Hello Janet,
I practically live and breathe audio PC's doing audio work for computer
games (PC) so here are a few nuggets of wisdom that I have gathered over the
years.
1. Get the best sound card you can afford.
2. Get quiet components; there is a fantastic emerging market for quiet fans
etc.
3. Get the best CPU/motherboard and the most RAM you can afford.
Years back, to make an "audio ready" pc required some heavy grunt work and a
thorough knowledge of voodoo. People had all sorts of tricks to get their
systems "audio optimized" including an "audio only" partition on the hard
drive, custom windows registry tricks, hacked system settings, super
expensive and crazily noisy scsi discs etc, etc, etc. System performance
has come a long way, to the point that just about any modern computer system
built today will be able to play back/record 30+ tracks of 16bit 44k audio
with some plugins to boot. The voodoo is no longer necessary thank god.
That said, you would still do well to stay away from the majors (dell,
gateway and the like) and create your own PC from scratch. It might be a
bit daunting at first, but you will save a bundle, get better performance,
get a quieter computer than you ever could from a pre-built and you will
learn a ton about how the whole system fits together. If you find DIY
daunting, there are a slew of sites that will help you start and finish the
job. Here are a couple just to get you started:
http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/
http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/index.htm
http://www.daileyint.com/build/buildtoc.htm
If I were to do this today, I would probably use the new and super cool
micro case from Shuttle; the XPC SS51G. This little baby looks great, has
an incredible array of integrated peripherals (firewire, usb 2.0, LAN,
sound, graphics) and it uses an ultra quiet "heat pipe" CPU cooler to keep
things running silently. Here are some reviews of the case and system
performance:
http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/cpu_mobo/shuttle/ss51/ss51.shtml
http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/Motherboards/shuttle_sb51g.shtml
Then I would put in one of the two silent (~20dBA) Fluid Bearing (FDB) hard
drives; Seagate Barracuda ATAIV, or Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 -- I have been
using the Seagates since they came out and will never buy a noisy hard drive
again. I think the smallest hard drive you can buy is like 40 gigs
now...crazy. After that all you really need is a CD-R in the 5.25" bay and
you will have a killer little system.
For a general overview of silent PC's, this article is quite possibly the
best ever written from a how-to perspective:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/other/silent_pc/1.php
Other sites for quiet computing are:
http://www.endpcnoise.com/
http://www.quietpc.ca/
http://www.silentpcreview.com/index.php
Lastly it's soundcards.
As far as soundcards, there are all these new USB/firewire
cards/mixers/midi-i/o boxes on the market so making recommendations is a
bit tough. Most of these products are geared toward musicians so you will
likely be able to rule out all of the multitrack/combo boxes since you will
not need 24 simultaneous midi controlled inputs and outputs with compression
and eq on each channel. The thing to look for is just a rock solid, great
sounding two track card. I own a number of sound cards including a
CardDeluxe, a Delta 1010 and two Delta 66's. All of them are great
sounding, but I have truly never heard anything better than my CardDeluxe.
I have an Apogee MiniMe on order right now, so we'll see if that sounds any
better, but I can recommend without reservation the CardDeluxe. Anyway,
coming to a decision on which card to buy is always tough so here a few
places that might help you decide on what card to get:
http://www.audioforums.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/Ultimate.cgi - great forum
http://www.pcrecording.com/ - seems dormant but has some reviews
http://www.prorec.com - good site, but a little thin on content.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rec.audio.pro&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en
this is the venerable Usenet group where you can find an opinion on
ANYTHING.
Oh yeah, and never EVER use a SoundBlaster live/audigy/etc for critical
recording/listening. They are fine for games and computer speaker mp3
listening, but those cards are so shoddily designed/manufactured that I
truly despise these things. I view all of creative labs products as
necessary evils in my line of work. I only mention this since almost every
pc made comes with a SoundBlaster of SoundBlaster equivalent and I feel you
should have fair warning.
Scott Petersen
Sound Designer
Blizzard North
-----Original Message-----
From: jplanet ten
Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2002 12:22 PM
To:
Subject: [Nature Recordists] hardware [esp soundcard] question
greetings,
i have been listening to and learning from this group
for a while, and i appreciate your openness and
willingness to share your experiences.
i'm about to replace a nearly-dead computer. i want
to make sure that i 'outfit' it for audio work, which
i gather means being attentive to memory, storage
space, and the sound card. [right now i'm learning to
use cool edit software, and will probably continue to
do so for the foreseeable future.] the primary
constraint is that it's got to be a pc rather than a
mac, because of other uses.
so as i sort through what's out there, would you all
give me some recommend specs to keep in mind? i'm
especially concerned about soundcards, because i'm not
enough of a techie to know if that's something that
can be 'upgraded' as you make a purchase. [i know
that one can often specify more memory and larger
harddrives.]
many thanks for any suggestions that you care to
offer....
janet lowry
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>From Tue Mar 8 18:23:03 2005
Message: 7
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:58:09 -0500
From: Walter Knapp <>
Subject: Re: Praat sound analysis software...free download
Lang Elliott wrote:
> Bernie:
>
> What system? I don't see a link.
http://www.praat.org/
Walt
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