I’m a former musician and the idea of using the pc for music recording and editing was one of the main reasons I bought my first pc and why I’m at all this IT stuff today!
If you too want to use the powerful capabilities the modern pc has for recording and editing high quality audio then you’ll need the correct hardware. First off you need a pc with a decent CPU, RAM and hard drive as second to Video editing, Audio editing is the most intense thing you can do with a pc!
I would say a decent pentium 4 CPU and at least 1 GB of RAM would be enough for audio but obviously the more of each the better. Hard drive space will need to be biggish and ideally you will have 2 hard drives in the pc, one to install the audio software on and the other to record audio input too. Using 2 different hard drives for this just increases the audio efficiency over having the one hard drive both run the program and save the audio data.
Also your hard drive should be fast too, that is to say, capable of writing data fast. This may be referred to as ‘Spin Speed’ and is normally 5400rpm for older laptop drives and 7200rpm for desktops. You need at least 7200 but if you’ve loads of money get a new 10,000rpm!
Perhaps the most important piece of hardware though is the Sound Card, the physical connection between your mic or guitar and the pc. The default sound cards in a pc or laptop are just about ok for recording 1 stream of audio but if you want to come back and record a vocal over your existing rythm guitar track then a thing called ‘Latency’ will mess you around. Latency is basically a ‘Delay’ between what you hear and what you record and to avoid it you’ll need a Pro quality Sound Card from the likes of Creative Soundblaster which guarantees very low latency rates through the use of ‘Asio 2′ drivers. If a card doesn’t have these drivers don’t buy it.
I’ll cover audio software in a future post.
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