The DijonStock Digital Home Recording Support Forum

Some of you may have read i bought a Mac or at least my wife has allowed me to.

I plan to post my experiences here and the hunt for vst's as well. Since i blew the budget on this single piece of hardware there is none left for other things so i'm working with Cubase LE and i will scout for free vst's.

So far the setup has been an unbelieveable breeze. No hastle with updates and drivers, just start, answer a couple of questions and go. I'm listening to some music via the unavoidable itunes and really do hear that the soundquality is much better with the same speakers and mp3's i used on my pc.

The software i'm addicted to all works well it seems. Mozilla, Thunderbird, LibreOffice. It's all free. I just installed and reactivated Cubase. Everything goes a lot faster than i was used to.

One surprise though, the Imacs no longer have an optical drive so i was going 'where do i insert this dvd?'. Luckily i still have an external usb dvd. Then again Mac comes in, just plug it in and it works. Same thing for the hp printer. Plugged it in, Mac asked 'shall i fetch drivers' so to speak and ten seconds later i could print. I can asure you that on a pc this takes much longer even if you find the drivers immediately and all goes well during install.

I now have a Terrabyte to fill with recordings. I wonder if that will be enough?

oh, it's suposed to be about recording right ?

I did my first small test recording today and this shows that a standard MAC is far superior to a budget pc. I know there are good pc's and laptops too but the recording latency on this device is only 1.2 ms !!!

No, that is not typo. output latency is only 6 ms. That is hardly noticeable and low enough to record directly into the tracks with no need for seperate monitoring.

I found the first usuable free vts's too at http://www.voxengo.com/group/free-vst-plugins/

More will come later when i had the time to really test this stuf.

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In a minute it might be gone. Life is a bear in a bubble.

http://www.soundclick.com/bearinabubble

Looking forward to reading about your experiences with this gear. At some point I want to try out recording with computers. The whole thing seems like a big step to make.

As I mentioned in another section, I, too, am a Cubase user (Cubase Artist 6.5). I still use the AW16G for vocals and will never get rid of it! But being able to "see" the audio tracks in Cubase is a big plus for me. And something else I find extremely valuable is exporting songs instantly into an mp3 file.
Quantizing audio, dissolving midi drum track into all separated tracks, speeding up/slowing down audio tracks without changing pitch... I can't do without it now!

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Enthusiasm is the electricity of life.

financially, it may be a big step if you don't have a computer that is fast enough and need to purchase one, but once you take the plunge, you will probably wish you had done it years ago... especially with keyboards and midi


All you really need is a decent audio interface

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it's funny, the older you get, the older you wanna be

Huh, my darlin' bride has threatened me with a Mac lately, but I just don't have the software savvy for recording on a computer. I tried a freeware version of Audition several years ago and my eyes glazed over before I even knew what the heck I was looking at. My audio production school days were at the tail end of when analog was still king. The stand-alone DAWs (love my 1600, but have a handle on about 1/100th of what it can do) are about as close as I dare get. The ProTools setups I've seen in "real" studios trigger the fight-or-flight instinct in me.

Maybe one of you PC/Mac recording wizards wanna come up and edjamacate me? I'll take ya fishing...

I need to get a new computer, as my current one is steam-driven. And seeing as I would like to try recording with a computer I don't want to go and get something unsuitable for that. I hear so many horror stories and one of the key words is latency. And there are other things like software/interfaces not working with latest Windows OS things.

Another thing that boggles my mind is how to clock external sequencers to the computer. I think I grasp the idea of an audio interface, but the two at once - I need to read up on all that.

Hi Gents,

I got Cubase working on both Mac and Windows. Even under a notorious beast called Vista. It's just a matter of knowing a bit of the shoptalk. If you know where to find the right drivers and how to install them you should be able to get it working. Latency begins with the audio interface you choose. Next it is highly dependend on good drivers and buffer sizes. One thing you need to know about is is the lower you can get it without glitches the better you can work with the system.

There is one road i won't take anymore and that is the firewire one. I have learned from experience that ofthen firewire which is supposed to be lightning fast does not work optimal on cheaper hardware. It has to do with DPC and chips that are not dedicated but have to share clocks Address and data busses. Such cheaper hardware will result in working ok for data transfer but not for realtime stuff and as such not for capturing audio. It's almost impossible to predict which systems will work ok with firewire and which not. Mac is more expensive hardware and you may rest assured that on these systems the hardware won't let you down. I would still go the USB way as it is far more universal.

If you want to get something working just let me know. I'll try to help where i can. If all fails we can still rely on the old AW's.

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In a minute it might be gone. Life is a bear in a bubble.

http://www.soundclick.com/bearinabubble

Latency should`nt be a problem for anyone these days as there is a free download which sorts that out for Windows and Mac`s. (or if you have one of the line 6 pods they have an Asio driver already built in).

http://www.asio4all.com/

Even using an old computer is`nt a problem, it depends on what you want to use it for, recording and mixing a full blown orchestra live or just you and a guitar or whatever which I hazard a guess that is probably most home studio owners.
In fact my laptop is an Asus with Windows 7 and a i5 processor, 8gb Ram, and a Terrabyte hardrive, but I don`t use it for the studio, I use a 12 year old pc with Windows XP, less than 2gb Ram, and a 120GB Hardrive, and the last song I did had 25 tracks without a glitch and could have done a lot more, my brain would have given up before the pc.

T.

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