Daw tips.

[manning]

(my background..hopefully folks wont take this
as meaning i'm an egotist..just shareing.
but i did 30 yrs in the puter industry.)

if your on a budget and cant afford an i7 puter..
look carefully at a desktop amd 620 quad processor with lots of ram.
and 2 7200 rpm drives with 32 mb cache.
(note the cache level.)
one drive for OS and one for recording to.
normally around 600 buks.
you should be able to do 80 traks with this set up.

BE VERY CAREFULL OF EL CHEAPO LAPTOPS.
in summary ive tested hundreds this year for friends ,
and they are pretty bad imho.
which is due to slow internal drives , chipset issues
with some sound devices and many other factors.
(for proper laptops..but pricey...check out
adkproaudio.com i have zilch to do with em.
just suggesting folks check em out.,)
in summary laptops are a zoo.
which is why many recording forums have so many ..
"my laptop has probs with ...etc etc " threads.
yes they are mobile and YES they look sexy (lol.)
but beware the old adage "beauty is only skin deep".
lots of people are haveing probs.

(i have a ton of tips related to daws , to save me typing reams...
there is a leangthy tips thread of mine called "My tips" at pgmusic.com
in the user forum titled tips n triks.)

before buying any laptop or desktop run this on it..
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

one reason i like the budget amd 620 approach is ...
puter processors can get obsolete.
yes the i7 is grrreat...but ITS NOT THE END OF THE STORY..
so you might think bout the useing a 620 now and saveing your money
for major new processor products that will come.
eg 8 and 16 core processors.

hope this helps someone.
god bless.
ps..if however you anticipate useing a TON of resource hogging plug ins..
right now i see the i7 as the only alternative.

[kara]

Good tips, thanks for posting those 
The I7 is a good alternatif, Moon is doing some experiments with it.
And in a couple of months we have yet another CPU from Intel.

k

[Oren]

Further to this theme, a Linux operating system tends to use your hardware efficiently. Typically, a dual-core processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM is all you will need for intensive real-time audio processing.

[rharv]

I, like Manning, find that the bottleneck in recording will most likely occur from the hard drive.  (As long as other processes like antivirus and little apps looking for a camera to be hooked up, etc  are not running)
In a 'clean' system the drive is the most likely spot for slowing the system down.  There are a LOT of processors out there that can handle the job, and the amount of required RAM will depend on the OS more than anything.

In W98 1 gig of RAM was plenty, even 512 worked great.  XP seems to work most efficient with 2 Gig (1 will work if the system is 'clean') and Win7 will need about 4 gig.

I have an XP system that can playback 32 audio tracks while recording 8 more at the same time.  It is about the most I have been required to do, but with an Athlon XP processor and 1 gig of RAM the system had no problems at all. I have also hooked two Delta 1010's together and recorded 16 tracks at once as an experiment, but not with as many tracks being read at the same time.

Mind you this system starts running with only 22 processes running total, so it is a 'clean' system, set up to run Windows minimally and no other extras load up at startup.  I will say I doubt this system could perform that well if it had only one drive.  One of the biggest improvements in multitracking I know of is to use two drives.  One drive (typically C:) runs the OS and the DAW software, which means it will also be used to read the recorded audio files since these are run from a temp directory on the OS drive as default by every DAW I have seen.

The other drive is used for the recording drive.  This means any audio coming in and being recorded is written to that second drive.  That way one drive can be reading existing data and the other can be writing the new data coming in.  This takes a HUGE load off the main drive.

We all know data is written in certain locations on a drive.  If one drive is required to read a bit of data, jump over and write a chunk of new data, jump back and try to read enough data to keep ahead of the incoming data and then hurry up and go write another chunk of incoming data, .. well you can see how hard this can be on a drive.

My point being that processors have been up to the job for years now.  It is the drives that are slowing down the process and causing the stuttering, lost bits etc.

So, as manning touched on, the processor is not the main focus if you want better recording system. Sufficient RAM and a couple drives will likely make more of an improvement, along with not having processes load at startup that are interrupting the processor regularly.
These can be update processes for any device or software,  printer software (especially HP) that is constantly checking to see if the printer is on/off, as well as checking for updates, camera software that also polls the system regularly to see if the camera is hooked up (I know Canon camera software is infamous for this), and of course antivirus software that will also look for updates regularly and want to check everything getting written.   These types of programs 'distract' the processor and can cause glitches when recording.

So having a DAW that is not on the internet is very helpful not only because you don't risk the data, but also because you can run a clean system with minimal processes taking up resources.

Laptops introduce a second bottleneck in the USB port.  This another reason they are not the go-to choice for a DAW.  Either the second drive or the uadio interface will be using USB (or both). Plus USB port is not a priority to the processor. USB is fine for recording a couple tracks at a time, but for multitracking it is another hurdle.