building a pc for music production

shanghai prawn · #1 12-23-2003, 10:22 AM

hi, i need some advice off you guys.
Im building a PC for music creation, live recording etc and wanted to know if you giys had any recommendations or advice regarding the specs needed. I take it a 600 celeron with 5Gigs hard space wouldnt do

hexa-db · #2 12-23-2003, 10:42 AM

I got some quite good results with a celeron 450 based PC

It depends what you want to do really, if you want 100s of tracks, loads of realtime plugin effects and software instruments you'll need something more powerful, but if you're happy with 4-6 tracks, and the minimum number of plugins you may even be ok (but 5gb won't go very far..)
As far as power goes, I think any reasonably modern spec will be ok for all but the most demanding users. My last PC was an Athlon 1700XP with 256mb RAM, and I never ran out of horsepower when recording.

This is very debateable and liable to get me flamed but I'll say it anyway.. In my experience Intel based systems have been a lot more stable, and easy to get going than AMD based. I've had great results with Athlon based systems, but always after spending many hours tweaking and troubleshooting. The intel based systems generally have been a lot more trouble free.

I'd recommend buying a PC from a specialist music pc retailer, as they know what components work well together, and will preinstall the OS with optimisations for recording. Some places I've seen recommended are:
http://www.carillondirect.com
http://www.inta-audio.co.uk
http://www.sub.co.uk/

Also, if you're going to be using the PC as a general office/internet/games machine as well as for audio, I'd partition the drive and have a seperate OS install for music only. I've been doing this for a while, and found it makes a big difference, in performance and stability. My recording partition has all un-necessary hardware disabled, and contains nothing but the OS, Logic Audio Platinum and one or two other audio apps.

Hope that helps!

shanghai prawn · #3 12-23-2003, 01:52 PM

diamond, cheers. As I have a laptop for work and things the desktop will just be a music platform. I've built computers before and have had far too much experience with the insides of windows and totally agree with your point about the pentium systems. I was really wondering about amounts of RAM and soundcard -vs- processor importance specifically for music applications. Im looking for something that I can monitor in real time through without horrendous lag times (if that makes any sense at all). thanks again for the links

hexa-db · #4 12-24-2003, 04:54 AM

For monitoring through the PC I've found that having a decent soundcard helps a lot. Although, in my case I have PC->Mixer->amp&speakers, and then guitars/synths/etc->mixer->pc, so I don't monitor through the soundcard.
It's impossible to get no latency whatsoever when monitoring via soundcard though, there'll always be a little bit, but with a decent soundcard and stuff it should be so small it won't notice.

I didn't notice you were in the UK. I'd give Inta Audio a mail/call, I bought all the parts for my latest PC from Micro Direct and it wasn't that much cheaper than getting a custom PC from Inta! They'll build it with whatever bits you specify and be able to recommend components too.