Advice on pc spec and setup
Hi All,
Probably one of those impossible to answer / 'what the hell are you doing' types of questions, but here goes!
Have a little 'project' coming up where i need to do some live band recordings.
Over the course of 2 days, 16 bands doing about an hour each.
It is a charity event, and someone has suggested making a CD of the bands to sell on after the event to draw in some more cash. As i'm the only one involved who has anything more advanced than a dictaphone, I've been dragged into it again!
I done a few recordings at the last event, which came out fairly acceptable, but it was the first time i had worked with sonar essential (or anything that wasn't a tape recorder!) so was totally new to it. Not much has changed there!
The setup I used last year, was a multimix 8 usb (used as the sound card / mixer) through my laptop (win 7, icore7 cpu, 8bg ram, 2 x 500gb hdd), took a feed from the PA for the vocals, and just dangled a couple of other mics. Most of the bands are your standard 5 piece rock covers band (drum, bass, 2 x guitars + vox) so the 'dangling mics' picked up enough to give an acceptable recording!
This year i'm aiming to do the same sort of thing, but slightly better. I'm planning to mic up the drumkit and run that through the PA and take a feed from the PA (which will have drums and all vocals) and run that to one track (or ideally split it into vocals and drums on separate tracks, but won't get to see the PA til on the day!), then just put some condenser mics in front of the guitar / bass amps. Guess i'm looking at 5 tracks.
I plan on taking my desktop pc this year, which i built specifically for my music shed at home, although haven't done any sort of recording with it yet.
Spec is: Win 7 64bit (pro/expert/whatever it's called!) , 3,2ghz AMD Phenom 2, 4gb ram, 1tb samsung spinpoint 7200rpm 32mb cache.
Literally only has the operating system and sonar installed on it and currently use it to play my electric drumkit through with addictive drums.
Is this going to be man enough for the job? I'm looking at clicking 'record' and let it get on with it rather than too much messing about.
What sort of storage space am i going to need for what could realistically be 16 hours of recording? (bearing in mind im a complete novice so sonar will be recording at whatever rate it does out of the box!)
More ram needed? Another drive maybe?
Any help gladly received!