Recording rig (old vs. new) need comments

  • Thread starter Thread starter Soulgolem
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Soulgolem

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Hello, me again, been asking a lot of questions in the last few hours, sorry for having a different post for each of them, they just came up while I was thinking about my next purchase at work and I would write one question every time I have a little break. I just got a decent deal on a Motu Ultralite which is what I want, but answer me this :

I used to have this :
LynxOne
RNP & RNC (pre and comp)
2.4 ghz, 1gb RAM 7200 RPM HD PC
Cubase SX 3

And now :
Macbook, Dual core 2ghz, 1gb ram 60gig 5400 RPM HD
Logic Express
(soon) MOTU Ultralite

Reason I'm switching to portable is that my good friend is building a studio with his stuff and my ex-stuff, didn't have the room for that home, so I thought I'd go portable for some of my projects, I know that it won't be of matching quality, but will I get good results with my new current setup ? Or is it a way to big downgrade to be even comparable ? I know recording quality has a lot to do with skills anyway.

Only thing scaring me a lot is the 5400 RPM hard drive (I guess I could go external eventually when I get the budget) and the switch to Logic Express. I'd appreciate feedback before I buy the MOTU and start recording.

Thanks,
Francis.
 
Your setup is fine. But, i would really get an external firewire harddrive dedicated for audio.
 
Well the interface is already using the firewire input so the hard drive will have to be USB, but then I also have to plug something, while with the internal alone I don't have anything to plug, drains a lot from the battery, but always usefull to have such portability... I'll try and see if i can manage with this hard drive first.
 
It sounds to me as though it should be fine. I've used a laptop Mac G4 for recording before and it seemed comparible to my desktop set up back at home. The second hardrive is practically a must now a days but I find firewire harddrives too noisy to work with.
 
I would definately recommend figuring out a way to add an external drive. Mac's do not like recording real time audio to built in drives. In most cases the software these days will have major conflicts recording to internal drives. I ALWAYS record to a different drive than the system drive. If the system drive crashes all your hard work is lost if the tracks are on the same drive. Also the recording drive should be wiped clean after all major projects and defragged before EVERY session. USB is not fast enough to record multiple audio tracks in high quality in real time to an external hard drive. USB is not really a viable option. You should be able to find a way to increase the number of firewire inputs on your powerbook. OR check into wether or not the motu will let you daisy chain firewire devices off it. Your rig looks very good and you might be suprised at the quality you get from it. I would say definitely find a way to record to an external firewire drive though. Hope this helps.
 
Hollowdan said:
I would definately recommend figuring out a way to add an external drive. Mac's do not like recording real time audio to built in drives. In most cases the software these days will have major conflicts recording to internal drives. I ALWAYS record to a different drive than the system drive. If the system drive crashes all your hard work is lost if the tracks are on the same drive. Also the recording drive should be wiped clean after all major projects and defragged before EVERY session.
Click to expand...

I would disagree with pretty much everything you said right there. External drives have higher latency, and some DAWs on the Mac have problems with that and will sporadically have drop-outs and stalls with external drives when internal drives wouldn't, resulting in dramatically lower track counts with external drives than internal.

If you find that the system drive can't keep up, that usually means that either you are using a low-end laptop drive (e.g. a 4200 RPM drive) or you don't have anywhere near enough RAM and your audio app is under paging pressure. For audio, I would recommend 2GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM internal hard drive. If you do that, there is provably no benefit to using an external drive, and I'd be happy to take you through the math in excruciating detail... all ten pages of seek time/settle time math, rotational latency, etc. :D

That's not saying that there aren't times when you might be right, but those are by far the exception, and as I said, usually indicate a poor choice of drive model or not enough RAM.

As for crashes, the last time I had a drive actually crash in a non-recoverable way was... wait... I've never in all my years had a drive fail in such a way that I couldn't recover most of the data. Usually, hard drives start showing bad blocks weeks or months before they keel over....

Defragmenting is a very bad idea on the Mac. Mac OS X has a very sophisticated defragmentation system built into the OS that automatically cleans up small fragments, moves hot files towards the front of the disk, etc. In general, defragmenting a disk in Mac OS X results in -worse- performance than before you defragment it.

I do agree the rest of your post (that USB is a poor choice for performance reasons), though.
 
the external hd: its called daisy chaining, you cannot use usb. even though usb2.o is supposed to be 480mbps and firewire is only 400mbps, it just doesnt work.

you connect the firewire drive to the computer, and the interface into to hd. theres always another firewire port on the hd.


i have a similar setup, with a ibook g4 and a digi002r. i just purchased an external hd, but it was the wrong one. with digidesign, you need something called an oxford 911 chipset, otherwise it just doesnt work. i hate RMA's....

the max for my laptop is 1.5gb and its really fine, i would add more if it supported it, but it is unecessary,

and you will need that hd sooner than you think, because the 5400 rpm drives are really just not powerful enough, unfortunatly for us all.
 
TragikRemix said:
and you will need that hd sooner than you think, because the 5400 rpm drives are really just not powerful enough, unfortunatly for us all.
Click to expand...

You can get 7200 RPM notebook drives. You can get them in the MacBook Pro as a BTO option, and it is a good idea to do so if you can.
 
Unfortunately, I already have the macbook (non-pro) and it has a 5400 rpm drive, I guess i'll have to manage, I do already have an external firewire harddrive anyway.

Tested a Dell laptop recently, let me tell you, it's the little usefull features that make the macbook superior in my opinion, it's just well thought-off, while the Dell is just packed with "specs", not necesarly "performance".

Francis.
 
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