I’m planning a new computer system for my personal use for business and music mostly and will likely go Dell (we all love my daughter’s). One area I’m uncertain of is the burner area. Now, I know I want 2 separate drives (I was glad to have the second on my old Compaq when one went out), but am unsure that I need anything specific for best use for music. I want to be able to copy music onto discs and label them to send to others to facilitate learning like tunes (as others have been kind enough to do for me).
I’d also like to be able to record my own music onto the computer and send the files (compressed wav?) to others as well. I already have a mic (SHure sm57) and a pre amp, but that stopped working eons ago with a Goldwave program on this old Compaq. I’m sure the mic and amp are fine and it’s either the software and/or the sound card on my computer. So I’d like to be able to start over on the new computer. (I also have Transcribe, a wonderful slow down program suggested by Bill Ochs).
As to the first issue, is there any difference in getting for example a 16x DVD-ROM drive and then a combo 8xDVD+R/RW CD-RW as opposed to a lesser second drive in terms of what I can do musically? I don’t generally do anything related to DVD on the computer, but do understand that DVD drives accomodate both CD and DVD and at relatively faster rates.
As to the second issue, will I be able to just hook my pre-amp into the sound card and then the mic into the amp and use software that allows for the internal recording?
I’m just trying to get straight what I want, because my experience is that the computer sales people do not really know these things and it’s best to know what you want and not unnecessarily get more than you’ll actually use.
Thanks for any feedback.
(Ok, so I’ve never even “burned” a cd and don’t get why they call it that.)
Regards,
Thanks for any feedback.
(Ok, so I’ve never even “burned” a cd and don’t get why they call it that.)
Well all I can say is you have been missing out on a heap O fun.
Whats also cool is Burning a Disk with a load of Jpegs and then veiwing on the DVD player on the big TV screen.
The program you use for burning is also important.some are much easer than others.
Twin drives, with one a burner, are almost a necessity anymore.
The term “burn” comes from what actually happens on the CD when it’s created. A CD is a mylar disc with a clear protective coating. A laser is used to both read from and write to the disk.
Think of it in terms of the prehistoric vacuum tube or ancient transistor based computers. Each position, as represented by a single tube or transistor, was in one of two states - off or on. In a modern PC, of course, a silion wafer with the equivalent of millions of transistors is used, but as always, each of those submicroscopic locations is either on or off.
When we moved to magnetic media (hard drives and floppies), the on/off status was maintained using magnetic states. Now you get to a CD. The laser reads disks by what amounts to whether tiny segments of the CD surface are either light or dark. You can’t see it. but under that mirror surface is a vast number of single locations, each either light or dark. A laser writes to the CD by darkening (burning) selected locations - just like turning a tube or transistor on or off or magnetizing a tiny bit of magnetic media.
OK, irrelevancies aside, the rule of thumb when buying new PC drives, whether magnetic or optical (CD/DVD) is BUY THE BEST YOU CAN AFFORD! Reason? Because over the life of the PC the drive speeds and storage protocols WILL increase faster than anyone ever predicts. For example, DVD readers are common and cheap now. DVD burning is possible now but expensive. Over the next couple of years, DVD burners will get cheaper and faster and become just as ubiquitous as CD burners are now.
Now they’re talking about nanotechnology for storage and processing. If it follows the same pattern as did CDs and DVDs, it’ll be here long before that new PC is even well worn, let alone obsolete.
Thank you, oh priestess of the screaming avatar. Laser=burn does make sense, duh Although Sherlock Holmes is my favorite fictional character, I fear that rather than successfully hiding things in the most obvious places, I myself am more likely to be the one to overlook the most obvious…
I prefer two burners in my PC. When it comes to CDs the burneres are almost as cheap as a regular drive. The DVD reader Cd burner combos are coming down in price as well. If I had my choice I would have one DVD burner (which also burns CDs) and one very high speed CD burner. BTW burning CDs can become addictive. As mentioned above I burn JPGs as a slide show and then show them using my DVD player on the TV. I burn an hours worth of music ( all legal BTW) to play in the car. My wife doesn’t appreciate a straight hour of whistle tunes though. I also use CDs to back up up my data.
I bought a Dell and support about 1000 Dells at work.
Dell’s, combination DVD reader CDR writer is pretty good and they are the oldest PC maker that includes that option so they’ve shaken out most of the OS conflicts. They’ve been including them in systems for 2-3 years. If, money is a concern, I’d look into buying an ‘after delivery’ DVD burner as a planned upgrade in a couple of months. These are even available with USB ports, and the prices are dropping.
Dells internal sound card is, Okay for business, but I went out and bought a SoundBlaster Audigy Platninum EX that comes with external ports, pre-amp, every thing an amateur recording artist would want. It allows me to direct connect a 1/4 inch mike jack. The EX is for an External interface which is a black box with every type of plug you’d ever want that on a firewire (fast) connection directly to the card. With the platinum EX I have the ability to record a second track while listening to a first track without appreciable electronic delay. It comes with more software than I’ll ever use for music editing etc. It works great with my older Dell. It also has the ability to produce very high quality MP3 files from regular CD’s, With it I’ve been able to store 10 full album (600 minutes) in MP3 format on a single CD. My Walkman plays MP3 as well as regular cd formats.
The second most important thing in your new PC, if you working with sound, is RAM (after the soundcard). Make sure there are slots left for memory upgrades later, or get a Gig or more of RAM now, it’ll pay on the performance end.
By the way I’m running Window 2000 because it’s more stable and what we use at work. So your performance with XP may vary.
Dell, with an add-on sound card makes a good system. If you can find an Audigy Platinum-EX it should be reasonably priced since the Audigy II Platinum-ex have been out for over a year.
If you have any other questions, feel free to email me.
New toys are always fun, especially if the help you …
Yeah. I agree with the above. Get a new Mac G-5. With a gig of Ram. A little more expensive, but well worth it and about 1/4 the problems as running a Windows system.
If you purchase a Dell, be aware that the power supply connections to the mobo are reversed and soundcards may be nonstandard and the CPU placement is nonstandard. That means that you can’t use a generic power supply, mother board or case as replacements in case of failure, you have to use Dell parts.
If you do purchase Dell, I would advise purchasing the extended warranty as a friend of mine had one MOBO, one power supply, one CD burner and the conexant (worthless) modem replaced. Now the keyboard has quit.
I always buy the parts and plug them together, install the operating system (I prefer Linux at the cost of $0, btw) and then I know what I have under the hood and what to get to fix it when it breaks.
The best soundcard I have found (lowest noise in recordings) is the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard. Place it in the PCI slot the furtherest away from the CPU on the MOBO for the lowest noise pickup.
It works well in both Windows and Linux (I have no Mac experience), but gamers may not like it as most games depend on soundblaster thingies.
Our two CDs were made using (1st, sblive!, 2nd sb audigy as my son wanted to do the recording so he has gaming stuff rather than audio).
We used a combo of Shure somethings with a 50 in it and my AKG C3000B condenser mike. We used 3 two condenser mikes on the 2nd recording. These were fed into a 6 channel audio preamp/mixer and pre-mixed and positioned with the mixer and then recorded in stereo on the soundcard.
I only use one CD-RW drive for ripping/burning/copying as I like to keep the wav files handy for editing/dumping, so I fill the other 3 positions with large hard disk drives.
One Word Laser 
Although Sherlock Holmes is my favorite fictional character, I fear that rather than successfully hiding things in the most obvious places, I myself am more likely to be the one to overlook the most obvious…
