Music Room PC's

[plexer]

I know someone else was looking for this info previously but I wanted some comments on a particular machine.

 

I'm looking at:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/pcrange.html?BRH

 

The 3000+ with the 1gb of ram.

 

Having a 250GB H/Drive would it be a good idea to have a d: partition that they could use as scratch data when creating compositions and have it delete the contents at startup with a startup script?

 

I'm also thinking fo adding an m-audio sound card to these in addition to the onboard 5.1 audio but is that really neccessary for GCSE music?

 

Cheers,

 

Ben

 

Ben

[Andrew_C]

Apart from any other Novatech issues, I would recommend a "proper" seperate D: drive for the audio temp folder. And speed rather than ultimate capacity would be the criteria. Multi-tracked audio files get big, really big. Then you need to pull them off the disk fast when doing mix-downs.

 

I know this pushes the cost, but...

[Geoff]

The graphics card is no good for vista (if you care about that ).

I don't see a problem with using onboard sound (it's probably the Realtek AL6xx chipset.)

[plexer]

Not bothered about vista tbh.

I have no problems with novatech or my account manager.

 

Cost wise at the moment that sort of spec and price is about all we can run to.

 

I'd probably be looking at splitting the drive into 50gb and 200gb for the temp I think.

 

Unless anyone else can recommend a similar spec machine they are looking favourite at the moment except for XP Pro being an additional £79 though. I can buy the upgrade licence from ramesys for £31 but not an OEM one.

 

I did ask a audio pc maker for a quote and have yet to hear from them.

 

Ben

[CHR1S]

I speced and built our music machines, which was no easy task. What programs will you be running? Will these machines be networked? Will you be using samples? If your using cubase and midi controllers you will find that there is alot of problems with syncronisation if the soundcards dont support ASIO.

 

I used Novatech for my supplier and had 3 sets of different boards ram etc on evaluation even out of the 3 only one combination actually functioned properly, so be very wary at your hardware choices.

[Face-Man]

Hi,

 

We fitted a new room this september went for hi spec Dell machines and have had no Hardware issues but have Software issue in buckets it would appear that no music software likes to work with each other and definatly does not like the resrictions of working on a network. If you want a good keyboard/midi solution have a look at m-audio ozone http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MAudioOzone-main.html. They have midi input and various outputs and have a small footprint.

[plexer]

Well looks like I've got about £500 - £600 per machine complete.

Yes they will be networked.

 

Each machine will have something like an ekeys49 or possibly an Oxygen 8 v2.

 

Each PC will be running Cubase SE and some virtual instruments as well posibly, as well as sibelius 4 and dance ejay school.

 

May have to reconsider my choice of pc then.

 

Ben

[CHR1S]

Well looks like I've got about £500 - £600 per machine complete.

Yes they will be networked.

 

Each machine will have something like an ekeys49 or possibly an Oxygen 8 v2.

 

Each PC will be running Cubase SE and some virtual instruments as well posibly, as well as sibelius 4 and dance ejay school.

 

May have to reconsider my choice of pc then.

 

Ben

 

You will need a good ASIO card for Cubase at around £100 per card.

I found that a semperon with 512mb ran everything we needed as alot of the encoding/decoding is handled by the card.

 

Your biggest problem will come from Cubase's stability with other programs and your network policies etc etc

 

Take my honest advice, make novatech give you evaluation units and save yourself alot of hard work in the long run!