Ram or Rom and 24 bit: What's the deal?

[BrettB]

Hi all,

I post this question because I'm still confused on what part of your computer has to work harder when you upgrade from 16 bit recording to 24 bit. Right now I'm recording in 16 bit, but with the purchase of a new soundcard I might change to 24 bit.

I have 128Mb Ram and a 7200rpm hard drive of 30Gb.

24bit gives you loads more information, so it will take more space on my hard drive. But what about the speeed of recording, like in another thread is mentionned. Do I get latency problems when I don't upgrade my Ram. Or isn't RAM that important on this upgrade, and are the rpm of my hard drive more important?

I am no comp wizard, so you guys could help me out on this one.

greetings

Brett

 

[drstawl]

>But what about the speeed of recording

Recording is done at "real-time" speed no matter the sample rate or sample size.

The memory deal is more of a "will it work at all" question that's more related to your choice of O/S and recording software.

The real "proportional" increase in bandwidth when recording more tracks or tracks with larger sample size/ higher sample rate
is the sustained throughput between your system and the HD.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Audio recording requires very little memory. However, if you are just a wee bit short, everything can go to hell very quickly

Typically on Win98/ME you can get away with 128MB for most things, and on Win2k/XP the minimum is 256.

Why recording is a "special" process is that things have to happen within a given period of time. If samples aren't delivered timely, then you get clicks and pops and all sorts of nasties in your recordings. So while most programs might work fine after you've exhausted most of your physical memory, the excess paging will destroy your audio!

It's always good to have more than you need, just in case! However, I wouldn't necessarily get all bent out of shape about it.

Moving to 24bit is most hard on your drive, the controller, and the PCI bus. That extra 8 bits can add up. A 7200RPM IDE hard drive is plenty of power for a considerable number of 24/44khz tracks. The real question is whether the rest of your components are willing to play along. You'll just have to see! As far as CPU power, moving to 24bit shouldn't be much of an issue, as your recording software will convert to an internal 32bit representation, regardless of what bit depth you start and end up with. Sample rate is what really nails your CPU (and your drive, controller, bus, etc). I strongly recommend sticking with 44khz as 96khz is just too much power drain for not much gain, and 48khz isn't enough gain to warrant the downsampling which could completely offset any gain, and it just makes it that much harder to work with a wide variety of sources (say you want to work with fruity loops and n-track, you'd have to downsample all your fruity tracks to 44khz when importing to n-Track....it's very bothersome).

Slackmaster 2000

 

[BrettB]

thanks for the information guys, I have a bit more insight about it know.

I'll just do it and see what happens. I also heared from other people though that idd upgrading from 44.1kHZ to 96kHz is a more difficult progression.