Recording audio to a PC

[Ben Lawrance]

Hi All,

 

Just bought a cheap and cheerfull peice of audio software (Called Guitar Tracks - by Cakewalk) to allow me to multi-track off my M-Audio Quattro.

 

Been searching around the net, and can't find anywhere to tell me how many megabytes for how many minutes etc.

 

I'll be recording at 96KHz 16bit into 4 tracks. Any ideas on the file size per minute??

 

The reason I ask is because I'm building a dedicated machine to run it and need to know what size Hard Drive to get.

 

 

Cheers

[Brian]

With no compression...

 

96,000 (samples per second) x 2 (bytes per sample) x 4 (tracks) x 60 (seconds per minute)

 

which by my reckoning is around 46 megabytes a minute

[Bobbsy]

For a good "finger in the air" estimate, you can assume that a 16 bit, 44.1 kHz sampling stereo track uses about 10 meg a minute. From there you can halve it for mono, double it for 32 bit, etc etc.

 

 

 

Bob

[paulears]

Hard drive - the internal one - bigger the better, BUT you also need removable storage - external firewire/usb2, or a caddy system. My audio machine uses a cheap caddy that I leave the lid off, and then I buy cheap 2nd hand mid sized drives from ebay that I use on a 1 or 2 project per HD basis - then stick 'em on the shelf. If the project then just needs archiving, I dump the files on the drive to DVD and use it again. However much disk space you have it is never enough!

[Bobbsy]

So true. No matter how big your hard drive, inside of a year you'll need more and bigger!

 

 

 

One thing to consider for audio work: some programmes work better with two drives installed, one for the programme and another (on a different drive port) for data storage. I don't know how universal this is, but Audition (for one example) certainly works better in this configuration.

 

 

 

Bob

[agermich]

Hi there

 

I use 2 hard drives (one for documents, one for programmes) which seems to work well. Another thing that you can do with this setup is to set windows to put the virtual memory file on the document drive which can help with speed. I use 2 70gb hard drives. I personally think that its a good setup because whenever my computers F*$%ed up its been the windows drive thats gone haywire and the documents have been fine.

 

Mike

[jayselway]

I do the same, have a drive that is exclusively for windows, and the "other bits" that programs like to dump on there too during their install - and then a second (or more) drives for programs, projects etc...

 

A little script in start up copies registry files, system32 folder and various other settings / system bits across to a backup folder, so if I need to flatten the windows drive, I can just do it, and restore files so everything works again*

 

*Never actually tested this....hummmmm

 

Jay :D

[dwh]

I do the same, have a drive that is exclusively for windows, and the "other bits" that programs like to dump on there too during their install - and then a second (or more) drives for programs, projects etc...

 

A little script in start up copies registry files, system32 folder and various other settings / system bits across to a backup folder, so if I need to flatten the windows drive, I can just do it, and restore files so everything works again*

 

*Never actually tested this....hummmmm

Windows doesn't tend to like you fiddling its settings without having set them first... You may want to try this on a spare drive (get something windows sized, say 10GB, install fresh windows, restore your backups), I don't think it'll work (or if it does, it'll work very buggily). Just like one Windows install drive doesn't like being put as the primary in another system.

 

But we're heading :D and into the realms of computers, so I'll shut up now :)