Recording PC

[LazyNinja]

I'm sick of my CRT that makes my guitar hum when I go near it! My PC commits suicide if I have too many applications open at once (as in 4 lol) Half the time it freezes with no warning. It's too slow to run my toneport without any lag. It has cr@ppy USB 1 port. It's noisy, hot and big. takes 10 mins to start, I could go on and on man I hate it.

So I need a new computer but what should I get exactly? I want to be able to run recording softwares smoothly. Intel or AMD? What graphics/sound card etc there are too many options and its overwhelming. Tell me what are the crucial specs for a recording PC. I can spend about £700 for a complete system I know that's not a lot but I'm poor.

Macs are supposed to be good but their spec per pound is much worse. Are they worth the money? and are they any good for recording?

[MDV]

If youre running sound apps then your importance ranking goes like this:

Soundcard (inc input, which should be firewire or USB 2)
Processor (sound work is all processor calculation, dual core is the best choice)
Large fast hard drive(s). These are gonna fill up fastert than you think. Min 100G, 2 or 300 is probably more sensible.
RAM (cant really go wrong with a gig, 2 is better but not by as much as you'd think)
Graphics card (hardly matters)

I currently have:

Athlon 64 3200
1 Gig ram
1 x 150Gb IDE drive (installation drive, programs live here, and so do videos etc)
1 x 120 Gb SATA (data drive, yes it should be the other way round but I didnt think an dnow cant be arsed)
E-Mu 1616M DAS. Owns. Simple as that.
Geforce 7950GT. Also owns.

This runs music apps well enough. No problems at all. I'm still furture proofing it a little this week with:
Athlon X2 4400
DDR2 ram
2xPCIe motherboard (so when my card starts to give up I can get another cheap and double the graphics power).

With £700 I would recommend you spend about 100 on a sound card, try and make sure you get a dual core processor, youre going to need it in a couple of years, good sized hard drive, a TFT and whatever you can get with whats left over, it wont be that important.

Oh, and, word to the wise: get it built by someone that knows what they're doing. I've done that twice and both times what I got was very stable and faster than the specs suggested because I gave them a little freedom in choosing parts and they know what works well together.

[MDV]

Oh, sh!t man I forgot: on the sound card, if youre gonna record the number of I/Os is important, make sure its well matched to what you plan to do with it.

Ideally it'd be a breakout box with phantom power and a mic pre or 2.

The quality of the interface is the main thing for recording (AFAIK: I'm basically regurgitating what a mate of mine thats studying to be a sound engineer said to me).

[carlaz]

Macs are supposed to be good but their spec per pound is much worse. Are they worth the money? and are they any good for recording?

Macs are excellent for recording -- they've had a good rep in this area longer than PCs and not without reason.  

Many of pros use Macs, sketching out demos in the tour bus on GarageBand and then migrating the project to GB's big brother Logic (the full version of which is extremely serious music production software).  

Some of the main advantages of Macs are that you don't run usually run into weird hardware and driver issues, there are very few security issues, and still no (zip, zero, nada) known viruses on Macs.  (I've a friend who works in a climatology research institute, and their IT guys recently decided all new machines are Macs because they were wasting way too much time trying to keep Windows machines from getting corrupted.)

Mind you, I've been a Mac fan ever since I had to make a choice about which GUI-oriented system was going to replace my 286 machine with DOS :) but I've experienced all the joy :? of Windows with machines I've used at work, and I've never regretted using a Mac as my personal machine.  You pay a bit more at the outset -- but, if you compare features, not actually very much more -- and I think the savings in ease-of-use and maintenance ends up being more than worth it.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's my tuppence!

[noodleplugerine]

There is little to no difference between them now in the work place.

Perhaps the only difference is that Macs get Garage Band and Final Cut.

But then again, PC gets programs like Studio max etc.

For music purposes, go with whichever you feel more comfortable. With a PC you get a hell of alot more bang for your buck, as long as you spec it yourself. (IGNORE NEWSPAPER ADVERTS).