If you are serious about building a computer to centralize your studio, there are some important things you should know. Or maybe know already....
1. not to stir any waves,, but rule one, dont be put off by message board snobs. On every board in the world there are nice people to help and there are guys that sit on the internet all day and brag about what they think they know while getting really picky about repost "rules"... you asked a good question, and i read it here so ill TRY to help here even though im not a computer guy...
2. As with anything, plan a budget. Especially when building a puter, ,its real easy to go overboard. I use a PC at home, a MAC at the studio, the PC cost me around $1,000.00 custom built.
3. The 3 most important things in my opinion are SOUND CARD selection, RAM, and BUS SPEED. You can get sold a puter with a gig of ram, but without a fast bus speed it means nothing. I would go for nothing less than 512 ddr ram. Even if you arent into much software yet, you WILL BE! So when you load up on plug ins youll wish you got the extra ram early. Sound Card selection, well, thats very subjective to opinion. At home I use the audigy pro platinum 2,, not too fancy, but it does the trick.
4. HD space. The more the merrier Iguess, although for me 80 gigs is enough. I would invest in a removable/protable hard drive. I keep everything stored on a 250 gig portable,, that way I take my work from home to the studio with ease and my home pc isnt bogged down with .wavs
5. I/O This goes with the sound card really, what Inputs and Outputs do you need? If you are recording more than one source at a time, youll need multiple inputs into your computer,, so take this into consideration. I also do live pa on the side, and when we record, we run everything into a Mackie 1202 mixer ( i picked it up new on ebay for $200!!) Then straight to the puter from the mackie and we record with Sound FOrge software.. Or you can get a protools rig, but thats probably not practicle.
6. Last but not least file management.. this is kind of after the fact of "how to buid the computer" . but once you have this monster system you dont want it losing performance. Try to be as organized as you can be with your files, and if possible, use another puter to surf the net. This is not a big deal, i know guys that just set up a seperate user on the same computer to surf, but in my opinion better safe than sorry, like i said, im a music nerd, not a computer nerd. hope any of this helped. Pretty elementary, but hey, its the neewb board and we are ALL newbs at something. Later and good luck.
1. not to stir any waves,, but rule one, dont be put off by message board snobs. On every board in the world there are nice people to help and there are guys that sit on the internet all day and brag about what they think they know while getting really picky about repost "rules"... you asked a good question, and i read it here so ill TRY to help here even though im not a computer guy...
2. As with anything, plan a budget. Especially when building a puter, ,its real easy to go overboard. I use a PC at home, a MAC at the studio, the PC cost me around $1,000.00 custom built.
3. The 3 most important things in my opinion are SOUND CARD selection, RAM, and BUS SPEED. You can get sold a puter with a gig of ram, but without a fast bus speed it means nothing. I would go for nothing less than 512 ddr ram. Even if you arent into much software yet, you WILL BE! So when you load up on plug ins youll wish you got the extra ram early. Sound Card selection, well, thats very subjective to opinion. At home I use the audigy pro platinum 2,, not too fancy, but it does the trick.
4. HD space. The more the merrier Iguess, although for me 80 gigs is enough. I would invest in a removable/protable hard drive. I keep everything stored on a 250 gig portable,, that way I take my work from home to the studio with ease and my home pc isnt bogged down with .wavs
5. I/O This goes with the sound card really, what Inputs and Outputs do you need? If you are recording more than one source at a time, youll need multiple inputs into your computer,, so take this into consideration. I also do live pa on the side, and when we record, we run everything into a Mackie 1202 mixer ( i picked it up new on ebay for $200!!) Then straight to the puter from the mackie and we record with Sound FOrge software.. Or you can get a protools rig, but thats probably not practicle.
6. Last but not least file management.. this is kind of after the fact of "how to buid the computer" . but once you have this monster system you dont want it losing performance. Try to be as organized as you can be with your files, and if possible, use another puter to surf the net. This is not a big deal, i know guys that just set up a seperate user on the same computer to surf, but in my opinion better safe than sorry, like i said, im a music nerd, not a computer nerd. hope any of this helped. Pretty elementary, but hey, its the neewb board and we are ALL newbs at something. Later and good luck.
