Hi all

I have £800 to spend on a music PC and would like to know if there are any meetings of DJs or producers in the Bristol area so I could discuss best PC builds, technical issues, etc. I appreciate I can ask questions via the forum but discussing this face to face is much quicker.

If anyone can help, much appreciated.

Regards

JB

Hey Super,
I'm afraid I know nothing about if anything is going on in your area - but I would ask if you are going to be producing or recording primarily with your 'music pc'.

If it's production - I would argue you don't need to spend that much on a system - please tell us what DAW you are planning on using, what music style/s you want to produce and we can try and come up with a list of things to start looking at.

But, for recording then issues such as system / fan noise can be an issue, no. of inputs/outputs needed on s/card etc.

As a producer, I'm still happy running a 2007 Core2Duo E6600, 4gigs ram, Win XP, FL Studio 10, Reaper, Renoise, Ezdrummer and a few other bits all through my edirol UA-25 and KRK VXT4 monitors - with Audio Technicia ATH-M50 cans when I want to be nice to my neighbours.

Guitar and bass tones are all handled and recorded via an Eleven Rack - yes, in an ideal world I'd buy a Kemper Profiler and update a few components in the pc - but for what I want to do - it's still rocking just fine.

So, tell us what you want - and you might not need to spend all the £££ you have.

Just a thought,

-Riff

--------------------
-The Power Of The Riff Compels Me-
http://soundcloud.com/the-good-dr

Quote Super-smashing-great:

---

Hi all

I have £800 to spend on a music PC and would like to know if there are any meetings of DJs or producers in the Bristol area so I could discuss best PC builds, technical issues, etc. I appreciate I can ask questions via the forum but discussing this face to face is much quicker.

If anyone can help, much appreciated.

Regards

JB

---

For what it's worth, here's my thoughts.

You could quite easily get by with a Core 2 Duo/Quad, and XP has matured now to being considered very stable. You could get a decent C2D or C2Q for £200.

But I would go for an i5 or at leat an i3

Don't go for the cheaper 'consumer' motherboards, I'm not too well up on that sort of thing, but ASUS, Gigabyte are among the better motherboards, though they do make cheaper motherboatrds as well as better specified ones. I would expect to pay at least £100 for a decent motherboard.

A power supply of at least 600 watts is better than the cheaper 400 watt things.

Although a games type video card is not required, a good stable one with a decent amount of memory is better than any onboard video chip. A card that can support 2 monitors is preferable, it really makes editing much more comfortable when you can have for example the DAW sequencer software on one screen and an editor/mixer page on the other

At least 4 gig of good quality RAM (though XP can only address 3.5 gig, Win7 4 gig though there is a Win7/32 bit ram patch that allows up to 64 gig to be addressed, though if the application is 32 bit then it can only address 4 gig anyway

I would go for Win7/64 bit though, seeing as you're starting from year zero so to speak. With the 64 bit operating system you can address lots lots more RAM

With a DAW it is common practice to have at least 2 hard drives, one for System and Applications, the other for data (eg sample library) and seeing as you're starting from new, use good quality SATA drives. I tend to use a smallish 80-120 gig sort of capacity, c:drive as it only needs OS and Apps, and a much bigger second hard drive - say 500 gig?

Many people stay away from the 'off the shelf' computers. But I have several friends who have bought relatively high spec Dell/Fujitsu/HP machines, customised them a bit and have perfectly good, reliable DAWs. Go for one that has a good number of PCI/PCIe slots.

I for example have a PCI audio card that has a piggy back extender giving me a further 16 channels of ADAT, but it obscures the adjacent PCI slot. Then I have a PCI firewire card, another card that has extra number of USB slots, of which I have more than enough but the PCI USB card has 2 internal USB connectors, which I use for dongles, so the dongles are safe and out the way and not waiting to get snapped off as they do when poking ot the back of the PC

I also have an oldish hardware sampler that communicates with the outside world by way of SCSI, so that's another PCI slot taken up!

As editing can be quite a strain on the eyes, get a good monitor, the bigger the better, though a pin sharp 22" monitor is easier on the eye than a cheapo 24" I bought a good quality Dell monitor and the difference between it and the cheapo monitor I had before is really remarkable, certainly less eye strain.

The most important bit - the audio interface.

There don't seem to be many PCIe audio interface cards about as yet, though there are many PCI ones. All of the well known makes, M-Audio, Focusrite, RME, MOTU and otherds are all good quality, consider what inputs and outputs you need, I have a digital mixer so lots of ADAT i/o was my main requirement. Previously I had 3 Delta 1010s giving me 24 analogue i/o

Increasingly though audio interfaces are either USB or Firewire. The choice of firewire host card is important, some Firewire audio interfaces are fussy about the fireware card they connect to, it seems any texas Instruments firewire card is the favoured choice though I used a Belkin card and it was fine.

I don't know much about USB, it used to be the case where USB was considered inferior to firewire as firewire had a higher sustainable data transfer rate. With USB 2.0 that advantage was not so much an issue, if an issue at all. I did have one of the early USB 1.1 audio interfaces when they were first released and it performed well enough if the track count and effects were kept to a moderate figure. Suffice it to say, you could probably end up spending almost as much on the interface as you do on the PC itself.

There seems to have been a preference for an Apple computer within the music making community, but there are many many users, both hobby and professional, that bump along quite happily with a PC, depending on how they are set up, can be utterly reliable.

The next major consideration is what sequencing, sampling, editing software you choose, and that really is to a great extent a subjective choice, in my humble opinion. Whichever you choose, take some time to 'learn' it, it is so easy to be enticed into installing this that and the other, especially freeware, when in fact the answer you're looking for is in the software you have already, it might not be that apparent though.

One piece of crucial software is a drive imaging application. As building the DAW is not a trivial endavour. You need all hardware drivers, patches, updates done. Software activations done and of course the OS updates, patches etc. Drive mappings - I have the Documentds folders point to the Data drive instead of c:drive. With soft sampler libraries you might place them in a chosen rather than installation default location, DAW custom templates and VSTs. If you have a hard disk failure or some sort of software glitch, or the drive is getting bloated with Demos and freeware, it is really handy t be able to run the imaging software and with 15 mins or so, you're back to a clean mean fast machine again. Win7 has it's backup/imaging facility built in, but I had already bought imaging software way back when XP was introduced and that same software still works with Win7 32 and 64, so I stick with what I know

Looking at your post header, I was trying to keep this simple - mission accomplished I hope!

I think a good plan would to be to buy a machine that is ready built for the purpose, for not much money more than your budget a ready built solution will reduce headaches along the way. there is normally a price to pay for not doing this even if it is time and in the worst cases a fault you cannot trace which cost more money and of stops you from having a smooth running system.

I like Inta Audio myself, decent prices and I have had good experiences with them and their machines.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
Mastering studio

I bought one of these earlier this year: Scan AW25 System

It's probably not really up there with the pro stuff many on this board use but it's been absolutely everything I need and I've been very happy with it. It's fast enough for me, nice and quiet (I use the onboard graphics, rather than a dedicated card) and the build was free of the crap you get with mainstream shop-bought PCs.

I did get a couple of upgrades (i7 CPU and a couple of extra USB ports) but even with those I think the the price was still within your budget.

Pete Kaine posts on here and he pointed me towards the Scan "happy shopper" range that Scan seem determined to keep secret

Quote ChromeDome:

---

Scan "happy shopper" range

---

It's quotes like that which I reckon keeps the gaffer from making a big deal about them

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

(I'm joking of course, thanks for the feedback CD )

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

---

(I'm joking of course, thanks for the feedback CD )

---

You're welcome Pete. I've been delighted with the machine.

Just to be clear though, I was also joking. There's nothing "happy shopper" about these PCs. I'd imagine that it's the limited options that enables Scan to build these at such a competitive price. A major plus was that Pete was happy to upgrade a couple of components for me so there's limited (but very useful) scope for customisation.

I think of it as the Scan "Set Menu" PC, as opposed to the full "à la carte" 3XS selection. Bon appétit.