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Old 12-04-2017, 09:28 AM
FrankHudson FrankHudson is online now
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Location: Minneapolis, MN
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Necessary power/capabilities needed in an audio recording/editing computer really varies depending on what kind of recording you're doing.

If you are recording external acoustic events: just acoustic guitar and vocals for example, you need very little in the way of Processor/Memory/Disk speed. Even if you are recording a whole band in a home studio, with maybe 16 tracks being recorded "live" not much is needed. Overdubbing is no more challenging than live recording, and along as you are overdubbing to unprocessed tracks. Even in the most extreme overdubbing situations where you want to have tracks running and recording with lots of effects, there are usually features to make the backing tracks "frozen" or they can be converted to tracks with the effects already "burnt" into the audio.

Having your sessions, your recorded audio files, on a separate hard drive is important as those track counts get higher. However, a separate, regular old spinning hard drive can handle large track counts easily.

Editing audio itself at this level is similarly not all that challenging. When you do final mixes or mastering with software plugins for compression, reverb, EQ and the like will up the need for processor power. Unlike many here from what I gather, I like to do larger projects with 6 to 24 or so tracks. Still managing with an older Mac Mini for this, older than the Mac Book Pros being discussed. Compared to even serious hobby video editing, the requirements for audio are laughable smaller.

If (and this may not apply to most here) you want to use Virtual Instruments then RAM and CPU power becomes important. I do, and so far I'm making do, even with moderate number of VI tracks (three or four orchestra instruments in stereo, full virtual drum set, electric guitar amp sims, maybe a piano, organ or synth part or two as well. Those VIs typically load into RAM, and the size of the sample, particularly for the better orchestral instruments, are considerable. Even disk space becomes an issue here, as the collections of samples you might chose from total into the tens of gigabytes per VI nowadays. Eventually this desire for more VIs will cause me to need to freeze tracks and upgrade my computer.

I edit, mix and master on my PC almost all the time, but record on the Mac Mini--but that's for my own reasons I don't need to discuss at this time. I'm somewhat concerned that Apple is largely a smartphone company these days and that the future of them providing computers for artistic professionals and serious hobbyists or bootstrapping startups is far from assured. But the future isn't now. If you can afford it, get a 27" Imac (mixing and editing like screen real-estate big time!) and upgrade the RAM if you're going to use VIs. Get at least one external Thunderbolt hard drive if you're going to be recording more than 5 or 6 tracks. You likely won't need the Imac Pro.
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