I am sure that a lot of people who read this will have been using computers to record music for some time and I apogise in advance to anyone who feels that I am covering old ground, but it might still be worth reading on. If you have had your system working perfectly and for some reason it isn't now, this page will serve as a good reminder of some of the things you may have overlooked!
It is easy to look at your computer as one box. It either
works or it doesn't. This is a very bad way of considering what it is.
It is of no benefit to you whatsoever.
Consider all the pieces of equipment you use to make music. You may
have a keyboard, microphones, mixing desk, recorder, cables, guitars,
effects, amplification, etcetera, etcetera. A lot of stuff all
connected together. Does it all work perfectly all of the time?
Probably not.
When something ceases to do its job you probably try to identify the
problem and see whether you can correct it. Much of the time it is
something simple. Maybe a dodgy lead or something which has become
unplugged. So you replace the lead or plug it back in.
A computer is no different. It contains lots of equipment and may well be capable of performing many more tasks than all the rest of the equipment you posses! So it is just as important to know your computer as it is to know your instruments if you would like to make it an important part of the way you make music.
A good number of things, but please don't get alarmed.
In many ways using a computer as a recording studio is not that different to knowing the equipment in a recording studio. Hardly surprising really! If you have ever been into a recording studio you have probably encountered a sound engineer. He's the grumpy bloke who sits behind the mixing desk. He's usually rude, perhaps slightly arrogant (I know, I am one) and is less than happy to let you touch anything , but perhaps with good reason.
In his mind every time someone comes into the studio he is expected to make everything work seamlessly and with perfect integration. He has spent a lot of time learning his art. hopefully he knows how everything works, its benefits and limitations, how best to work in different situations and how to get the best from your performance.
Working with a computer is a combination of all these things in one box, but with a crucial difference.
You are the engineer as well as the performer.
In the studio you can blame the engineer for all sorts of things. That may well be why he's grumpy!
Now you are the engineer, you can only blame yourself or the computer, but be absolutely sure that with an entire recording studio at your fingertips, that you are not the culprit.
The better you know this equipment, the smoother your ride
will be.
When the "average" computer is put together it provides "average" functionality. That is to say it will work for common, day to day tasks without a hitch. We don't want a computer to simply do common, day to day tasks. We want it to do something rather different. In our case, because recording involves lots of tracks there are expectations which we would normally take for granted. To immediately make these things work properly is a primary consideration.
When audio is recorded onto a computer hard-drive the audio file is scattered across a fast, rotating disk at great speed. A disk which rotates at 7200RPM or greater is recommended. Laptops can suffer in this respect. Many of the drives in a laptop only rotate at 5400RPM and they are smaller. They have a smaller surface area and can read/write less data than the larger faster drives. Now ask yourself a simple question. Would you expect the engineer in a studio to use the same tape you are recoding on for something else at the same time?
If we expect the operating system to run from the same hard-drive (HDD) which is being used to record our music we are effectively doing the same thing. This is simply unwise. A computer set up like this will probably read and write the music erratically. The more tracks you expect to play back or record synchronously, the greater the problem will become. Clicks, pops and periods of silence are the most common symptoms of a badly set-up music computer. A music computer should always have an independent HDD for your audio files.
In the old days of recording, many tracks were recorded along side each other on a wide piece of tape. The tracks were locked together and precisely synchronized. To hear a track which had been previously recorded whist recording another along side it was a simple matter. There was no time delay between hearing one track and recording another.
In the computer domain this is one of the most important things to consider because it has great implications, not only in terms of if the computer will work, but also in terms of how the process has to be handled.
Computers can only perform a limited number of tasks at one time, so to perform multiple tasks that appear to happen together a computer stores completed tasks in memory and releases the tasks later, but synchronously. This subject is very important to understand. Controlling Latency is something that every DAW user has to perform regularly. The subject is covered in more detail on the Soundcard page
As all the components in a computer have become faster and more reliable, this is perhaps not an important consideration as it once was, but it is still worthy of mention, especially to those who might be considering using a slightly older computer. The capability of a device to be able to carry data from one part of a computer to another is dependant on three main factors
The speed and bandwidth of different types of connection in computers are subject to strict protocols and have a known value, but sometimes a device of a given type might not pass data as accurately as another. these devices rarely fail to function, but they might not work as quickly as a better example. This is often accomodated by a given device being alloted a larger buffer. The subject of buffers is discussed in greater detail on the soundcard page.
Sometimes there are several protocols in place for a given type of connection/bus. Usually the later protocol is a revision which allows for a greater amount of data handling. Typical examples of this are USB, Firewire, PCI, IDE, SATA and others.
In the case of connections for peripheral equipment like USB and Firewire, especially where more than one physical device can be chained together on one connection, it can be important to take into account not just how much data can be transferred along the bus, but also how much bandwidth is required for each device in the chain. In addition to this, some computers boast high speed USB2 connections, but actually have only 1 USB2 device and a number of USB1 devices which are much slower.
It is also often the case that what might appear to be several USB devices are actally one device with a number of sockets attached, so connecting several pieces of equipment can cause the bus to stop functioning as expected because the sum requirement of the devices is greater than that of the bus. In the case of a sound card this would have the effect of causing crackles, pops and drop-outs in recordings and playback.
The ability of a bus to comfortably pass the data to and from a soundcard is very important to a soundcard user. Much more important than with most other types of computer equipment. As a rule computers arrange data in a queue, so if more than one device requires data to be transferred along the same bus as another, the transfer of the data is prioritised and sent in a sequence. Different busses use different methods of performing this function.
In the case of a soundcard, the last thing we want to happen would be that another device on the same connection would cause the soundcard data to be transferred erratically.
This is equally applicable to hard drives. The performance of hard drives varies not only in the physical capabilities of a drive to be able to quickly read and write data, but also in the connection type and the number of hard drives on the cable. IDE protocol only allows data to pass in one direction at a time. Two drives can be connected to one cable, so it is quite possible for one drive to slow down the rate of data transfer to the other.
The speed and bandwidth of busses is rarely reached in practice. There are other factors which can limit the performance. The subject is one of the primary subjects of debate and development in the computer world and rivals that of CPU design
These factors make it very difficult to predict with any great degree of accuracy exactly how well we can expect given connections to work in practice, but it is possible to make allowances for this kind of behaviour with a little knowlege and a few basic rules.
Here are speeds of some more commonly used busses stated in
speed/second.
IDE DMA33, 33Mbytes
IDE DMA66,66Mbytes
UDMA 100,100Mbytes
UDMA 133,133Mbytes
SATA 1, 150Mbytes
SATA 2, 300Mbytes
PCI Card Bus 132Mbytes
PCI 2.0 Card Bus 132Mbytes
PCI 2.1 Card Bus 264Mbytes
PCI 2.2 Card Bus 528Mbytes
USB 1,1.5Mbytes/12Mbit
USB 2,60Mbytes/480Mbit
Firewire 1394a 50Mbytes/400Mbit
Firewire 1394b 100Mbytes/800Mbit
This Website is under a state of on-going improvement. Check back soon. Thank you for visiting inthepipeline.net