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Poxican_ · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

First of all, Kudos to Emperor Fab for sorting this out.

I've got a new 500gb drive that I've split into 4 lovely partitions. One of them is a 25gb partition I intend to set up solely for recording music with REAPER.

I'm interested in trying Ubuntu but it seems like theres a lot of hassle setting up Wine and ASIO and such to get REAPER to work properly, especially for a Linux virgin like myself.

I found a thread (http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=30162) about a streamlined XP SP3 for music production, but it still seems a little daunting.

My idea is that, because I've not got an immensely powerful computer, I'd like to run an OS with all the fat trimmed to give maximum resources to REAPER.

Any suggestions for me?

Carol Decker · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 12

sorry, your question is well above my pay scale. I don't do 'puters

maybe I should work for MR in th IT dept?
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ecc83 · Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 1:49 pm Post subject:

"because I've not got an immensely powerful computer,"

Well, HOW not immensely powerful!?

I know jack about pc's really but I think the OS is not really the problem so long as you have done the optimizations and gone thru' the Admin tools and turned off everything that is not needed. And no internet, therefore no anti virus, no error reporting. They say turn off Restore but I am so pc Tas S I daresn't!

Plugins, especially reverbs will eat memory but shedloads of tracks should be ok with say a P4 3G and 1G of ram.

I have an old HP laptop, 850mHz 256ram and that will record 2 tracks 24bits/44.1kHz all day no problem, 'bout ALL it will do mind!

Dave

lespaulgb · Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 2:11 pm Post subject:

500 gig should be tons as long as you haven't got any other apps or the internet running. My PC has a huge memory, mainly as I thought I'd need it for recording music but I think I have a bit too much.
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Poxican_ · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

ecc83 · Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 4:31 pm Post subject:

Is the new drive a SATA?

I ask because I was told a SATA was very much faster than the old IDE's .
I am also assured that you can keep the IDE connected and use it as a backup or general storage area.

This pc is 3G 1G ram and a Foxconn MOBO running WMCE( ! I was conn'ed) but it isn't too bad.

The other pc is 3.2G 1G ram EPoX MOBO XP Pro and my son uses that for most of his music. It does have internet capability ( MAGIX Samplitude almost forces that upon one) but we have little trouble, in any case he rarely runs more than a dozen tracks and we can only do 2 in at a time. Well! He's the only musician! I solder!

Dave.

Poxican_ · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

Aye, 'tis indeed a SATA.
And I can tell you right now, it's a hell of a lot faster. just moving files about the place and retrieving information is noticeably quicker.

I'm gonna keep the old one in as a backup drive. I suspect it's in the latter stage of it's life, but it might still serve a purpose.

thereformant · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 11

These days most of the stuff about having a separate OS install for your music is really unnecesary. Most modern OS's are much better at scheduling especially if you give them the appropriate hints by setting the priority of your DAW process accordingly.

You main issue might be disk access if a background process starts using the disk while your recording / streaming loads of tracks from disk. BUt to be honest I find that these days Im far more bound by CPU in terms of how many plugins I can have running rather than disk IO and unless you have heaps of rancid malware on your system most background processes shouldnt make as much dent on your cpu as a single vst plugin.

Or to put it another way, if I run into performance problems say adding that one extra amp sim on a track puts me into jitter territory then I have never been able to get enough juice back from the system by stopping background processes to actually make a difference.

Poxican_ · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

Hmm thats interesting...
Do you not think the absence of anti-viral software is at least one small benefit?
If nothing else, it will force me to be more productive as I cant just open Firefox every 15 minutes to go on MusicRadar or facebook when I should be working on music :p

thereformant · Joined: 03 Oct 2009 Posts: 11

Anti virus software doesnt actually sit and process all the time. As long as you dont schedule a full scan while your tracking you wont notice the difference.

Personally I'd put AV even on a machine not connected to the internet, you'll inevitably introduce some attack vector onto it.