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Working with MIDI

What you can get away with spending on your DAW is down to what you want to use it for. If you are planning to do some basic MIDI sequencing and just want to play around with a MIDI keyboard you really don’t need much more than a 100Mhz machine with a soundcard with wavetable synthesis (SoundBlaster AWE32 onwards in general terms). In the case of working with MIDI the “work” of voicing your keyboard (or other midi parts) is best reproduced either by a soundcard or an external sound module. Of course in an ideal world you’ll have a beast PC to work with, but it’s nice to know that requirements for this end of town aren’t too high.

For someone who is more interested in traditional composition and arrangements (such as piano, jazz, classical music and the like) you will probably find that MIDI won’t require much out of your PC, and is quite cheap to get into.

A suggested minimum configuration for MIDI would be a Pentium 100+ machine with a SoundBlaster AWE32 card or greater with a dumb MIDI (dumb MIDI means the device has no sound of its own, it’s purely a controller) device, and a program such as Cakewalk Home Audio, Cubasis or similar.

Working with Digital Synths

The next step up in terms of PC requirements is Digital Synthesizers. We look at some of the basics of understanding synthesizers here if you want to learn a bit of background information. Digital synths are often cheaper alternatives (and often are more flexible) compared to their hardware cousins. (Its worth noting that often outboard synths are used for their reliability and the fact that they don’t use much in the way of computer resources, so bear that in mind) The good news about digital synths is that often they don’t require masses of processor power, and even very current programs (Such as Propellerhead’s Reason) can be run successfully on slower machines. In many cases what will really kill your processor is the application of effects to your synth – not the synthesis of envelope filters and all that hoopy stuff. Audio effects have traditionally been processor intensive and one way to get around this would be to purchase a cheap outboard effects unit. Working track by track on a slower box is a good way to recycle that older machine into a decent music composition sketchpad.

So the requirements of Digital Synths vary, you can rest easy in the fact that the more processor power at your disposal the more simultaneous tracks will be available for use. I spent a period using Reason 1.0 with a Pentium 133 and although I really could only work with a few instruments at a time, it was still a satisfying and cheap way to be working with audio. If you are into Electronic music, Drum and Bass, Ambient music you will be into working with Digital Synths.

A suggested minimum configuration for Digital Synths would be a Pentium III 500+ ideally, with a outboard effects unit for a slower machine (Units such as the Digitech S100 are great places to start for basic outboard effects). A control device such as the those made by Kenton, Roland, or MidiMan would certainly help with getting those tracks down and manipulating parameters on the fly.

Working with Digital Audio

If you want to lay down audio tracks on your PC you are going to be spending the most money of all. It’s a shame but it’s the truth. Because of the sheer amount of internal bandwidth uncompressed stereo audio takes up, you really need to be running as fast a pc as possible. The more tracks you want to play back at once, say in a 12 track stereo 96khtz mix the more data being moved just to play that audio back to you.

With this in mind, it becomes reasonably clear why the hardcore audio heads use 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SCSI hard drives. Large mixes are terribly resource intensive. Combined with audio effects being applied in real time, they are also very processor intensive. once again, you can opt out for outboard audio effects, or as many high end cards have specific hardware onboard the card for dealing with effects, you can do it on card without sacrificing processor speed. (That’s called onboard Digital Sound Processing (D.S.P) for the anoraks out there. It’s where megabucks are spent in hardware and software and it’s the domain of professional recording studios.

A suggested minimum configuration for Digital Audio recording would be a Pentium 1ghz+ (or Athlon) processor with a dedicated secondary HDD for audio (7,200rpm would be ideal for starters). Big money can be spent in getting that analogue audio into your computer, but there are several beginner solutions that begin as low as $70 AUD for ADAT or $350+ AUD for dual stereo 24bit/96Khtz audio inputs. 512mb of RAM or greater is also recommended, for fairly obvious reasons.

The Operating System of Choice for Digital Audio

As you would be well aware, Microsoft has released quite a few different flavors of its now ubiquitous OS, Windows. There is a great deal of conjecture about which operating system is ideal for audio. At the moment the lead seems to be with Windows 2000 professional. It’s reasonably un-bloated and configurable (especially with regard to an audio pc in a networked studio environment), driver and software support is very good on this platform now. It’s just a little more mature than Windows XP, and for a single role computer it works very well. Software support from the various audio companies is always a little behind the ball and as can be seen with Digidesign only just supporting Windows 2000 (you can forget windows XP at the moment) at the moment we can only surmise things are going to stay that way for a while despite promises of updates coming soon. It’s often to go with a known option, and for that reason, we’d recommend running Windows 2000 pro for audio on a PC, with the caveat that you check the software that you want to run works with it. Check out online forums for the company involved, it’s always to get a good perspective from current users of the software and hardware combinations you are planning to go with.

Conclusion

If you want to get into audio on the PC the best thing to do is to start looking at all your options, doing as much research as you can, look at all your alternatives before you invest large amounts of cash there. Do your research and ask about, and you won’t go wrong!