recording music

[citercian{007}monk]

Hi, it been awhile. Would i need to add an external hdd to my comp. if i wanted to record music. Because music fileds are supposed to take up alot of space. Or would it be better to add bigger(but less expensive :cool: ) drive to the inside of my comp. but somehow only save the music files to it and keep all other software i already ohave on my comp. seperate (but i dont know how i would do this).
also, one last question, what are some good sound cards used for music recording? as of now i only use the sound from my motherboard

[ZeratulsAvenger]

The internal HD would require less space, since you are without the external unit and cords, but it isn't portable. If you wanted to bring your recordings to another computer you would have to burn a CD or DVD, but with the external you could just carry the drive. Externals and internals should be pretty much even in price, and if they aren't you can buy a harddrive enclosure and then buy a plain ol' HD and stick it in the enclosure. Maybe $20 difference from an internal?

To use the internal purly for the music files you would just, well, use it only for those files. Set it up as a slave/2ndary drive and it will be listed just like an External might be, and you can probably change the default saving location for any programs you use to save automatically to the new drive dedicated to your recordings. Some programs(well I know GIMP allows it) will let you change the cache location as well, so you could even place that on the 2ndary drive. All in all it's not to hard of a process.

Don't know about the sound card.

[citercian{007}monk]

sso all i need to do is set it up as a secondary drive and i would be able to look it up as a seperate drive under "my computer?" Is it really that easy?

[ZeratulsAvenger]

You plug it in, and set it as the slave drive with jumpers(your primary drive set to master), and it will be displayed as the D: drive or something similar under "My Computer." All your programs will still default to installing on the C drive. Yes, its just that easy.

[trowand]

If you get a SATA HDD there are no jumpers to worry about. Your mobo has four SATA ports and you're probably using two of them for your Raptors so you've got two more available. So just plug it in and go. You might need to format it by going into Control Panel/Administrative tools/Disc Management/and format the new HDD to get it to show up in "My Computer" but it's very easy. Also, music doesn't really take up that much room unless you're talking about TONS of songs or you're dealing with small hard drives. I've got like 240 songs recorded at 192kbps and I think it's taking up around a GB or less. (But I'm not positive about that. I'm at work and can't check right now.)

[ZeratulsAvenger]

He may be talking about music production of some sort? I would think that would take a larger amount of space... If it is just plain old music then ya that does seem a lil excessive to get a whole new HD.

[glc]

It wouldn't hurt to put a big 3rd drive in - and keep an image of the main array on it. If just one of those RAID 0 drives hiccups, the whole array will crash.

[citercian{007}monk]

He may be talking about music production of some sort? I would think that would take a larger amount of space... If it is just plain old music then ya that does seem a lil excessive to get a whole new HD.

well this isnt like just downloading music to the computer. Im talking about multitracking guitar stuff onto my computer. Im not sure how much space that takes up though :rolleyes: