SOUND ON SOUND
Very low-cost PCs with apparently good spec are not hard to come by these days — you can even pick one up at the local supermarket. But not all computers will work well for music and audio, so how do you avoid making a big mistake?
The latest incarnation of Tascam's Gigastudio introduces support for 64-bit operating systems and the ability to address up to 128GB of RAM. Are there any catches? Let's find out...
Even if you pack your PC with a full 4GB of RAM, you may only be able to access between 3GB and 3.5GB of it, and a single application is normally limited to using just 2GB. We explain why, and what you may be able to do about it...
The newly released Service Pack 3 will be the last one ever issued for Windows XP — and XP itself is due to go 'off the market' at the end of June. Are there any implications for the thousands of XP-using musicians out there?
When you buy music software, you're not paying for a physical object, but a licence that resides on a small plastic key. How can you protect your investment, and what happens if something goes wrong?
Clicks or pops in your audio? The cause may be hardware devices taking more than their share of interrupt time. Now there's a utility that checks for this, and a PC Notes survey amassing results that could help you track down the source of your problems.
The focus this month is on checking and improving the performance of your PC, with a new benchmark test just released and news of a useful tool that could help you pin down the source of latency-related problems.
Vista's now a year old — but is it loved or loathed by musicians?
Are you stuck on the PC upgrade bandwagon? This month, PC Notes discusses whether it might be possible to step off it, as computer power finally starts to catch up with the needs and aspirations of musicians.
Convolution technology has provided new levels of realism for plug-in reverb, but has been unable to capture non-linear or time-variant effects such as compression, tape saturation, distortion and flanging. Until now, that is...