Hello,
I found this site a couple of days ago and have been reading all the great info on the archives. What a great site! It has lots of info, kudos to the organizers.
I'm not sure if this question should go in the "budget" section, if so please advice.
My question is: what would be the best PC DAW that I can get for $600? (Not including sound card, software, mic preamp's, monitors, etc.)
I will be upgrading my home PC in a month or so (it's an old Emachines 566MHz that I have been using for the past 5 years or so). This will also be the home machine; I think I will implement some kind of dual boot.
Looking around, I found a (non-Emachines Brand Name) P4 3GHz / 915G / 512MB PC3200 for this price. I will most certainly buy some more RAM later, but this seems to be a reasonable machine to start.
My goal is to record some demos of my songs, nothing too fancy... yet. Probably start with Audacity + the onboard sound card, then buy some software and a better card later on. Then throw a Great River and a couple Neve's just for fun... :D
For $600, can I do better by going the build-it-yourself way? Again, I'm not expecting ultra-performance, just a machine to start experimenting.
So far for my home computer purchases in the last 10 years I always went the "state of the art from last year" route with relative success. However, I wasn't doing any recording on them. With a DAW, can you be 1 year behind and still have a semi-decent machine?
Any recommendations are welcome.
Thanks in advance!
Camino
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BladeSG wrote: The biggest limitation for you is going to be u
BladeSG wrote:
The biggest limitation for you is going to be using the onboard sound, so like I said look at replacing this first. There are many options that are PCI card, USB and Firewire based and some of these options won't put a huge hole in your pocket.
Thanks for the info. There are certainly a lot of choices when it comes to buying a pro-ish soundcard.
I will be entering one track at a time, so I was thinking of an Audiophile 2496 + some cheap Behringer mixer to get me started. Sounds reasonable?
Best,
Camino
AndrewSteingrebe wrote: http://messageboard.tapeop.com/viewtopic
AndrewSteingrebe wrote: http://messageboard.tapeop.com/viewtopic.php?t=12407
Thanks for the pointer. I checked out Dell's site and it looks very interesting.
Best,
Camino
P4 3GHz / 915G / 512MB PC3200 for this price. I will most certai
Yes this should be adequate to start with. Upgrading RAM is a good idea for the future.
Certainly. I built my DAW over 18 months ago.....
If I can give you one single peice of advice it would be this: The PC you mention is capable of multitrack recording and running VST Instruments and FX. The first thing I would do though is get yourself an ASIO supported audio interface for recording then secondly a 2nd hard disk drive for recording your audio files to.
The biggest limitation for you is going to be using the onboard sound, so like I said look at replacing this first. There are many options that are PCI card, USB and Firewire based and some of these options won't put a huge hole in your pocket.
Good Luck