How to set up your budget home recording studio (part 3)

Digital recording studio systems

Cubase 5 - Digital multitrack sound recording and editing software

As described in my previous article, we are living today in the era of a digital technology. The traditional, analog studio recording equipment, although available and still necessary in some applications, became much less popular in general due to the evolution of a newer, more compact and versatile, and relatively cheaper digital sound recording systems. These systems became cheaper and widely available simply because the need for the expensive hardware doesn't exist any more (except for the high end systems), as the digital systems are now controlled electronically by the software, rather than the hardware it self. In home, or so called project studios, although we still require to have some hardware interfaces to be able to physically connect various pieces of studio equipment, instruments etc., in comparison with previous systems, they are minimal.

We are now going to take a look at some very basic computer based audio recording setup.


Computer based Audio recording setup 

If you are lucky to have a recent Apple's Mac computer, it comes with iLife'11 software bundle that includes iPhoto, iMovie and a GarageBand applications - a complete multimedia editing package. For your audio recording you wont need anything else than a USB Microphone (Samson's USB line has some nice microphones) and some speakers/headphones. Even if you have an older Mac, you can download this software package on Amazon for US $49.00. If you don't have a Mac and would like to get one, you'll have to pay about $899.99 for a new MacBook Air (see picture) - and the price goes up for higher spec models!

Click on the picture to see full details

I'll take it you are not one of the lucky ones and that you have a PC at home - like my self! Let's say, for example, that your PC is of a reasonably good build. What I mean by "reasonably" is that it meets at least following minimum system requirements, which most of today's sound recording software and hardware will require in order to run smoothly:

Computer system requirements

Click for more details 

I will take for example, the minimum requirements for the Steinberg's Cubase LE 4 sound recording and editing software, that comes bundled with many Audio and MIDI interfaces available on the market. If you are new to Cubase, you can also get this cheap and very easy to understand "Complete Idiot's Guide to Recording with Cubase" book, that will set you on the fastrack to your own recordings in no time. See the picture to the right.

Now the PC specs:

• Pentium III 500 MHz or AMD K7 (Pentium III / Athlon 1 GHz or faster recommended) 
• 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended) 
• Windows 2000, Windows XP Home or XP Professional Windows 
• MME compatible audio hardware (ASIO compatible audio hardware recommended) 
• 1 GB of free disk space 

These are minimum requirements that are only needed for software to be installed and ran. But, when you record several audio tracks and apply some sound effects to them, this will hardly tax your system's performance, so I would really recommend the following as a minimum:

• A multicore processor (1.7GHz or faster Dual or Quad Core)
• at least 1GB RAM (2GB or more preferable)
• Windows Vista or Windows 7
• at least 40 GB of free hard disk space with a speed of at least 7200RPM (rotations per minute)
• A dedicated Audio/MIDI interface - sound card (I will talk about this a little bit later)

Most of today's computers exceed these specs, so this shouldn't be a problem. If however, you are stuck with a relatively slow PC, it will be wise idea to invest a little bit more in your dedicated Audio/MIDI interface/sound card. These devices - especially the ones with DSP (Digital Sound Processing) built in them, usually take a good amount of a sound effects processing strain of your PC's hardware (processor and RAM memory). If you are planning to have loads of recorded audio tracks, you will still need to have a faster hard drive, as mentioned above. A simultaneous recording and playback of a multiple Audio tracks, directly depends on storage devices (hard disks) capacity and it's operational speed  - it's ability to read/write multiple bits of information (Audio tracks in this case) at once.

Next we are going to talk about different types of the Audio/MIDI interfaces, what are they and what is their role in computer based studio recordings.