New user needs advice

[road_runner]

Hi,
I've just built a computer for my son-in-law for his band to record with. I'm hoping you can look at the specs and tell me if there are any areas that might cause problems.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+
2 x 128kb L1 cache
2 x 1024kb L2 cache
2 x 1gig OCZ Platinum DDR2 800mhz RAM running in dual mode
320 Gb Seagate 7200rpm sata2 harddrive
ASUS DRW-1814BLT sata DVD burner
Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard with 2000/1600 MT/s system bus nForce430 chipset



At the moment it only has the built in 5.1 Audio. We have a Behringer FCA202 audio interface.
Will a better audio card help the sound or does the Behringer bypass that by using the firewire connection?
I was thinking of a Sounblaster Audigy 2ZS or similar.

The Behringer came with Ableton Live, can you suggest any other software that might be suitable? Won't know for sure till we start recording, but I'd say initially at least all the effects will be produced before the signal hits the Behringer.

[mbailey17]

I just asked basically the same question and found out you dont need any other soundcard only your interface.

[liquidair]

The computer specs look great. The only thing I may suggest unless I missed it, no I didn't, is to get another hardrive but smaller for the OS and software you end up using. IT's best for audio to have 2 drives, the reason is that with everything was one the same drive, the drive has to fetch alot of information, whether it be audio tracks, or info from the software itself or even the OS. Also, with such a huge drive, a defrag doesn't know that the audio is related to anything but the other audio in the folder with it, so it may stick the program may be on a different complete sector. This takes up time to get there and back. You can prolly get away with a 60-100 gig OS drive and it shouldn't cost much.

The Behringer will become the "soundcard" and will be better than the stock built-in 5.1 circuit on the MoBo. Sound will always improve with the quality of the interface you use, but I doubt the quality of the SBlaster is any better than the Behringer. That is the one drawback to soundcards (audio interfaces), you can't ever hear them really before you buy unless you go to a store and they have one hooked up. Most likely however, that's the one they make the most money on. For now I would say stick to the Behringer. I am not a fan of their gear but I think you guys will have enough fun and the sound will be good enough until a while down the road when it's time to upgrade. Have fun and let us know if you have any questions!

[road_runner]

Thanks for the advice with the harddrive.
What if I buy an identical drive and connect them as a raid array? I'm from Australia so I dont know what things cost there but they're less than $100 here so I don't mind spending that if it helps get the best out of ten grand plus worth of instruments, amps and mixers.

[liquidair]

a Raid array will increase performance but again you run into the same problem. The basic issue is that two arms are better than one. All a Raid array will do for you is have two arms trading the same tasks, which means data will read faster off the drive, but it won't find it any faster. See what is going to happen is that the computer will need to find these audio files for the song, load them into Ram, go find the OS instructions, go find code for ableton, go back and find more audio, record audio.go back to ableton sector, get code for a plugin, get the new audio track that is coming up in the song, and so on. Seek times are a constant (based on how far they have to travel), so each time we had to change a task, we add in that time.

Now with one drive running the OS and the software, and then one drive only having audio, we get those seek times down to virtually nil. The audio drive never has to move far, it's stationary within the sector of the audio file folder of the song you are recording/playing back. The O/S and any other software is at the exact same time finding what it needs and sending it to memory, there is some seek time here but it is not as much because these things don't need to send as many instructions as audio does.

Audio playback and recording needs constant attention because they are big files, and there are a lot of them. It's not feasible to load up the audio for the entire song into Ram (at all), so maybe a second or two will be loaded so the computer can do different tasks. It still has to come back and load another second or two of audio. Sorry if I am getting too technical.

What you may want to do is buy that matching drive, use it as an OS drive, and when you guys get really good and firmiliar with audio recording, you can convert it to a Raid array and then buy a different OS drive. I have a RAID array for my data drive, but thats because I was doing a ton of tracks! For starters I doubt you will need to use alot (it takes some practice to make more tracks sound great).

Just out of curiousity, what kind of other gear did you guys get? I am a gear head so I just like seeing setups. I will tell you, and this makes me very happy, is that Austrailia looks like it's in the midst of a music boom right now that appears to be bigger than the 90's Seattle seen here. There are so many awesome bands coming from down under, so I am so excited for you and your son in law to be a part of that! I don't know what kind of music they are doing, but in the past couple of months I have found at least 20 bands, most of which are recording just like you, who are just outstanding. Compared to the crap here, it's miles above.

Again, hope I helped and if you have any questions at all just ask!

[thesilentdrummer]

The alternative (but almost as good) option is to create a partition on the hard drive: one for the OS, one for everything else.