Re: PC building tips?

On Nov 2, 11:22 am, straightnut <ck74...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
So, when it comes to bottlenecks on a PC, is it right to assume these
occur mainly from slow hard drives?
What about slow motherboards?
What about RAM? Is 4G dual channel overkill?

I'm not convinced that there really ARE any PC bottlenecks, except for
the "extreme" producers. But there are bad setups, less than optimum
settings (that need to be determined experimentally) and occasional
mismatched components that can slow things down.

I don't see disk access speed being a problem unless you're recording
or punching-in a large number of tracks simultaneously. Sure, you can
overload any system, but if you're really seriously going to be doing
100 track productions, you probably shouldn't be using a home-built
computer for it.

How do I determine how many hard drives for my needs?

Count to one. Or two if you want the convenience of having your audio
files stored on a different drive than your operating system,
application programs, and memory swap file. That swap file thing comes
up frequently as a justification for recording audio on a different
drive, but in reality, unless you're loading up your project with a
lot of samples played in real time as a virtual instrument, a couple
of gigabytes of memory will probably keep your swapping to disk to a
minimum. Audio recording just isn't all that hard for a computer to
do.

I've been agonizing over the same sort of things you have recently (I
go through exercise every couple of years and end up not buying
anything) and I'm convinced that I really have little to worry about
when it come to choosing sufficiently powerful components. My biggest
worry, since I tend to keep computers for a long time and change audio
hardware and software frequently (for reviews and writing
documentation) is compatibility and obsolescence. If you have a system
pretty much in mind and figure that it will stay the same for a while,
it's hard to go wrong with even modest offerings.

I neglected to mention that I would be trying to create a fairly quiet
if not silent machine, which is one of the reasons I assumed I
couldn't buy a prebuilt PC.

There are some pre-built PCs made with audio applications in mind that
hae some attention paid to mechanical silence, but you can probably do
better yourself.

The other being upgradeability and hard
drive bays. I do see some great deals on PCs however, and now I'm
wondering if I should just go that route.

If you buy a Dell or HP at the dime store, you probably will be
limited in upgradeability, but most custom builders use cases with
plenty of drive bays. What you need to look out for is what kind of
slots and how many are offered on the motherboard, which is somewhat
of a good reason to assemble your own. There are all sorts of new and
newly obsolete things here. PCI slots are becoming extinct, there are
at least two flavors of PCI-e slot, and practically no more AGP
slots.

And little stuff, too. For example, I want to have PS/2 mouse and
keyboard ports rather than the contemporary style of using USB for
those - because I use a switch to swap the keyboard, mouse, and
monitor between the computer and Mackie hard disk recorder and I don't
want to have to swap out the switch and then find that the Mackie
doesn't like a USB adapter ahead of its "legacy" mouse and keyboard
ports. Anyone starting with a new system can comfortably use USB ports
for the mouse and keyboard as long as there are enough to go around,
but not me. And I want to continue to use my Lynx L22 audio card
because it's just so darn good, and that takes a "normal" PCI slot.
And if the motherboard doesn't have a Firewire port, it'll need
another (probably PCI) slot for a card to provide that. So these
"little thing" can narrow down your selection pretty quickly.

I'll buy as many hard drives as I should. I'll buy whatever I should
to make recording as seemless and easy as possible. I need my system
to be inviting for creativity, which it has never been. I'm looking
for point and click for dummies ease of use if I can get it, to help
stay in a creative frame of mind.

You can't buy that, you have to evolve it. Put aside the musical
creativity for a couple of months and just fool with your computer.
You'll eventually know when you're ready to get back to pushbutton
music creation. But if you try to do both at the same time, you'll
probably not do a good job of either.

Maybe I'm going about this backwards and
should have focused on the software I'll be using to determine how
much PC power I'll need for it. But I have little experience with
software for recording, so I don't know what issues can come up when
using multiple applications.

That's a very good approach. You can get demo versions of a lot of
different DAW programs and they'll run well enough on just about any
computer with the proper OS so that you can get a sense of how they
work and how they fit in with your work style. You can probably
eliminate a few right off the bat and you'll have a couple of
favorites. Or you can just decide that come hell or high water, you're
going to learn to use ProTools so you'll be like most of the rest of
the community. (it's not such a bad choice, but may not be the optimum
for your working style)

The test to apply is not how many tracks you can run with it but
rather whether the user interface makes sense to you, and whether it
supports the hardware and plug-ins that you're likely to be using in
the future. Once you have some likely software candidates you can
start looking for hardware that will let you run it without problems,
within reasonable bounds. But it's pretty rare that some piece of
software won't run on any reasonable hardware platform with the proper
operating system. Obviously you can't run Mac programs on a PC, and I
wouldn't advise you to mess with running a PC program that's your
primary application on a Mac. But I assume you're entrenched in the PC
camp.


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