000).]
 
Hey Rats: How'd that Siamese taste? Fajitas?
But you're gonna need a whole mess of pelts if you want to stand other than birthday suited in PC Recording Land.
I made the leap from a Porta-07 to PC recording with a P-90/ 1GB, 3GB HDs/ and 24MB RAM with just CW and CE. I could reliably record two (3 or 4 on a good day) tracks and the system had a 2x burner. If you want more tracks than this get a new system with a faster CPU (>350MHz), more RAM (128MB) and a large 7200 RPM HD. And save a few shekels for a decent sound card.
Monty: He didn't even have the lamp plugged in.
 
Holy crap you guys this is cool that you are giving me this good stuff, it's just that I am a kind of moron I think judging from yer responses. I, too am a former porta07 (loved that thing) user, and I'm a bit illiterate so far to this computer lingo. What is "P-90/1 GB", what is a "3GB 1HDs/"? What is a "CW" and a "CE"? What is a 2x burner?
Also, what kind of special mixers are needed for PC recording, if any? What do you hook those things up to?
Please excuse my illiteracy and I will save you a piece of cat gut.
 
Hey Rats - I don't think there's anything that can be done about your self- (and cat-) destructive tactics to get attention :) but you can take steps to change your present ignorance about computer recording if you follow James HE's advice above. Read up, do the homework he suggests, and then come back with more questions.

About your last question: if you use mics, you'll need either a mixer (with its built-in preamps) or a standalone preamp(s) to boost the mic signal (which is relatively weak) up to the level where it can be successfully recorded on today's equipment. You can check out mixers and preamps by using the 'search' facility at the top of the page. For mixers and preamps, restrict your search to three forums - 'The Rack' and 'Other Equipment' and 'Mixing'.

[This message has been edited by dobro (edited 07-11-2000).]
 
P-90/1 GB": Pentium-I 90 MHz
3GB 1HDs: I had two really small HDs one was a Western Digital 1GB, the other a WD 3GB.
What is a "CW" and a "CE"? CW = Cakewalk; CE= Cool Edit.
What is a 2x burner? A CDR writer that will write at 300KB/sec.
Also, what kind of special mixers are needed for PC recording, if any?
None are needed. When I need input metering that's not covered by my pre-amp I use the old Portastudios as mixers.

What do you hook those things up to?

I hook my inputs up to my recorders and my outputs up to my monitoring circuits.

I have no need for cat guts.
Got plenty of my own. :)
 
Drstawl I am really warming up to you, feller. I like the way you think. Too bad you dont like the cat guts. It sounds like what you are saying is that I may actually be able to record on my current system If I was to go out and pick up a sound card, and CW and CE software? Holy crap that is frigging cool (please excuse my overuse of the word frigging I dont even know what it means I just think it sounds good :eek: ). I've got an extra box of rubber bands and paperclips, is there anything I can use these for to help out my recording?
 
i was actually recording using a fostex 250 4track as preamp for a little while. my behringer is superior, but if you have a dual rca (the plugs that will be on tape out if you have them) to 1/8", you can run the outs on your 4track, if they work, to the line in on your stereo. i managed to push down the noise floor by screwing around with dynamics controls in sound forge. like i said, i'm using a behringer now, but i was able to scrape by on the 4-track. as far as computer speed, i have no problems using a celeron 366 with 128 meg of ram and an ibm 14.4gig 14gxp(could have the name wrong, but it's probably discontinued now).. anything that's 7200 rpm will do.if these terms confuse you, you may want to find someone who's reasonably used to working on pcs to help you. you'll also have to probably change the case, and you'll have to change the motherboard. i record with a sound blaster live card right now, and am reasonably happy, though i hope to upgrade to a nice layla-24 soon. hope this is at least somewhat helpful.
 
OH...MY...GOD...a Richard Thompson reference. I almost fell out of my chair. Here's another good one for you--BOB MOULD!!! Bonus round points if you know who Curve is.

Anyway, forget about getting that Celery crap from *ntel. Within a couple of months a new memory type (called DDR-SDRAM) will intro that has twice the data transfer rate of current memory. Higher data transfer rate means that your digital audio will whip around your computer's innards that much faster (this is a good thing). Pair this new memory type with either of AMD's desktop processors: a Duron, if you're on a budget, or an Athlon, if you want to spend a little more. Both should work in the same motherboards, so you can always upgrade (or downgrade???) if you want to later. They also will cost you much less than the equivalent *ntel proc (yeah, like there IS an equivalent *ntel proc.)

Do NOT get less than 128 MB of memory, especially if you're letting Windoze abuse your hardware. Infineon makes great memory, if I recall correctly.

Digital stereo files recorded at 44.1 kHz takes up 10.5 MB/minute of storage space. That's a lot of hard drive real estate, so you'll need a big hard drive. Size does matter. There are two types of hard drives: SCSI, which is fast and expensive, and EIDE, which is almost as fast and not nearly as expensive. Maxtor hard drives are very nice. Low noise, fast, and hard.

It's late, and I'm tired, so I'll stop now.

P.S. I'll pass on the cat guts. I'm vegetarian. How about a tofu weiner instead?
 
i don't really care about playing the processor war game. as near as i can tell, everyone involved is at least half full of shit at least half the time, so i just wait for lots of benchmarks to come out and make sure what i get doesn't -totally- suck. someone can say what they want about my intel, but it cost about 250 bucks with board and ram, and it's pretty handy on the music rendering. when you get to a certain amount of speed, you're probably going to find the software you use a lot more important than the cpu/hd. i've never done more than 6 or 8 full tracks thus far on my machine, but it specs out to soemthing absurd, like 50. i think i'm going to be ok. i do, incidentally, plan to build a higher-end machine a little later-some manner of RAID on SCSI setup, a nice monster of a processor, 512meg or so of ram, rackmount case, etc. anyone who has used ide and scsi in pretty disk-intensive applications will laugh at the "slightly-faster" assertion you just made. true, the speed of the bus is only a little faster, generally, and the physical speed of the drives is often only a little faster, but the way scsi handles multiple requests makes it so much more efficient than ide that it's sick. a lot of time is lost on ide by only handling commands in a FIFO fasion. with scsi, it sorts the requests according to position on the drive, so it reads everything in a sequence. try driving, when points a, b, c, d, and e are in sequence, to d, a, e, c, and b, and then try it actually in sequence, and you'll see what i mean. very good stuff, and in a nice raid-0 or raid-5 setup, massive speed, if you need it. i'd consider disk speed and ram size more important than cpu speed in almost every case here. it's important to keep also in mind that just because 98654976 gamers are having wet dreams about the new underdog-company-cpu doesn't mean that when you buy, the computer will automatically render large multitrack recordings as well as it plays quake 6. i like the amd's, but there are a LOT of serious design/production flaws in the motherboards, leaving a lot of people with flaky machines that can't be relied on for something really important, like recording. i have to actually incite violence toward my machine for it to crash, even in win98se. that seems pretty good to me, and it does everything quickly enough until i have the money to get a fast, stable machine from the next generation. it's important to keep perspective, rather than simply believing everything tom or anandtech or 96598787 FPS players say as somehow the right answers for another application. i bet that setup you mention, when mature, will make for a great machine (i lean toward scsi drives, though, if you're really serious about it), but make sure you can do something about it when it dumps your 100 hours of work in the middle of mastering ;)
 
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