Ready to bite the digital bullet

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vintagedrive

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I'm fairly new to the recording game. I have done a fair amount of reseach to educate myself with the vast amount of utilities available to anyone willing to plunk down the duckets. After testing the waters with a portastudio, I am now ready to go digital and have a couple of questions. First off, I have a Pentium 4, 1.6ghz, 256MB Mem, 60GB hd. Is this sufficient enough to opporate a DAW? Second, any suggestions on what software? Third, I currently record guitar and drum tracks together live,(at drummers house). How would I go about recording my drummers tracks? Fourth, I like the idea of being able to have a cassette handy after recording. Is this possible with digital? Thanks for any reply.
 
vintagedrive said:
First off, I have a Pentium 4, 1.6ghz, 256MB Mem, 60GB hd. Is this sufficient enough to opporate a DAW?

Yes, provided you choose your sound card interface wisely.

Second, any suggestions on what software?

Lots of choices.

www.steinberg.net
www.cakewalk.com
logic audio, can't remember the URL
www.fasoft.com - Ntrack, cheap price but effective.

Third, I currently record guitar and drum tracks togther live,(at drummers house). How would I go about recording my drummers tracks?

That is a whole other question on it's own. Briefly, depending on your budget, you'd want enough inputs on your sound card to acomadate the number of microphones you feel you want to use when recording them.

Fourth, I like the idea of being able to have a cassette handy after recording. Is this possible with digital? Thanks for any reply.

Sure just plug a few cables out of your soundcard or mixer to your cassette deck. Better yet, record it to your internal CD-Burner.

You didn't mention a soundcard. Many of these questions are closely tied to that variable. If your going to use your stock soundcard, it will be limited to 2 channels, and the quality will not be great.

A few links to some recording soundcards.

www.midi-man.com
www.aardvark.com
www.rme-audio.com
Click to expand...
 
Maybe a list of your current equipment would help and some kind of idea how many tracks you would like to record simultaneously.
Budget restrictions as mentioned by Emeric.
What are you recording on currently?A portastudio can be used as a sub mixer in a pinch whilst you get your recording chops down.
About the drummer thing if you want portable recording and lots of inputs along with rock solid stability the way to go is with a all in one like a roland vs series.You can always sync up to a computer later.
In these forums the more info given the better the answer otherwise you're usually answered with more questions.
 
Appreciate the replys fellas. My bad for not being more specific in regards to current equipment. Emeric, you mentioned sound card interface. I'm still very green to recording, and DAW is new to me. I am currently using a portaMK2 to record guitar(trk1) and drums( trk2) together. Then will record bass(trk3) and vocals(trk4).( I can't blame you if your LOL at this very moment. I most likely would too if I were you). I then mix to a Kenwood dual recorder using the fade / pan. SM57 for guitars and AKG B320 for drums /vocals. I realize it's a horse n buggy on todays highway, but it seems to work for what it's worth. I am ready to go the next step.
 
your setup

I was recording 8 tracks at a time (layla by echo) and mixing down 32 tracks with effects on a pentiumII 450.
1.6 is fast enuf. 128meg is enuf ram. But 5800 is a joke. 7200!
The harddrive speed is the single must important thing, along with its seek time and buffering. (in my experience)
SCSI Rules.
rj
 
>128meg is enuf ram

Not for Win XP. For Win 98SE, yeah.

And SCSI doesn't really rule unless you have unlimited funds.

It's forté is the handling of a large number of small read/writes.

It's only marginally better at the typical audio multitracking job where you have one large stream being written as a few files.

Sure- a 15000RPM SCSI drive with a 160MB/sec transfer rate will "top-out" at a larger # of tracks.
So what.
You'll never need that many tracks anyway.
 
If I was you:)

I would go check out www.pcrecording.com . There you will learn alot about what to look for in a set up. You cand find several soundcard links there to. One great one is http://www.pcavtech.com/soundcards/index.htm

The sound card tables need updating last I looked, the are about a year old but still list many cards available for purchase.


It's very worth the read.
Later

F.S.
 
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