A FEW BASIC TIPS ABOUT MULTI-TRACK RECORDING
WITH YOUR PC
Multi-channel, multi-track recording consumes a great deal of
resources on your PC. Depending on how serious you are about the
results and how many tracks you need, you should have the fastest
processor and the biggest and fastest hard drive that you can afford.
Of course, most of us working folks can’t afford to rush out and buy
the fastest PC and besides, at today’s pace of technology change, it
would start to become obsolete before we got it home. So in the
interest of making the best use of what we have, here’s a couple of
very basic tips (most of which are obvious, but sometimes forgotten).
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Don’t skimp on RAM — it’s really cheap and it can help
performance quite a bit. Windows swaps applications to and
from your hard disk disk when it runs out of RAM and this can
wreak havoc on your digital audio recording. Try to have at least
64MB.
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Before recording, shut-down any applications that aren’t
necessary to the recording. You can never tell if an application
is really idle; it could be doing something stupid in the
background that sucks up some of the PC’s processing power.
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Turn off unnecessary background programs like screen savers,
virus scanners and power management.
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Clean up your hard drive: here's a tip, run your web browser and
delete all of those little files in the browser’s cache directory.
They take up more space then you might think and also cause
drive fragmentation.
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If you can afford it, a wise incremental investment to your PC
would be to purchase a good-sized Ultra DMA hard drive (6-12 GB
drives are a real bargain these days) and dedicate it to digital
audio. This can improve performance and reduce fragmentation
and clutter.
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Finally, immediately before you start recording, do the obvious
and run your systems
hard disk defragmenter
utility. Along with
processor speed, hard drive performance is the most important
factor in determining how many tracks you can record and
whether or not you’ll get any dropouts in your audio.
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