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I just finished a little device that sits on the MIDI line between our Mac and Mackie Control and turns on/off a 12 volt output when Pro Tools sends the command to turn the recording LED on/off on the controller. I'm wiring it to arrays of LEDs in the live room and lounge to let people know we are r...

I get nervous trusting a hard drive to hold that much stuff. I've had a brand new 200GB drive go tits-up on me a week after I moved all my data to it. That being said, Western Digital makes good drives but a little insurance may be in order. I would have to reccomend a second 500GB drive set up as a...

I recorded drums with just a plain old 2 channel sound card one time back in the day. I put up my overheads, threw a mic on the snare and mixed that down to stereo. Then, I put triggers on the toms and kick and sent those into a drum module (you can use the roland TMC6 http://www.musiciansfriend.com...

One thing you need to watch out for to burn a continous cd is to burn in Disk-At-Once mode. If you burn track-at-once, there will be a physical gap between the tracks on the cd as the burner gets ready to burn the next track. Also, you may want to mix down as one long file, then use an editor to cho...

Alot of people use a seperate word clock generator to improve fidelity. With the box designed to only provide a word clock, it does the job much better than a built in clock. This reduces jitter and improves linearity of the signal. The downside is the cost. Musicians Fiend has the Aardvark AardSync...

The rack cases are almost never, if ever, designed to be quiet. They are designed for good cooling to increase reliability, since they are usually used for servers. You should do what I did. Get a good quiet desktop case (not tower), and mount it to a rack shelf. Costs half what a rack mounted case ...

For PC people reading this thread, Sonic-Foundry's CD Architect will do the fades, the hidden tracks, fun with the time code (put a file in the countdown before the track starts, put a big blank space before a hidden song on the last track), etc.

I use the M-Audio Delta 1010, and I can't reccomend it enough. I have 2 in an XP box and they are rock solid. They come with built in bass management and an excellent monitor mixer/routing system. I've used these in a P3 866 and a P4 3.2. Has been rock solid on both. They don't have any preamps, but...

I've never done it on a mac, but on a PC, a 3 hour defrag could be seen as fast. The defrag is ordering all the tiny pieces of all the files on your HD for maximum effenciency. One problem is that it can be bad to defrag multi-track audio files. When recording multitrack on a computer, the files are...

You need to get a good power supply. With the drives you have drawing ~84 Watts, you need a power supply that can supply more than 200 watts. The problem is most power supplies are WAY overrated. I'd reccomend the Fortron FSP400-60PFN . This PS has a good review at AnandTech, and is going for $72 at...

It is not necessarly going to die. Does it stall after a long period of time? How are you shure it is even the HD causing the pause. Please describe with more detail what is going on.

I'm a computer tech during the day and an engineer by night, so here's my take on new DAWs. I use most of this HW on my setup. Motherboard: Asus. I love my P4P800 Deluxe. GREAT board. Processor: 2.6Ghz P4 (NOT 2.66Ghz) (mine is overclocked to 3.2 Ghz) Ram: 2x 512 MB PC3100 (must have 2 sticks for du...

I agree with apropos of nothing (he says his name is William....) Your computer is TOO SLOW to do pretty much ANYTHING. There isn't any upgrade, no fix, nothing. I'm a computer tech by day and when I see a Win95 PC, the first words out of my mouth are "buy a new PC". I won't give a warranty on my wo...

You guys need to find someone to xfer it for you. If you are a novice, it can be extremely difficult to set the levels correctly, normalize, tip-and-tail, etc... If you can find the right person, they will even have a pro soundcard. Just start asking around locally. Find someone who will do it for a...

In CD ARchitect, you can bring in the whole mixdown, and then set the track markers. It even lets you set the end of tracks, so the intro of a song will be in the countdown before the track starts.