Turning multimedia PC into Recording PC

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robbocop

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Anyone done this and is it worth it?,i always hear,and have had experience of clicks,pops,etc having a PC full of other things going on at the same time,im going to strip the Pc down to the bare essentials for recording,format the whole lot and start fresh,is it worth it?I'll just throw together another PC for the internet etc and other programs.One final thing is it easy to transfer all the music files,plugins etc to another harddrive altogether?I,m using Cubase vst32,any help,advice appreciated!
 
Well I use my PC for everything such as watching DVD's, programming, web design/graphics, internet browsing and recording. If you have the cash for a seperate PC for recording it might be worth it as your gonna have more hard drive space. Generally when recording you don't want to run anything in the background anyway.
 
Try This

get a copy of 98prolite- I prefer version 3. you can strip away what you don't need. I have a dual boot system with one partition for everyday stuff and a second for audio with rest of drive for audio/software. Good Luck!
 
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This will help you to optimize your comp. ;)
 
98?! Ack! Even if it's the stripped down version I'd be afraid to touch it with a 10 foot pole. That was the most unstable OS I've ever used. I'd like to dub 98 "Blue Screen". Win2000 was a huge improvement! Rock solid and application crashes would almost never crash the machine. I just clean installed to XP and I'm sensing even more stability though at the expense of slightly greater overhead.

I'm not sure but I think the OS takes more drive space and for certain tasks may require slightly more CPU but I'm not sure.
One really bizarre thing I noticed is that under XP my CPUs run MUCH cooler. I couldn't even touch them using 2000 and now they don't get any warmer than bath water. I've yet to do serious processor tests but I've done some Ogg Vorbis encoding with XP. It's much slower than MP3 encoding but then again I never did ogg encoding on 2000.

Transforming your media machine into a DAW is really just about trimming away anything that would conflict with audio or needlessly take processor usage. You don't necessarily need to buy a new machine if it's relatively new and meets requirements on the Cubase box (though you definitely want to aim for more because those are base requirements). Quit all background applications not related to your audio app at hand. You'd might be surprised all the junk that is running in the background if you never used your task manager. I think you can also create different profiles for your machine so it only loads the necessary drivers minimizing conflicts. Good luck.

i'm'
 
windows 98

My windows 98 rarely crashes and I've read of other people quite as happy. Its the 64k GDI/USER/KERNEL files that are the problem alot of times. and buggy software. And that active desktop that people uses eats up at least half of one's memory where I use the windows 95 interface. Windows 2000 problem is that it was meant as a server/business OS and a large amount of memory is used to keep it stable. I plan on using windows 2000 for video but with alot of those darn services and junk stripped out. XP? No way! I don't do spyware. I talked to a UPS Technician 2 weeks ago and he said he has seen the blue screen of death on all microsoft's OS from win98 to XP. He said its all buggy. His recommendation- LINUX.
 
Linux rocks as a desktop OS and a server... but recording blows.
Just getting a delta series card to work is a nightmare, and when you finally have the alsa drivers, utililtes, and libraries compiled, then you need to get your modules loaded, and the envy24control program (which is the equivelent to the midiman delta mixer in windows) and the audio is still shitty.

The programs like Ardor and ProTux require so many additional develpmentol and experimental libraries that just getting them to compile is ... lets just say not too easy.

Ive been trying to record under linux for a few years and its just not working. Use win2k or winxp. At least for now until linux gets better support, it will come, just not yet.
 
Thanks for the input! I'm going to do my own linux from scratch but for audio only and with a low-latency kernel. Linux is a pain to configure soundcard-took me months to get a opti931 card configured correctly. when I gave up, I accidently come across the page with the answer and I wasn't even looking for it. I've used peanut 8.4 & 9.1 and it played my MP3 files excellent using only the regular audio drivers. I've had problems with compiling ALSA but its suppose to be getting better. I'm hoping if I can compile a fast real-time basic Linux for audio, maybe it'll interest more experience people to further what this newbie is wanting to do. I've only found one site that talked about such a system for audio but its all talk. the only thing they have done in the last two years is collect titles of linux audio software. that can be done in 15 mins. so I think its a dead site cause its been 2 years and nothing has happen.
 
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