At home recording studio- Specs?

http://www.soundonsound.com/forum

for audio, 7200, whether it be internal or external.

how do you plan on pluging the external drive usb 2.0 or firewire?

well pit it this way if you use 7200 hd over the 5400 hd and you are useing usb 2.0 it would like dial up internet you wouldn't much of the def. but if you use firewire with a 7200 hd then yea it would be better over the 5400 hd.

useing axt. hd i would not matter if you had a 5400 rpm or a 7200 rpm you trying to push all that data thur the usb port the data is only going to that speed so have a 5400 rpm hd it would keep up with the data comeing so you wouldn't see no deffent on that usb is to slow for what you want to do. firewire would a little better but no that much. i would do what worldstress said. in stend of buying an ext. hd i would buy more ram for your computer the more ram you have the better. then when your done why not just put it on cd or dvd if you need to use in the later just pop it back in and go from thier
i hope that clears things out for you.

Heh and this is why Firewire 800 is involved...

Ok when recording Ram is important, CPU is important but your main bottleneck to severe multi-track work will be your HD as the original poster I am sure has found out on t=other forums.

A 7200 RPM HD on a seperate firewire 800 bus is what most people choose to do for serious Multi-track work. The reason for this is contrary to popular belief when mixing down much of your audio is streamed off of or on to the HD, not stored in RAM. If that HD also has to access other portions of itself that are not contiguous for reading pasts of the OS or running software that will severely slow things down, another reason to stop as many background processas as you can. Partitioning your HD can help with this in keeping your audio in a contiguous part of your HD(Seperate Partition), but if it has to read other partitions and move the headsd to them it slows things down.

Someone posted elsewhere I believe on this forum the math behind figuring out what your stadard 5400 or 7200 RPM hd will support. In essense I believe the 5400 RPM HD dedicated to audio could support 16 tracks of 16 Bit/44.1 KHz(CD Quality) audio for multitracking purposes.

However I dont know about most people, but my multitrack sessions frequently go to the 20-30 track ranges with the rarer sessions going above 30 tracks. I also typically run 24 bit audio, even if working at 44.1 to export to CD, and on occasion I will work at 48 or 96 KHz as well, meaning that the HD speed becomes that much more important.

So my reccomendation is dont worrk as much about the internal HD if you wont be using it for audio, get a 7200 RPM external drive if you can to go on a seperate bus(Unfortunatly on a laptop this is pretty difficult). For the difference in price though it is worth it to go with 7200 RPM for the external even if on a bus like USB, though I believe USB 2.0 can still push through a good amount of data, not as much as an internal SATA bus I dont believe, but still decent.

And no you dont want to load your audio software on that HD, you would want to use that drive exclusively for audio data. Keep your OS and software on your Internal, which a 5400 should do you fairly well.

Above a gig of ram can make a difference, but getting to that gig point can make the largest difference for your money vs getting over a gig. So in other words try to make sure you have a gig of ram, and if you can afford it get more.

CPU also important, both CPU and RAM come into effect on how many softsynths, Effects and the like you can perform on the audio, but not as much into how much audio you can reliably track at once(Until they get filled up by software running in them, then it effects it, but only because you are running to much stuff on your computer)

Seablade

seablade is right on the money................what he said..........

I record on both actually. I have recorded on Desktop PCs running windows once or twice, not often, recorded on Mac Desktops and Mac Powerbook(Which I own one) but my main audio workstation is actually a PC running Linux and Ardour/Jack which I personally find to be the best solution for straight audio for me anyways. If I am doing soundtracking for video that I will do in PT on my Mac, mainly because PT is what I have that supports video, not nessecarily what I like.

I also have access to nuendo, but since I avoid MS like the plague it kinda sits around and does nothing, and has for several years. However I have been told this is a good program to use and my brief stint using it shows that it is indeed pretty capable.

Personally if you are looking for something that will always replace a desktop, you will never find it. I got the powerbook for 3 main reasons, unix based non-MS OS(Yes I dislike MS and the BSOD), sound, and stability. Meaning it is pretty quiet, quieter than most PC laptops, and more stable, not only in OS but just general build quality is much better IMO than most PC notebooks. Add that onto it is I think one of the few if not only Laptops that can provide power over firewire to interfaces and there is good software selection for audio on a Mac, I am very happy with it. DOesnt mean its for everyone, just my opinion.

However I use my desktop for my larger projects.

In as far as that statement you asked about lety me clarify...

Drive 1= Internal 5400 HD- Put all software and OS on this.
Drive 2= External HD- ONLY put audio DATA on this(Not software)

I would have to look it up, but I believe the previous poster is partially correct in that USB wont allow you the same speed as SATA. SATA is 150 MB/s max transfer rate if I remember right, and USB 2.0 is 480 megabit/sec, which equals roughly 60 MB/s theorretical max. That is about the same as ATA/66 drives if I remember right, but not the current SATA. Now all that being said, let us take a track of 16/44.1 audio which is roughly 700 KBit/s of audio, divide that by 8 to get useable numbers for most people of Kilobyte and not kilobit and you get 87.5 KiloByte/sec per 16 bit/44.1 mono track. That means it would take quite a few tracks to fill up your usb 2.0 Bus, lets assume your Real Life max on that bus is 300 MegaBits per second, that means 37.5 MegaBytes per second if we play it very conservatively, and of course these are all estimates, not exacts but cloase enough for our purposes. On a USB 2.0 Bus that means you can fit quite a few tracks before you fill up the bus

The HD speed will help ensure that you can do that without maxing out your HD first, which I dont have the calcs on hand at the moment, try to find them earlier in this topic, Ill look back a little later and see if I can, very informative post at any rate. But as I said if you assume 16 tracks at 16/44.1 for 5400 yes you should be able to take advatage of the bus. Thing to remember is yes the theoretical max for SATA is much larger than the theoretical max for USB, however the drive has to take advantage of both of those in order for either to come into play, and of course your RL will tell you that theoretical maxes arent possible

EDIT: Found the thread, redgiki did a very nice post in on this topic... http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=69136 Not the exact one I was looking for I dont tihnk but still very good post.

Reason why you would want an external HD, even if you are only recording a track or two at a time, is if you are tracking it in, meaning playing back other recorded tracks at the same time you are recording in audio tracks for monitoring purposes, and obviously to keep in time with the already recorded material etc.. you are still needing that bandwidth for transfer.

Now all that being said I can and do still do smaller projects on my laptop off my internal 5400 drive on occasion

Nope. Almost every Audio program out there should have no problem streaming the audio directly to a different drive, not involving the first in the path at all. If your audio program cant do that, it aint worth paying for at the least.

If it caused lag that means you are probably running to many programs at the same time anyways and things are getting paged into and out of your virtual memory, in which case you need to do two things, one stop running so much crap while doing audio, and two possibly buy more memory if you are running light on it(Again over a gig and while there will be some difference it wont be to much, get it if you can afford it, but otherwise that money can be better spent elsewhere)

Cant help you with why the audio was stopping and starting only when you were using external speakers, I am assuming the external speakers were connected to the internal sound card? That would be kinda odd and I would lean towards conincidence, or a faulty sound card or connection or other equipment being faulty. Using external speakers doesnt add to the overhead until you run them through an external card, which while it does add SLIGHTLY to the overhead, it is well worth it in terms of audio quality. You just wont get good quality off an internal sound card.

Seablade

EDIT: Forgot to convert Bits to Bytes in some places, I think I caught them all but post up anything that looks questionable.

Well you are opening a few different situations there, so let me see if I can field them...

In as far as Midi, the information for that is EXTREMLY small(Just control messages) so I wouldnt even worry about recording it to be honest in your specs.

Now in as far as recording the audio output from a soft synth, which I believe is what you were referring to, I believe(And Fachiro you may have a better clue on this than I do as I dont use softsynths in windows or mac?) that most softsynths will do one of a couple of things. One they may generate their sound based off an algorithm stored in memory, or two they may play samples that have also been stored in memory(With limitations). Short of something with huge samples(Gigasampler I believe would be an example of this, there is a reason people actually have debates on how to seperate those samples up on seperate HDs and it aint because of the size being to large for the HD) your standard soft synth should be fine running off your internal HD. HOWEVER you would want to write that data to your external for the next portion...

Running your playback, or recording both involve massive amounts of data transferred if you are doing multitracking or multichannel work. See that thread I linked for good estimates, the amount of data required depends on the number of tracks and resolution of those tracks. If you are recording one track at a time, if you save that one track to the external drive, and then replay it to write another you will be doing better, MUCH better than trying to write it to the same drive that say your OS is constantly swapping stuff in and out of virtual memory because windows doesnt like to use its full actual memory when it has virtual memory availiable.

Most recording software out there has a point where you can define its temporary storage space, used typically in recording, but even if you cant if you define the project and save it on the external it will most likely work there as well if the programming is worth its salt. If the recording software gets set to use your external HD then you should be fine. Short of going into a detailed explanation of pipes and the like, which I am not even sure I could do it justice, youll just have to take my word on it that it is possible and should be able to be done fine. What software are you using to record with? maybe then someone can tell you how to do this in it.

And in as far as capabilities of a 5400 RPM HD, I was and still am working on series of offball recorded projects from live theater performances I have engineered recently(This past summer). These were recorded in Ableton Live because that was what I was using for playback and didnt want to have another peice of software open, everything running at 16/44.1 Now Live is great but it aint what I would use for my multi-track work, that is what I have ardour for on my Mac(Yea for linux, shameless plug there) so using Jack I had to route the output for each channel of audio in Live out and into Ardour, playing back the shows in live and recording in ardour simultaneously. Everything staying at the 16/44.1 arena as it will be going to CD if anything outside of my own use. 7 Tracks in Live for playback, 7 Tracks in Ardour for recording, all to the internal 5400 RPM HD and early on I got a few hiccups but once i got into the groove of thigns I went for nearly 3 hours straight of recording without a single dropout or other hiccup on the HD. Of course that was all contiguous as well, make sure your drive is welll defragged.

Now if I was doing one of my other projects I have worked on that involved 20-30 tracks of audio, there is no way I would have touched that with a 5400 RPM HD, that is why I have a 7200 in my desktop, and another external, as well as if I ever really needed to I could set up raid arrays(Again shameless linux plug with little problem if I picked up the HDs for it.

Now the thing to remember about the above example though is that I am not doing anything but running software that has been loaded into memory while this is going on, not running any softsynths, even though I dont think they would present a huge problem, and really not using my computer at all, not doing anything that would cause other HD work while it is happening. There is a reason for that

Hope this helps.

Seablade

Err...

In graphic work like photoshop layers can be whatever the heck you define them as, but typically they are used to seperate objects from one another and are identified in part by the fact that they are either covered by or cover another layer or both(Exacpet in a single layer project which you get after flattening one.

So I am not real sure what you are referring to as layers there.

The tracks would be for example, Your Fretless Bass Track, or your Piano Track, or your Slow Strings track(s), etc...

However it appears to me those are reading MIDI data correct(Not familiar with FL studio sorry)? THat would mean that they are exporting that data to a softsynth, and the audio is coming out of the softsynth. Now if that is the sound you would want I would record the audio out of that softsynth into a sequencing program myself and get it all as audio, but I know some people prefer to work in MIDI due to the ease of correcting anything later on, so you may just want to export the individual tracks as MIDI if you can use the softsynth as a standalone with a good sequencer.

Anyways all that aside... when you say stall and lag, do you mean it does so once when you start palyback, but then it plays fine? If that is the case have you tried shortening the buffer at all, as that stall would be the software filling the buffer to prevent dropouts.

Or are you referring to it drops out throughout playback for brief periods of time and you lose some audio?

Seablade

Hmm Ok...

Well then if I had to guess(Take this with a grain of salt since i am not familiar with FL) I would say you are probably running individual softsynths for each track, and your problem is MUCH more with a lack of ram or processing power than with your HD(As Midi is not much to be read from the HD it isnt a huge drain by any stretch)

Things to do with that would be to record your tracks that you are done with as audio out of your soft synth into a real sequencer(Again I say that not being familiar with FL so it may be the sequencer in it does what you need, I dont know) and try to balance your load between audio and soft-synths a bit better.

However you should see if there is a Load Meter anywhere in FL studio, either processor or DSP or Synth or whatever they want to call it, but it shoudl represent how close to fully loaded you are currently. Anyways that amy be able to give you a better idea of wether it is a HD problem or a problem in the RAM/CPU topping out in capabilities first. Myself I obviously lean towards the second of those in this instance since you seem to be running it all as Midi into softsynths, and as I said Midi is not much information to read off a HD.

But yes get a decent processor and a gig of ram would definitly not do you bad at all.

Seablade