Advice needed!.....Can this computer be converted to recording?

[Stevetemp]

I've been using a Vaio laptop, and it's worked okay but does have some issues....limited hard drive for one.

 

I've recently freed up a family pc Gateway GT5014 Similar to this one with a memory upgrade.

 

The sound chip has some issues, so a new sound card is in order. And I'll need a firewire input for the Presonus Firestudio.

 

Soundcard needs upgraded, but otherwise this PC has been a fine XP OS machine for us. Do I stay with the laptop, or convert this to my recorder?

 

Will it be easy to install and configure a sound card on an "integrated" system? And the firewire input?

[blue2blue]

Should be OK. It will be pretty far behind the times.

 

FTR, in terms of basic profile, your Gateway in theory is more powerful than the desktop I use for all my work. It's an older, quite modest machine -- but I'm quite hardcore about maintaining this machine at a slim-loading, efficient system state. Which is hard to do in a consumer software world where developers and publishers think nothing of clogging up your RAM with all kinds of always-resident crap (unless you jump through hoops undoing the crap they install in your boot profile.

 

You'll probably want to load it up with RAM. If you can no longer find it cheap new (once the parade has passed, older RAM tends to go up as it becomes more rare), try Ebay, they tell me.

 

With regard to the FireWire card, make sure you get one with a Texas Instruments chip set as there have been a world of problems with FW controllers with other chipsets. (There's not single term used for this, and the issue spills into USB interfaces to some extent. The problem appears to be contamination of the audio signal with digital signal. The symptoms are often related to mouse/screen activity: electronic whirring, buzzing, chirping noises coming through your sound system. Those problems have been seldom reported with TI chipsets.)

[Stevetemp]

 

Should be OK. It will be pretty far behind the times. FTR, in terms of basic profile, your Gateway in theory is more powerful than the desktop I use for all my work. It's an older, quite modest machine -- but I'm quite hardcore about maintaining this machine at a slim-loading, efficient system state. Which is hard to do in a consumer software world where developers and publishers think nothing of clogging up your RAM with all kinds of always-resident crap (unless you jump through hoops undoing the crap they install in your boot profile. You'll probably want to load it up with RAM. If you can no longer find it cheap new (once the parade has passed, older RAM tends to go up as it becomes more rare), try Ebay, they tell me. With regard to the FireWire card, make sure you get one with a Texas Instruments chip set as there have been a world of problems with FW controllers with other chipsets. (There's not single term used for this, and the issue spills into USB interfaces to some extent. The problem appears to be contamination of the audio signal with digital signal. The symptoms are often related to mouse/screen activity: electronic whirring, buzzing, chirping noises coming through your sound system. Those problems have been seldom reported with TI chipsets.)

 

 

 

 

Thanks blue. A couple years ago I did put more ram in....it's still only 2 meg total.

 

I'd just hate to put too much money in it, and find out the system can't handle it. I am a little leery of getting a separate sound card working on it, pretty sure I can trick it...haha.

 

Yeah...it's kind old...but she's been a good soldier!

 

Thanks again!

[A. Einstein]

 

....it's still only 2 meg total

 

 

 

Forget it.

 

With 2 mega ram you can't even start a music production program,

 

and Windows XP is very likely a photo someone glued on your laptop screen.

[blue2blue]

Forget it. With 2 mega ram you can't even start a music production program, and Windows XP is very likely a photo someone glued on your laptop screen.

 

 

 

I'm pretty sure he means 2 GB.

[Stevetemp]

I'm pretty sure he means 2 GB.

 

LOL...quite right, obviously. doh

[Johnny-Boy]

Yeah, even my old mac from the 90's has 16 MB memory. Oh wait, it has 32 MB. I remember maxing it out.

 

What you have Steve is the bare minimum for DAW's. You'll probably get some low memory warnings, but you should be able to do some serious recording.

 

John

[blue2blue]

I was actually getting by on 1 GB (but, again, I'm obsessive about keeping my machine in lean, fighting trim) but maxing my econo machine to 2 GB helped a lot.

 

XP could get by pretty well on 128 MB -- and the applications people used back when it was new were a lot lighter on their feet, but, today, running a contemporary DAW (Sonar) and video program (Vegas), a couple GB is a good practical minimum, I should say. (I was successfully running both with only 1 GB, though.)

 

If you're sticking with your hardware, stick with XP. While you can likely run the 32 bit version of Win 7 on your machine (barring unforeseen issues), XP is lean and mean in comparison. (Still, they tell me W7 does well, even on older machines.)

[A. Einstein]

Oh.

 

With 2 GB you can run almost anything, at least one instance of it, for example 1 good EQ, or one Sylenth1, or one ElectraX,

 

or 50-80 audio track at 24-bit with a few native EQs,

 

you can't run one instance of an u-he Diva thus

[MikeRivers]

 

Thanks blue. A couple years ago I did put more ram in....it's still only 2 meg total. I'd just hate to put too much money in it, and find out the system can't handle it.

 

 

I picked up a Gateway Pentium 4 at a hamfest for $20. It had 3 GB of RAM in it, Firewire port built in (Augere chip), a fairly small hard drive, and a fresh WinXP installation. I put in a 160 GB drive (about $45), and it works fine with all of the Mackie Firewire interfaces I have here, and the Firestudio uses the same Firewire chip set as the StudioLive mixer which I've run with other computers around here with the same Firewire chip.

 

But remember, no two computers are alike. We could have the same make and model and what works for me might not work for you, but there's a pretty good chance that it would.

 

Where you need the horsepower is when you start running a bunch of processing plug-ins or virtual instruments. Hook up mics, do a little compression, and you really don't need a very powerful computer.

 

The best thing going for the older computers is that they're older. Many audio hardware manufacturers are slow at getting drivers working with current operating systems. So the Firewtudio that worked find on your old computer might not work for a while if you buy a brand new one.

 

This is why I stick as much as possible to hardware.

[A. Einstein]

I stick to digital audio production because I can have 400 track running at the same time in a mix, can change on the fly between ProTools and Nuendo running both at the same time, and an amout of DSP I do not even klnow where the computer would stop processing.

 

 

400 tracks that would be 17 SONY PCM 3324 DASH machines, and still no processing.

[A. Einstein]

Watch this video:

 

Btw, this video is several years old

 

 

 

[video=youtube;v1GMFSPs-WA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1GMFSPs-WA

[blue2blue]

I picked up a Gateway Pentium 4 at a hamfest for $20. It had 3 GB of RAM in it, Firewire port built in (Augere chip), a fairly small hard drive, and a fresh WinXP installation. I put in a 160 GB drive (about $45), and it works fine with all of the Mackie Firewire interfaces I have here, and the Firestudio uses the same Firewire chip set as the StudioLive mixer which I've run with other computers around here with the same Firewire chip. But remember, no two computers are alike. We could have the same make and model and what works for me might not work for you, but there's a pretty good chance that it would. Where you need the horsepower is when you start running a bunch of processing plug-ins or virtual instruments. Hook up mics, do a little compression, and you really don't need a very powerful computer. The best thing going for the older computers is that they're older. Many audio hardware manufacturers are slow at getting drivers working with current operating systems. So the Firewtudio that worked find on your old computer might not work for a while if you buy a brand new one. This is why I stick as much as possible to hardware.

Mike brings up a very good issue -- and a potentially big problem on older machines: trying to upgrade one element of an older rig sometimes triggers a need to update/upgrade some other element and then you find that that won't work unless you update something else. Windows users are fortunate that MS continues fixing bugs and issuing security updates going back to XP (in effect, back to 2001) while, ahem, other OS/platform vendors have a much narrower update/support window. One prominent MS competitor only issues security updates for the last two OS versions -- that only goes back to July 2011. Swim or die over there. Or get out of the water -- that is, lock down your working platform, no updates, no additions. Or perhaps carefully using rollback if necessary -- or possible -- rolling back OS upgrades is frequently impossible on any platform. But often times you can install application programs -- and uninstall if they don't work -- and safely rollback the OS to its previous previous state. (Since program installations can change settings and even using the official uninstall may well leave behind various files as well as, in Windows, Registry entries that are no longer necessary or might even cause problems now or in the future.)

 

 

It's my general policy to use the (properly patched and security updated) OS that was contemporaneous with the machine's manufacture, if at all possible. (Obviously, if you keep your machine off the web and are very careful about allowing connections to other people's removable media, you can probably get by without security patches. But be careful about connecting such a machine to the web even for a short period to download driver/program updates and such. I'm not saying an unpatched OS is exactly a magnet but the bad guys scan the web all the time looking for vulnerabilities and something like a machine running version 1.0 of Windows 98 is about as close to a malware magnet as you can get.

[MikeRivers]

 

I stick to digital audio production because I can have 400 track running at the same time in a mix

 

 

If they aren't good enough to do it on two tracks, I'm not good enough to take their money.

[electrochrisso]

You will be able to do a lot with what you have, you will need to be a little creative. I mostly us an Acer 1.5ghz, 1gb ram, which runs Reaper really good even with 4 VSTi, Eq, Reverb at the same time, Cubase can get a little glitchy, with too many plugins, but you can get around these issues, although a bit more time consuming, by rendering plugin stuff down to audio files, then switch the plugins off.

I use my Zoom R8 as the audio device when I want the good quality, otherwise I just use the built-in audio for general listening etc.

Just thinking, I used to be able to do a lot of great stuff with my old Amiga 1000, with 2mb ram and a 7.16mhz processor speed, still I did have quite a few keyboards/modules and effects units linked up through the midi chain.

[A. Einstein]

 

If they aren't good enough to do it on two tracks, I'm not good enough to take their money.

 

 

 

My friend Markus Fischer said the same to me when I was a young man:

 

 

"The best recording are with one stereo pair, everything else is a cramp"

 

 

Markus was a genius. He invented many devices in audio. Today he would be about 90 years old, he died too young at 79, because he drove Vespa, also in the winter in sandals and no socks.