PC Recommendation

[rocker8742]

Need some help with this and i know a few guys on here are great with their PC know how especially fooby when hes actually online

I'm after a small PC but has a requirement for audio recording as below

CPU 2.0 GHz or above (Dual Core)
Memory: 2.0GB or Above
HDD: 500GB

General Video card
General network card capable of 10/100Mbps or more (Preferably with wireless too)

Sound card is where Ive been having issues as i need either a PC that will support multiple sound cards or an external sound card which supports multiple channel in/out for recording

Due to the size I think its going to end up as a compact PC with a USB External Soundcard unless someone knows of a small PC that will support multiple cards


Also what are the chances of getting one which will run from a regulated 12V supply rather than having to have an AC Powersupply?

[Gaz85]

Depending on your budget you could go nuts with something like this are you prepared to build yourself or do you want it built for you ?

[bashbarnard]

You can buy compact pcs cheap enough now. Cant beat building your own but if your like me you end up going nuts and spending all your wages. Ill see if I can.link a couple of reasonablly priced one tonight if I can get on pc.

[rocker8742]

Its for work so can spend up to about £450 but would like to keep it cheaper if possible, also happy to assemble it myself and do the setup to save some cash

[rocker8742]

Think after a bit of research online im going to be looking at something thats Mini ITX with space for a second PCIe sound card

anyone got any experience of whats good for mini ITX? understand this is good for car PCs as well

[Razorback_Rob]

I've got a fair bit of experience with audio recording. How many input channels are you wanting in a real world situation? Also is it multiple input types? Like xlr 1/4" jacks etc?

If you're doing professional recording you want an external sound card with external desk or a more powerful pc with automated midi controlled mixing.

If you're after good sound basic recording I've had a lot of success with the edirol ua-25ex. (External sound card with 2x multi inputs (xlr 1/4" and midi) has phantom power, monitoring etc. There are other such products out there but something along this line sounds ideal. It's worked well when I've recorded demos etc.

[toseland]

What's your budget?

[rocker8742]

I've got a fair bit of experience with audio recording. How many input channels are you wanting in a real world situation? Also is it multiple input types? Like xlr 1/4" jacks etc?

If you're doing professional recording you want an external sound card with external desk or a more powerful pc with automated midi controlled mixing.

If you're after good sound basic recording I've had a lot of success with the edirol ua-25ex. (External sound card with 2x multi inputs (xlr 1/4" and midi) has phantom power, monitoring etc. There are other such products out there but something along this line sounds ideal. It's worked well when I've recorded demos etc.

Will probably only be using 2 channels but could be useful to have capacity for 4 they will only ever be 3.5mm mix input and line out/speaker for each piece of kit connecting to the pc

There's no mixing to be done with it as such because it is passed directly into a program which handles each channel individually

We've done it with a desktop pc just using and additional sound card alongside the on board one which worked as we needed but obviously need to cut down on size for this


Toseland as above about £450

[Razorback_Rob]

I've got a fair bit of experience with audio recording. How many input channels are you wanting in a real world situation? Also is it multiple input types? Like xlr 1/4" jacks etc?

If you're doing professional recording you want an external sound card with external desk or a more powerful pc with automated midi controlled mixing.

If you're after good sound basic recording I've had a lot of success with the edirol ua-25ex. (External sound card with 2x multi inputs (xlr 1/4" and midi) has phantom power, monitoring etc. There are other such products out there but something along this line sounds ideal. It's worked well when I've recorded demos etc.

Will probably only be using 2 channels but could be useful to have capacity for 4 they will only ever be 3.5mm mix input and line out/speaker for each piece of kit connecting to the pc

There's no mixing to be done with it as such because it is passed directly into a program which handles each channel individually

We've done it with a desktop pc just using and additional sound card alongside the on board one which worked as we needed but obviously need to cut down on size for this


Toseland as above about £450

2 channel recording as I've suggest the ua-25ex will be perfect for you. Usb powered and connected device. Headphone monitoring and also outputs are RCA and 1/4" jack. (http://www.rolandus.com/products/details/970)

4 channel I've used akai eie interface (http://www.decks.co.uk/products/Audio_In..._-ye9m9LCQ) perfect for 4 inputs and I found it to be a good product for price.

Other than those kind of things for good quality setups you're looking at big mixing consoles which I've moved onto using (although not my own I only wish I could afford a studio setup (ams neve/Allen and Heath pro setups)

I would suggest at least 4gb of ram and definite multi core for any kind of heavy mixing (process heavy inserts etc) I use a lot of microphones running from 2x 4x12 cabs and have 2 microphones per cab and an ambient room mic. That plus the other guitar tracks. Multiple drum tracks bass tracks vocals and then adding in automated mixing etc is process heavy. Also I use software amps (guitar rig) and some drum software (superior drummer with the metal foundry pack added on) those together come to over 100gb so hard drive space on fast sata3 hard drives..

I would also suggest FireWire connections anywhere possible to cancel out any latency that could occur but this is just me being a bit ott now.

can't praise these Gems enough though. Perfect home recording if you don't mind doing multi tracking.

[rocker8742]

Thanks for the info rob will have a proper look at those tomorrow at work

[Eeyore]

hello!

Right. I built an awesome PC but now that I am more mobile I can actually now see the point of a laptop. Couldnt see it before as they were slow and couldnt play decent games but recent advances mean they are just as good. Ive seen some deals on tv recently and laptop prices seem to be fairly low.

As for building your own PC there isnt too much in it. If you build your own system then you get the spec you want and you avoid any proprietry parts and you know you can upgrade it in the future but actually it wont save you too much money and you wont have any support. Worth considering if youre not willing to spend a few hours troubleshooting drivers and connections etc.

On a budget of £450 and those specs (which are f*ck all) i would recommend getting a decent laptop and spending the remainder on some decent equipment like rob posted. i doubt you will be able to find a laptop that does it without some specialist hardware.

Spec wise on a laptop... at least 4GB of ram, windows 7 if you can, an i5 processor, 500GB HDD or whatever and decent graphics. you'll have to google the graphics. Also google the i5. Its not as as straight cut as it seems. the i3 is mostly dual core, the i5 is dual or quad core and the i7 is quad core. So for the i5 youll need to find a quad core one. Remember that a slow quad core is probably going to be better than a fast dual core!

[toseland]

Do you have moniter mouse etc?

I would still go for a full atx, doesn't need to be huge but is a little cheaper.

Definately Intel i5 as others have said, at least 4gb, with an external card like the cakewalk above.





Most most most important, is a decent pair of speakers and sub, I am not talking about an off the shelf set, but a proper hifi setup go give you a good range of sound. A good set of studio moniters are the best start.

Have a look at behringer krk or m-audio speakers, they are all good options

[Razorback_Rob]

Do you have moniter mouse etc?

I would still go for a full atx, doesn't need to be huge but is a little cheaper.

Definately Intel i5 as others have said, at least 4gb, with an external card like the cakewalk above.





Most most most important, is a decent pair of speakers and sub, I am not talking about an off the shelf set, but a proper hifi setup go give you a good range of sound. A good set of studio moniters are the best start.

Have a look at behringer krk or m-audio speakers, they are all good options

Speakers are a definite. Try get one with a built in eq so you can set it flat when playing the mix back to set the track qe through a flat band speaker set up. But also a decent set if monitoring headphones is a must when music mixing seen people mixing through ear buds saying it's incredible and then playing back later and the bass response being awful.

Laptop is also a great idea so are solid state drives. I've used my macbook with a traditional disc drive keeping click for my drummer while playing pre recorded intros etc and it's lagged from vibrations on stage and through off timing for our drummer. Luckily he ripped out his earpiece and carried on naturally listening to the monitor. Not saying that this will be anything you will need but the r/w speeds are definitely worth it.

Edit: Sorry about my multitude of bad grammar and spelling I'm being thrown around in a van by one of my work mates [FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY]

[rocker8742]

Thanks for your advice guys, not going for a laptop as it would be a PITA, the PC is being mounted in a case and so with a laptop would have to disassemble every time to use it.

As it is after doing a bit of research on the web i stumbled across this: http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/configur...h-model-a/ which appears to do everything that we require it to.

The audio the PC is recording wont be getting played back from the PC as it is only acting as a database which will be accessed from elsewhere. for now we're going to try it with a couple of cheapy USB soundcards and see if it works before spending out more on recording spec equipment

[r3k1355]

Cept it's running an Intel Celeron, so it's slow as shit.

Core i5 can be had in your budget, you should aim for that.

[rocker8742]

Cept it's running an Intel Celeron, so it's slow as shit.

Core i5 can be had in your budget, you should aim for that.

It's only ever going to be running one maybe two program's max so I can't see it being an issue, the size is more important tbh

[Razorback_Rob]

Cept it's running an Intel Celeron, so it's slow as shit.

Core i5 can be had in your budget, you should aim for that.

It's only ever going to be running one maybe two program's max so I can't see it being an issue, the size is more important tbh

Just remember as I said. You may only be running one program but say if you use cubase and you have a lot of inserts etc it bogs the processor like mad! Using guitar rig on a single core pc while running a bass and drum track in the back was awful for me. Even on playback I was getting clipping and awful results. Just a thought. And there's futureproofing too. I know that on mac newer copies of logic don't support single core processors anymore. So if you ever wanted to update etc a single core may limit you. Just an idea.

[r3k1355]

Yea music production stuff hammers the shit out of the processor and ram, especially when you start loading loads of plugins.

[Eeyore]

om i hope you dont think that having more programs installed on your computer slows it down? it totally depends on the type of program. Installed programs that arent running dont make any difference apart from a fuller HDD and larger registry. A irrelevant difference compared to just having a faster processor.

Get an i5 minimum and it should be able to run anything you can throw at it.

[Razorback_Rob]

om i hope you dont think that having more programs installed on your computer slows it down? it totally depends on the type of program. Installed programs that arent running dont make any difference apart from a fuller HDD and larger registry. A irrelevant difference compared to just having a faster processor.

Get an i5 minimum and it should be able to run anything you can throw at it.

Running an ssd drive does help with read write speeds when it comes to using apps plugins such as superior drummer. I have 1.12gb of patches running at once just for one drum track when making demos :p obviously not all being used at once but when it's random samples playing I found an ssd in practical application far better. But in the application were mentioning now. Processor and memory is far more important I agree.

[Ruan]

Lol seriously if you're doing anything audio related, you really do NOT want a crappy Celeron with 4GB ram...

Anything that ASIO can't offload onto your soundcard is going to be dropped onto your main CPU and it's going to nail it, have a few VSTs on whilst doing some stuff and the latency is just going to go through the roof.

I'd be looking at a high clock speed, lower core count CPU - multi core is all nice, but means you'll tend to sacrifice clock speed for more cores, but you're wanting to solve latency problems, high clock speeds are better for this (not to mention you've the same amount of memory controllers for more cores, you can't get data in and out the cores fast enough). An i3/5 with a high turbo clock speed, dual core would be absolutely fine, stick in a 8GB of fast RAM and a good SSD and that'll see you right. An Intel NUC is not going to cut it here!!!!

[Razorback_Rob]

Lol seriously if you're doing anything audio related, you really do NOT want a crappy Celeron with 4GB ram...

Anything that ASIO can't offload onto your soundcard is going to be dropped onto your main CPU and it's going to nail it, have a few VSTs on whilst doing some stuff and the latency is just going to go through the roof.

I'd be looking at a high clock speed, lower core count CPU - multi core is all nice, but means you'll tend to sacrifice clock speed for more cores, but you're wanting to solve latency problems, high clock speeds are better for this (not to mention you've the same amount of memory controllers for more cores, you can't get data in and out the cores fast enough). An i3/5 with a high turbo clock speed, dual core would be absolutely fine, stick in a 8GB of fast RAM and a good SSD and that'll see you right. An Intel NUC is not going to cut it here!!!!

^

Amen to that.

This being said it's nice to hear of people who do audio recording/producing etc on here I remember having a talk with someone on another car forum and discussing mic techniques, after the conversation realised he'd been using some £6 microphone and was confused why his recording quality was awful [FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY]