Who needs a cloud?
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
but you had to have 10k rpm drives, 7500 would not do.
Interesting! So what is the alternative to hard disk recording? Doesn't the recording softwares cache most stuff in memory and then write to disk? In this case how dropouts occur?
Christopher Duncan wrote:
my main studio box
Is that the machine you bought at Walmart?
There are a few alternatives to hard disk recording, all considered old school these days. One is magnetic tape, e.g. an analog 2" 24 track master. ADATs are 8 track machines which use a VHS type cassette tape to record digitally. Both technologies can have machines linked together to increase track count. And there is a camp that largely prefers analog mag tape as it imparts what's perceived as "warmth" due to tape compression and the loss of higher frequencies. But of course, what some call warmth, others call limited frequency response. There is no right or wrong, it's all religion. Personally, I prefer the power that software based recording offers. Software does use caching, but there's such a huge volume of data moving back and forth on a large session that it can frequently be inadequate if the performance of the hard drive isn't up to it. A dropout occurs when the software wants data and the I/O subsystem isn't ready to hand it over (or the reverse scenario when writing).
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Is that the machine you bought at Walmart?
No, that was the Video machine. :) Given that video is even more expensive than audio, I see upgrades happening there as well. I tested a small video project over the network to the USB drive and it performed fine. Don't know what will happen with real world scenarios on that front just yet. I'll be doing more video stuff this next year, but haven't yet queued those projects up.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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This past week a friend of mine pointed me to TigerDirect.com[^] where he'd just snagged 1 terabyte SATA drives for $70 each. That's a pretty silly amount of storage for non-geeks (my entire music collection is only 6 gigs), but I have a recording studio. Uncompressed wav audio is roughly 10 megs per minute, which can add up quickly in a multitrack recording session. So, I ordered two of these, as well as a 1 tb USB drive for $80. Upon arrival, I pulled the current 200 meg drives from my main studio box and dropped in the two new ones as a mirrored 1 tb drive. I hung the USB drive off of another box on the network. So far, I've reported that hard disks are becoming very cheap, which isn't exactly headline news. However, the next part really surprised me. Hard disk recording requires high performance in terms of disk I/O, as even one dropout can ruin a take. Back in ancient times (circa 1997) when I took a stab at hard disk recording with Cakewalk's first offering, performance was horrible and I ended up in ADAT land. When time moved forward and I tried again it was workable, but you had to have 10k rpm drives, 7500 would not do. These days I'm running Nuendo and Sonar (the latter mostly for MIDI but also some quick & dirty scratch mixes whilst arranging). Naturally, after installing the new drives, I ran some tests to make sure the system was happy, and that mirrored drives didn't present an unacceptable performance hit. Pulled up some sessions in both Sonar and Nuendo (ranging from 16 to 24 tracks). No problems at all with the mirrored drive. I didn't really expect any. Then, just for fun, I copied the projects over the network to the USB drive. I'm not running a gigabit network, just 10/100. I was sure that the USB drive wouldn't cut it, let alone having to hop over the network to get to it, so I anticipated a significant amount of I/O dropouts. To my surprise, sessions on both Sonar and Nuendo rocked right along. On a USB drive. Over the network. I'm sure I could push it and find where the wall is (there's always a wall somewhere), but I'm now officially impressed. I've also ordered a USB hot swappable SATA drive bay. While the data needs of my development, writing and other activities haven't been constrained to the disk space on a single machine, the performance constraints of hard disk recording have kept the studio limited to what a single box would hold. That limit now appear
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
(my entire music collection is only 6 gigs)
110GB - WAV files because MP3 doesn't cut it.
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
Trollslayer wrote:
MP3 doesn't cut it.
Someone's an audiophile. Apparently kids nowadays are so used to MP3s that they really don't pay enough attention to the sound quality to care if it is a good recording or not. At least that is the theory. I'm pretty sure it is the fact that you get maybe 1-2 decent artist a year and most are just over-marketed 1 hit wonders with no real talent but with nice bodies. Knowing quality in this situation is difficult enough, but then they record the music for maximum volume with these same folks so a lot of sound quality is lost anyway. (Might also hide the fact that they suck)
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
(my entire music collection is only 6 gigs)
110GB - WAV files because MP3 doesn't cut it.
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
That was tempting, to be sure. However, my Audiotrons don't support wav, and it's hard to fit 110gb on a Crackberry. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Trollslayer wrote:
MP3 doesn't cut it.
Someone's an audiophile. Apparently kids nowadays are so used to MP3s that they really don't pay enough attention to the sound quality to care if it is a good recording or not. At least that is the theory. I'm pretty sure it is the fact that you get maybe 1-2 decent artist a year and most are just over-marketed 1 hit wonders with no real talent but with nice bodies. Knowing quality in this situation is difficult enough, but then they record the music for maximum volume with these same folks so a lot of sound quality is lost anyway. (Might also hide the fact that they suck)
ragnaroknrol wrote:
Apparently kids nowadays are so used to MP3s that they really don't pay enough attention to the sound quality to care if it is a good recording or not. At least that is the theory.
Yep. And that's what the recording studio geeks also said back in the 50s about transistor radios with tiny speakers playing the records that were broadcast over AM radio. The overwhelming majority of people have always listened to music in on playback devices that are far less capable than what you have in the recording studio. More's the pity, but it is what it is.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
(my entire music collection is only 6 gigs)
110GB - WAV files because MP3 doesn't cut it.
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
WAV sucks. Try FLAC (or try changing your MP3 settings -- "cruddy" isn't the only option).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Trollslayer wrote:
MP3 doesn't cut it.
Someone's an audiophile. Apparently kids nowadays are so used to MP3s that they really don't pay enough attention to the sound quality to care if it is a good recording or not. At least that is the theory. I'm pretty sure it is the fact that you get maybe 1-2 decent artist a year and most are just over-marketed 1 hit wonders with no real talent but with nice bodies. Knowing quality in this situation is difficult enough, but then they record the music for maximum volume with these same folks so a lot of sound quality is lost anyway. (Might also hide the fact that they suck)
Ahh the old wax cylinder is far superior than the new fangled 78rpm disc arguement. This ones trotted out every time we have a new recording technology on the market and the fact is that 99.9% of listeners don't have the high quality equipment capable of reproducing the subtle differences and 99.9% of those remaining 0.01% don't have hearing capable of noticing the differences.
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WAV sucks. Try FLAC (or try changing your MP3 settings -- "cruddy" isn't the only option).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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MP3 at highest quality still has pre-emphasis problems and FLAC doesn't offer much in space savings plus I've had encoder issues. Hey, I've got 4TB of storage so don't need to mess about!
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
Trollslayer wrote:
Hey, I've got 4TB of storage so don't need to mess about!
Yes, but you're supposed to want your entire CD collection on a 2Gig card in your phone! Get with the times!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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This past week a friend of mine pointed me to TigerDirect.com[^] where he'd just snagged 1 terabyte SATA drives for $70 each. That's a pretty silly amount of storage for non-geeks (my entire music collection is only 6 gigs), but I have a recording studio. Uncompressed wav audio is roughly 10 megs per minute, which can add up quickly in a multitrack recording session. So, I ordered two of these, as well as a 1 tb USB drive for $80. Upon arrival, I pulled the current 200 meg drives from my main studio box and dropped in the two new ones as a mirrored 1 tb drive. I hung the USB drive off of another box on the network. So far, I've reported that hard disks are becoming very cheap, which isn't exactly headline news. However, the next part really surprised me. Hard disk recording requires high performance in terms of disk I/O, as even one dropout can ruin a take. Back in ancient times (circa 1997) when I took a stab at hard disk recording with Cakewalk's first offering, performance was horrible and I ended up in ADAT land. When time moved forward and I tried again it was workable, but you had to have 10k rpm drives, 7500 would not do. These days I'm running Nuendo and Sonar (the latter mostly for MIDI but also some quick & dirty scratch mixes whilst arranging). Naturally, after installing the new drives, I ran some tests to make sure the system was happy, and that mirrored drives didn't present an unacceptable performance hit. Pulled up some sessions in both Sonar and Nuendo (ranging from 16 to 24 tracks). No problems at all with the mirrored drive. I didn't really expect any. Then, just for fun, I copied the projects over the network to the USB drive. I'm not running a gigabit network, just 10/100. I was sure that the USB drive wouldn't cut it, let alone having to hop over the network to get to it, so I anticipated a significant amount of I/O dropouts. To my surprise, sessions on both Sonar and Nuendo rocked right along. On a USB drive. Over the network. I'm sure I could push it and find where the wall is (there's always a wall somewhere), but I'm now officially impressed. I've also ordered a USB hot swappable SATA drive bay. While the data needs of my development, writing and other activities haven't been constrained to the disk space on a single machine, the performance constraints of hard disk recording have kept the studio limited to what a single box would hold. That limit now appear
A long time ago and in a different universe I use to play drums for a living. I recently purchased a used Yamaha IISP e-drum kit re-learn how to play and recording through a usb audio interface. I have been using an older computer but suffer from the occasional dropout when I record. I want to replace it. Do you have a recommendation for an off the shelf computer or a motherboard/cpu combination to start with if I build one? Also, I am working with old friends who have remained active in the music business and who are being very patient with me as I re-learn to play the drums and learn basic recording techniques. We are located in Tennessee, Colorado and Iowa. The first problem we had to tackle was how to share tracks. We are using the free version of myotherdrive which is where the cloud is effective. If you have other suggestions for sharing or moving tracks around I would love to hear them.
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This past week a friend of mine pointed me to TigerDirect.com[^] where he'd just snagged 1 terabyte SATA drives for $70 each. That's a pretty silly amount of storage for non-geeks (my entire music collection is only 6 gigs), but I have a recording studio. Uncompressed wav audio is roughly 10 megs per minute, which can add up quickly in a multitrack recording session. So, I ordered two of these, as well as a 1 tb USB drive for $80. Upon arrival, I pulled the current 200 meg drives from my main studio box and dropped in the two new ones as a mirrored 1 tb drive. I hung the USB drive off of another box on the network. So far, I've reported that hard disks are becoming very cheap, which isn't exactly headline news. However, the next part really surprised me. Hard disk recording requires high performance in terms of disk I/O, as even one dropout can ruin a take. Back in ancient times (circa 1997) when I took a stab at hard disk recording with Cakewalk's first offering, performance was horrible and I ended up in ADAT land. When time moved forward and I tried again it was workable, but you had to have 10k rpm drives, 7500 would not do. These days I'm running Nuendo and Sonar (the latter mostly for MIDI but also some quick & dirty scratch mixes whilst arranging). Naturally, after installing the new drives, I ran some tests to make sure the system was happy, and that mirrored drives didn't present an unacceptable performance hit. Pulled up some sessions in both Sonar and Nuendo (ranging from 16 to 24 tracks). No problems at all with the mirrored drive. I didn't really expect any. Then, just for fun, I copied the projects over the network to the USB drive. I'm not running a gigabit network, just 10/100. I was sure that the USB drive wouldn't cut it, let alone having to hop over the network to get to it, so I anticipated a significant amount of I/O dropouts. To my surprise, sessions on both Sonar and Nuendo rocked right along. On a USB drive. Over the network. I'm sure I could push it and find where the wall is (there's always a wall somewhere), but I'm now officially impressed. I've also ordered a USB hot swappable SATA drive bay. While the data needs of my development, writing and other activities haven't been constrained to the disk space on a single machine, the performance constraints of hard disk recording have kept the studio limited to what a single box would hold. That limit now appear
A few years back, the way bits are stored on the platters changed, enabling large capacities like those TB drives, and simultaneously improving write speeds. The USB 2.0 limit is somewhere around 22MB/sec sustained write, and even a 2.5" drive will do 18+MB/sec sustained write these days. That's way above what you can push through a 100Mbit network, so its no suprise that it works. The problem isn't can it work, but is it reliable? Or will network congestion hose your records at random, unpredictable times? I wouldn't record on a network drive without some thought to how to keep windows itself or other users from slamming the network in the middle of your record. Our camera records ~8 MB/sec sustained and we've been able to use 2.5" USB drives for years now (not across a network though). We've watched as all these technologies have unfolded because, at 8MB/sec, disk capacities and write speeds are important to us :) We're watching the same thing happen with flash & SSD drives now.
patbob