24 track recording advice needed..........

If I were to step into a live 24 track situation I would test how the 24 i/o interface interacts with my DAW several times, at least a week before the event.

When I do a live recording I hit save or ideally save as at every performance break. Break the 2 hours down into sections that are more manageable... and leave a bread crumb trail of saved versions in case something does go wrong at some point.

If I were going to track with the Presonus... I'd track with Studio One. Then you can mix in SONAR.

best regards,
mike

Thanks Jim & Mike....Jim given your track record here I really appreciate the advice. This won't be until November so I have at least three months to sit down with these guys and figure out a better plan.

FWIW,

I use one of Jim's systems to track 16 to 24 tracks live.

;-)

I have a Presonus Studio Live 24.4.2 and found that I needed a Firewire Express Card to get it to talk with my laptop. You won't need SONAR to record as you can use the Capture software that comes with the Studio Live. You dont need Presons' studio One Pro software either. capture is a bare bones software package which lets you record 24 chanels od audio files which you can choose to edit in any DAW you want later on.

As the desk has a comprehensive list of fx available on each track/channel/aux you wont even need any other ourboard gear. You can record dry without any of the fx and just use them for your live FOH, and various monitor feeds.

it's an awesome desk but I'd get my hands on it as soon as possible to get familiar with as it's very feature packed. Make sure you get the firewire card sorted out ASAP.

My laptop has 2 X 500GIG 7200 RPM internal SATA II drives and an eSATA port for an external drive if I need it. 24 channels at a max of 48 khz is a good bit of data and you want to make sure that your laptop can do it.


Files size isn't that big an issue as 24 bit @ 48k X 24 tracks = 291,600 MB/hour so you'll need double that space. see this link

When I first started doing this sort of thing I setup 24 channels (don't have to have connections) and set my DAW to record and tested how long I could record. I did a few trial session running all through the night. Showed me the laptop was stable enough for the job.

That's great news about the Presonus capture program Mike.


I also do test runs with all the lines open. I usually record the sound of a TV or something.


Then I use Wavelab to quickly scan for errors... the tiny ones that take too long to find by ear. ;-)

I often wonder how many people take the time to analyze for errors.

When I don't find any errors I feel good about the system.


best regards,
mike

I have a Sony Vaio laptop running Windows 7 64 bit Home Professional and I can tell you that from personal experience I would NEVER use it to record anything important. I don't know what your processor type is but I am guessing if you have a 4 Mb system with a 5400 RPM disk drive you are running a generic consumer type of laptop. Even if you can strip things down on it you may run into the following issues:

Your firewire port may not perform all that well because you don't have a high quality controller on your PC if yours is anything like mine.

Your hard drive may have more issues than just a slower RPM. You are doing streamed writes so you don't know how well it is going to be buffering writes to the drive from these multiple streams. It should keep up but you can bet Sony didn't test for this type of application. You also only have a single drive with limited RAM so the moment you have to swap to the system drive you are probably cooked.

Your CPU is probably at least dual core but I am not sure how fast it is or how many threads it can run for audio processing and handling the large number of driver interrupts you are going to get for 24 simultaneous channels.

An external drive is all well and good but on what interface? 7200 RPM isn't going to help you if your system can't pump the data effectively through the USB port. I assume you are going to use a USB 3 port but I don't know what your laptop config is. Mine only had USB 2.0 but it is not a new Vaio. You don't want to share the system drive and your audio streaming device if possible.

At the very least pre-stage this setup and use the interface to see, in advance, how well your system performs. I would never use Sonar just to capture the 24 channels as others have said. You don't need the overhead if you are just grabbing audio streams.

My Vaio works quite well for audio. I have actually used it for recording sessions, nothing as complex as what I outlined in this thread. I have also used it extensively in the last 2 years for teaching purposes mainly Reason & SONAR using a lot of Rewire etc. and it's been very smooth. My main concerns have been addressed thanks to everyone's input and I am now leaning toward just using a tower for this project.