Pc VS stand alone DAW Recommendations for Audio Studio
My friend called me the other day and had problems with his studio Pc computer. he runs a layla card in a rackmount PC, I was stunned to hear that he runs a 3.3ghz machine with 4gb's of ram!! Yet his machine constantly crashed running Cakewalk Sonar and a Layla 24/96 audio card. It was slow too, like pond water. For comparison, I run a bottom end AMD 1.5ghz semptron system with 1gb of ram, yet my system is as fast if not fast in opening applications and hardly ever crashes.So what gives? Well, I guess he says that his overheats and then crashes. He has a special rackmount case. There must be a problem with it, perhaps the motherboard is shorting out on the case or something similar. I mean I have not even 1/2 of his processing power and 1/3 of his ram. So there is a serious problem there. Perhaps its software, but he isn't hooking that pc up to the internet. Geez and still has problems with it..
Now my friend, PSB, has his own studio and was abut to record something when his system crashed as I understand it. For me, this is why I would be miserable with a computer based recorder (a DAW-digital audio workstation on a PC). I much prefer a standalone hard disk recorder, no software worries no crashes,etc...Ok, so lesson learned and I have worked on many many pc's over the years and they just are not too reliable and are taxed when recording multiple tracks of audio.
anyway this does not help my friend,who has a great recording setup with his layla card. SO, I suggested that he just replace the motherboard and cpu in a cpu combo, $100 will get him a dual core cpu which would be nice. The only other real potential problem will be his memory, but my guess is that his motherboard and or cpu are flakey. bad memory will explain crashes but not overheating!! And he has plenty of fans and and huge processor fan to begin with. So that was my recommendation.
for me personally, I am considering spending $89 a new motherboard combo which is an amd dual core (an x23800). It might be nice as loading long 20 minute sound files takes a little while.On the other hand maybe just a stick of ram might do wonders for my system. truth be known it is very solid and works great. I wold like to get a drive dedicated to holding samples though and one dedicated to recording. SO we will see. I do know, that for audio, you don't need much. Truth is, any Pentium 4 xp system would do a great job in any studio and I have found pentium 4 2.0 systems refurbished dells for $89.00 Hard to beat and would be plenty fast for most audio applications.
Rackmount vs desktop case for audio studio PC
ok, I removed my tower case and put the PC in a fancy pants new black rackmount case, not realizing how long the case would be. You see rack mount audio units are usually 15" long as best ,some specialty items maybe 19" in length, but in the pc world standard is 23" or more!! And try to find a 4 sp 15" rackmount pc case, good luck, you wont find it, you might find a 2 sp rack at best which is 15" but requires riser cards or does not have enough 5.25" spaces and so on. Yes the rackmount case looks cool,but in practicality, its not so great, first off they are noisy as hell,mine sounds like a darn air conditioner, it sucks for that, and heat can be an issue which is why it needs all these fans. That sucks too. So, either have the rackmount pc in another room or buy fans that are silent including case fans, power supply fans and the cpu fan all of which are loud in mine. I think, I would go back to a desktop case if it were quiet. I still have not conquered the silent studio in that my pc is still in my studio room. the cables!! they just aren't long enough to go to he next room, spdif cables at 12ft need to be in the 20ft range and that is hard to find. well, don't get me started on that.
Recordings
Always clear off the recordings when your done with them and save them to your PC or you will eventually write over them as I just did ,5 minutes of a track gone, overwritten with a new track, well, no big deal, but frustrating just the same. Anyway, looking forward to the weekend. I am going to try to tackle the pc in the pc room dilemma and reorganize the studio room
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