i need computer advice

[mikegee]

i need computer advice; i bought a new computer, and i will be using it to record my music. the thing is, the computer i have been using for recording my music still works quite well (although it is slower than the new one i bought), and it has all my song files and programs on it, they are both running windows xp.

so here's my dilemma; do i:

1. run both computers and network them together? that would be pretty easy to do.

2. junk the old puter, and take the old harddrive out of it, and install it to my new puter as a readable hardrive.

i'm leaning towards option #1, but any advice (including other possible options) would be great! thank you

[McLean]

I personally would remove the old drive from the old computer and put it into the new one. Networking (someone correct me if I am wrong) in not a fast enough connection to make it worth doing. It can take a while to transfer files back and fouth. However, my freind and I were recently discussing using two machines at once. He says to use one for recording and one to do the plug ins. I am not sure how to do that, but I will ask. He is also talking about two new computers. I will ask him soom on how that is done, but that is an option as well. That would be the only reason I could think of to have two networked together.

[dolivas]

Networking between two computers should be pretty fast. There are certain ways to use firewire connections to transmit information rather than a ethernet cord which I've heard should be the same as using an outboard dsp card. It's all a matter of getting some kind of network audio protocol program that makes one computer send digital audio information to another. I believe on a Mac there is Soundflower, AudioHijack a couple that do that I dunno about Windows XP though.

[warmowski]

Originally Posted by mikegee

i'm leaning towards option #1, but any advice (including other possible options) would be great! thank you

The idea of connecting the two XP machines together to do concurrent audio processing (also called clustering) is not something I have tried, nor is there any Microsoft native support for this (that I know of) so I would not suggest #1 in that way.

#2 might be best if you have a lot of audio scattered all over the drive. To get it all and know you got it all, you pull the drive and drop it into the new one. You will need to set the drive jumper switches appropriately and you should also not put that drive on the same bus as the main drive of the new machine. And its kind of messy in that you are bringing over a lot more than the audio you cared about and not in a good way.

Depending on the applications you have installed on the old drive you may not get them transferred in a running state on the new machine if you simply drop the old drive in to the new box.

This is because the new CPU's drive is the boot source of the OS that you are running on it. You will be booting from the new drive/OS image. So EXEs that you launch that happen to be stored on the old drive can get thrown off if you launch them "into" a different OS environment/install than the one they are expecting. Some apps wont have a problem, some will freak out and refuse to run.

So, as always, it is best to reinstall your tools on the new machine afresh.

Option #1 can happen too, though, and there would be some benefits.

If you simply reinstall all the tools you have onto the new machine from install disks, all you need then is to transfer the audio files and a local network is fine for this. Turn on Sharing for the folder(s) on your old machine where the audio files are and copy them over to the new machine by browsing to the old machine in your Network Neighborhood. If you're lucky, this will be quick and painless. Transfer itself is trivial and pretty fast, the trick is to have the machines find each other and allow sharing.

There are also ways to use the old machine with the new. One thing to try is to "instrumentalize" the old box - host soft snths and samplers on it and play it, using a controller keyboard for example, as an instrument into your mixer and then into yr DAW. Under such a scheme you can even have the DAW control that second box via MIDI.

By offloading the softsynths onto a machine that isnt tasked with also running the DAW, you will increase the maximum plugin and track count on the DAW while you mix.

One thing to discard right away is the idea of hosting your audio on one machine and hosting a DAW on the other, connecting the two using ethernet specifically for that purpose. Maybe firewire would work, but not ethernet or wifi. Too slow for record / read.

-r

[mikegee]

these are great ideas, thanks.

yea, i decided, out of simplicity sake, to just take the old hard drive, and install it as a slave drive on my new puter. so far so good.

i'm sure the networking could have probably worked, but i have seen studios with 2, 3 or even more computers, and it just gets too complicated, and slows down the creative process. more isnt always better.

i'm still thinking about setting up the old computer, with a new harddrive, as a backup system, that could be good...

[JCI]

Hey,

Don't forget that you can always use the second computer to run virtual instruments. If you're into virtual modeling, you could use that computer to run reason, guitar rig, reaktor, etc. Just output the audio into your new computer & use the raw power of your new computer for mixing & recording glitch free & with way less latency than you would running your new computer for doing everything. Just a thought.

-JCI-

[dagosto]

If you do end up using the olp comp as an instrument host I would recommend bringing the output of the instruments to your DAW with a digital connection like spdif, AES/EBU, or ADAT. Unless you have really good A/D D/A conversion this could add some noise and signal degredation. Also if you do tis you will want to make sure that both are clocking off of the same source and that your interfaces word clock I/O.

[dagosto]

I just stumbled upon these articles covering exactly how to do this on create film scores. These are pretty good. In the third article he actually covers how to do this via ethernet. Definitely worth a quick read.

http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=9
http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=17
http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=29