will I have enough CPU power?

[chizzy]

Howdy. I am currently running a slightly elderly AMD athalon 1800 XP (1.5 GHZ, i think) And 1 gig RAM. I have been doing just fine running a quattro and recording 4 tracks at once, running both Live & reason. I just bought the Presonus Firepod, and am waiting for it to arrive. I've never used a FW device before, and was wondering if I will have to upgrade my CPU in order to record more than 4 tracks at once. In other words, is FW much more efficient? If I have to upgrade, I'll probably need a new mobo, and possibly new RAM. (which would kinda suck) If anyone here uses a firepod, could you tell me how CPU-friendly it is? Thanks in advance.

 

[ermghoti]

Speaking from near-total ignorance:

1.People were recording a good number of tracks on machines like yours, when those specs were leading edge.

2. I have read that it takes no more CPU to record a track than to play it. So try to play 8-12 or whatever tracks on your rig now, and you'll have an idea how it will perform.

 

[Nakatira]

Dont know if this will help.
But I reorded 8 tracks on the firepod on a celeron laptop I think it was 2, something really slow, on most thing, but it did ok.

I think your computer should be allright, as long as you dont use to many live plugins.

 

[chizzy]

don't really use any live plugins, so hopefully I'll be ok. I just want the option of recording say, drums to 5 tracks + bass & 1 rhythm guit as a scratch. Right now, I just have bass & guit into monitoring so the drummer can work off of it. Drums are mic'd bass, snr + overheads, but the drummer really likes his floor tom, so I'd like to mic that too.

thanks!

 

[cawhite12]

Where you will run into CPU problems will be once everything is tracked and you are mixing. When you start to add reverbs, EQ's, etc... Those are what become very cpu intensive (soft synths as well, if you run any of those). One thing you can do is if you've got some tracks that you like the sound of but are running out of cpu power, you can bounce those tracks (including the FX) and then finish up the mixing, so those tracks would now have the FX embedded in them, and then you can mute the tracks with the FX that those came from. It's a longer process, but can help if you're having cpu power issues.

 

[chizzy]

Already doing that. Right now, once we like what's happening in reason, we record it to a track and shut down the program. The last track we worked on like this, I had 10 audio tracks (most with an eq plug, a couple with delay or reverb) and 2 midi tracks: one edirol orchestra, and one softsynth. My CPU usage was at about 35%-45%.