Building a PC for Music Recording

ui

Are there any special considerations, apart from sound card? I'm likely to get a run-of-the-mill nForce4 motherboard, but do the North and South Bridge chipsets make any difference, especially when it comes to latency if I'll just be using a PCI sound card anyways?

Oh yeah, and I'm going AM2 AMD X2. With 2 gigs of ram.

I appreciate any help you can provide.

muninn

Good soundcard will take care of your latency problems, while gigantic amounts or ram will let you playw ith more samples at the same time. CPU is used for sound processing, so all depends on what you are thinking about doing software wise.

ui

Thanks alot for the quick reply.

I've also been thinking of grabbing a usb interface, like the M-Audio stuff. Any particular reasons why PCI would be a better choice over a USB 2.0, or firewire device?

muninn

I dont think that there are any practical speed differences between PCI and firewire for example. I own both m-audio firewire and the PCI audiophile and they both perform great. I think that usually the external interfaces are much more expensive. I would look into what you need and the ports and jacks you will need (external stuff usually have more connectivity options). But no, I dont think there are any significant disadvantages.

Zifnab

What software are you planning on running, what are you recording (how many tracks, what external equipment, etc), and how many tracks do you feasibly need to run at once? That will tell us a lot more about your needs in terms of hardware.

That said, I've found no real differences between using a Firewire interface and a more dedicated one, such as MOTU's Audiowire (which admittedly runs on a Firewire cable, but isn't). You shouldn't see any real difference between the two until you reach a large enough number of tracks that your computer will begin having issues as well.

Ruckus

Use multi-core Intel chips for your processor (Dual or Quad Cores). Intel always seems to edge out AMD when it comes to Graphics and Audio processing.

Some sort of SATA RAID array for your harddrive (RAID 1 if you just want redundancy, RAID 5 if you want redundancy and Speed). I'd aim for a minimum of 250GB of disk space available for audio files.

DVD Burner to backup tracks uncompressed.

2GB of RAM if you're going with Windows XP, even more if you want to use Vista.

I had a friend who was (is) in a few bands, does some of his own recording. He uses a system called ProTools, which has an external device connected via Firewire and controlled using the Software.

You may also want to consider a power filter for whatever setup you build.

Thanatos

I have a co-worker who does recording, and he's said that you get better performance out of an AGP graphics card than a PCI-E, because the PCI-E uses the same channel as the sound card.

ui

Thanks for the great suggestions guys.

For clarification:

I usually only record one track at a time, so, I don't have to worry about simultaneously recording instruments. I just use the "playback track" feature when recording over the top of the previously tracked instruments.

Each song would probably contain about 15 tracks.

kevbot

In addition to the above, make sure to buy a high quality motherboard (one with lots of voltage regulation, such as an A8N32 by Asus), a very good power supply (I'm partial to Silverstone, but PC Power and Cooling are usually even better), an all metal case with no windows and a decent UPS system with AVR (automatic voltage regulation). These will all help reduce electronic noise introduced by poor power and contain the normal electronic noise produced by your computer.

Also, make sure you install all of the grounding screws and metal backplane when you install the motherboard.

Thanatos

If you're planning on doing your actual recording in the room with the computer, you may want to consider a liquid-cooled model, or, at the very least, ultra-quiet fans.

virgilsamms

Thanatos wrote: »

If you're planning on doing your actual recording in the room with the computer, you may want to consider a liquid-cooled model, or, at the very least, ultra-quiet fans.

Yeah - where you have the choice between components, go for the quieter ones as ambient noise will come through in your recordings, especially when using a good mic. It's inevitable, but the less the better.

I'd recommend an external firewire/USB interface rather than a sound card. I have no empirical evidence to back me up, but it seems to me the external ones have better preamps and A/D converters than most PCI soundcards.

Musiqua

If you're eager to get started with recording, don't install Vista on it. Very few interfaces have drivers for Vista yet. Even M-Audio who claims that they've been working over a year on them has shown anything yet.