Advice for Music workstations

[SteveT]

We've finally got a music teacher that is keen to develop the use of ICT in music so I need to start thinking about the hardware she will require. She wants to use Sibelius and midi keyboards and I reckon that stand-alone machines would be most appropriate.

 

Any advice?

eg: how powerful do machines need to be ..... Processor, Ram, HDD size.

What SoundCard? etc

 

All advice gratefully received

[Quackers]

We use networked machines in music and we have Sibelius. Get the network edition it saves a lot of hassel! You run a local licensing server. Just your everyday P4 with at half a gig of ram should be more than comfortable.

[danIT]

we bought macs, there not networked just administred per classroom by apple remote dekstop2, they do have internet access though.

 

Power Macs dual processor 2.0ghz - sadly purchased before intel motherboards. 2gb ram, 2 x 250gb hard drive, garageband, reason and Qubase, also for Art they have photoshop etc

 

work very well but staff needed a lot of traning and support to get them off the ground.

[SteveT]

Cheers,

 

Have opted for stand-alone machines for the following reasons:

 

1. Cost of networking Music room. Nearest Switch is full so would need additional switch plus cabling etc. Not worth it at present.

 

2. Music room not used much. Networked machines would result in some teachers "sending" kids there to "get on with their work as they need computers to do it" ........ unsupervised and you can guess which kids would be sent!!! No point in sending them if they cannot access their work.

 

Any ideas re Sound Cards?

[plexer]

We have the E-MU 0404 in our music pc's.

 

Ben

[GrumbleDook]

Intel iMacs authenticating against the network, about to stick ARD3 on to make life easier and Sibelius too ...

 

Presently they are just using Garageband and Audacity ... and loving it.

 

During the summer we will stick Logic Express on and we have beenusing Atomic Learning as a way of training staff and students.

[AshF]

We currently run a music suite with a mixture of iMacs (G5 and Intel), and have two studios with Quad G5 setups in them thats used for the 'hardcore' editing and recording. Running Sibelius and Logic Pro. The iMacs are running with 1GB, and the Quads are running with 2 or 3... i forget off the top of my head. They're generally managed by the music technician, who only comes to me when something goes drastically wrong.

[Ric_]

1 suite of iMacs for Sibelius and Cubase. 1 suite of PCs for Sibelius and Cubasis.

 

The machine are networked for access to network files and for printing. You WILL get pissed off registering Sibelius if you go down the standalone route! The teaching staff will also demand printing ability and the ability to move work around from machine to machine.

[AshF]

Logic hates working with networked home directories, btw. I've spoken to Apple on this and basically the response was 'yes, yes it does.'

[john]

Networked Machines are a must, in the short term, network them locally to each other for Sibelius, it is a PITA to do it one by one, i've been there and its no fun.

 

I have AMD 3800+ X2s, 512 ram, 80Gb HDD, and Creative Sounblaster Audigy cards with front bays.

 

Midi Keyboards, its worth remembering that Vista does NOT support midi / game ports end of so you want to be getting USB MIDI keyboards not ones that use the MIDI / Game port adapters.

[Ric_]

@AshF: I have local home drives and the Windows network share mounted so that work can be done locally and backed up to the network.

[Face-Man]

we use m-audio ozone and ozonic keyboards as sound cards as the have everything built in. Makes life so much easier.

 

I would be really cautious about networking music software computers. I ended up doing a seperate domain with far less security as all the software wanted to add stuff to user registry c: drive etc and then handed it over to the music tech to manage.

[Guest Guest]

Heres a free asio driver to get people going. Obviously it isnt as good as having a real asio soundcard but its still very reasonable. Ive had 21ms latency from it, which is quite comparable to some of the cheaper soundcards. That was on an alright system though.

 

http://www.asio4all.com/

 

 

System requirements for music apps - The min spec used to be relatively high, now HW has caught up it isnt. You can quite easily get Cubase, Reason, FLStudio etc running on a Athlon/Pentium + 1gb RAM (even without an ASIO soundcard!).

You really really dont need some Dual core + 2gb ram, mirrored HD system, unless you plan on having 50+ tracks playing at once.

[baronne]

1 suite of iMacs for Sibelius and Cubase. 1 suite of PCs for Sibelius and Cubasis.

 

The machine are networked for access to network files and for printing. You WILL get pissed off registering Sibelius if you go down the standalone route! The teaching staff will also demand printing ability and the ability to move work around from machine to machine.

 

We have a suite of networked PC's with Cubase & Sibelius on. The trouble I had (and boy did I have plenty of that) - was that Cubase & Sibelius didn't seem to retain settings, so I ended up giving local admin permissions to users on those PCs which I think has resolved some issues.

 

Did anyone else have a problem with a networked suite of Cubase machines with a "locked" down desktop environment, roaming profiles, etc.?

 

baronne

[plexer]

Cubase seems to work fine for us.

 

Our setup is a shuttle pc with an EMU-404 soundcard.

17" neovo hard glass monitor

Tapco Mix 50 mini mixer

Yamaha keyboard with usb midi out.

 

The Tapco enable the connections to all the analogue connections on the emu-404's to be brought into play more easily.

 

The keyboards are plugged into the mixer and the input/ouput from the sound card is as well. They also have a tape input and microphone/line input free for outside sources.

 

Ben

[flyinghaggis]

We're running Cubase SX3 on our music PC's. We've been struggling to decide what's best with regard to sounds cards though we're pretty happy that pretty much any modern PC (=>P4,>512MB RAM ,etc)seems capable of running the software.

The main trick seems to be getting the correct sound card and that's where we've been running into problems. We've tried soundblaster 1024!live cards which aren't support by ASIO for all and as a result have really bad latency. The Terratec Aureon 7.1 Universe card on the teachers PC works really well and has native ASIO drivers but costs >£100 and seems like overkill. I've tried buying a cheaper £25 Aureon 5.1 Fun card and whilst this works OK with ASIO4ALL there's still a slight latecy as it still doesn't come with a dedicated option you get with the Aureon 7.1.

I think the main problem is that I dont know much when it comes to MIDI/music editing and neither does our music department so we're struggling to get to grips with the exact hardware we need for what they want to do. I don't think they're very sure exactly what they'll be using the software for either which complicates things further!

We've got a lab of 12 computers fitted with Soundblaster!Live1024 cards that we've pretty much given up on trying to get to work with Cubase so we're looking into buying a dozen new soundcards. Can anyone recommend a suitable reasonably priced sound card with dedicated ASIO drivers/MIDI interface? Or should we just bit the bullet and purchase more expensive audio cards?

[baronne]

do you have them all networked on a domain with group policies, etc?

[flyinghaggis]

do you have them all networked on a domain with group policies, etc?

 

Yes, They're running on a domain with the pupils/staff locked down with only basic permissions/ standard non-admin user accounts and it all works fine. The only real problem we've encounteed is that we've had to manually install the Cubase software as it comes with drivers for the hardware dongle to allow the software to run. Bit of a headache but it wasn't too bad as it's only a dozen PC's.

[baronne]

We're running Cubase SX3 on our music PC's. We've been struggling to decide what's best with regard to sounds cards though we're pretty happy that pretty much any modern PC (=>P4,>512MB RAM ,etc)seems capable of running the software.

The main trick seems to be getting the correct sound card and that's where we've been running into problems. We've tried soundblaster 1024!live cards which aren't support by ASIO for all and as a result have really bad latency. The Terratec Aureon 7.1 Universe card on the teachers PC works really well and has native ASIO drivers but costs >£100 and seems like overkill. I've tried buying a cheaper £25 Aureon 5.1 Fun card and whilst this works OK with ASIO4ALL there's still a slight latecy as it still doesn't come with a dedicated option you get with the Aureon 7.1.

I think the main problem is that I dont know much when it comes to MIDI/music editing and neither does our music department so we're struggling to get to grips with the exact hardware we need for what they want to do. I don't think they're very sure exactly what they'll be using the software for either which complicates things further!

We've got a lab of 12 computers fitted with Soundblaster!Live1024 cards that we've pretty much given up on trying to get to work with Cubase so we're looking into buying a dozen new soundcards. Can anyone recommend a suitable reasonably priced sound card with dedicated ASIO drivers/MIDI interface? Or should we just bit the bullet and purchase more expensive audio cards?

 

 

 

Go for the M-Audio 2496 - a great card for around £50...

[flyinghaggis]

Cheers for the advice. I've had a couple of other folk recommend this card so we'll get one in to see if the music staff are happy with it.

Just to add I've checked and we're currently running Cubase SX 2.0 (NOT SX3) on the network.

[john]

Higher end Creative stuff is what I use, SB Live Platinumn etc, I would now go for the X-Fi's, as the drivers seem to be much better now, and they should nativly support ASIO