Knowing the System Requirements for a Home Recording Studio

Franklin Taggart: Hi, I am Franklin Taggart. We are going to be talking today about computer recording in your home. Of course, if we are talking about computer recording, the first thing we need to talk about is the computer. There are a lot of different computers available that are totally appropriate for recording and audio use. Both Mac and PC platforms are available, they are all of just the high quality and very easy to use once a few basics have been learned. The computers that I am going to be working with in this video series are two. I have a Desktop System that has 1 GB of RAM, two Hard Drives; one is a 120 GB and the other one is 250 GB. The Processor is a Pentium 4 with 2.

4 GHz clock. The laptop that I am going to be using it has 2 GB of Ram and it also has two Hard Drives. One is for audio and one is for all of my system files. It will have a Dual-Core Processor from AMD 64 and it was specifically designed for recording. When you buy a computer for recording, you can buy, some of the stock computers have plenty of resources for you, but there are companies now, who are building computers just specifically for the purpose of recording and the laptop in this case is that. It is from one of those companies. There are a couple of things to remember when you are buying the computer for recording. One of them is that, you need to have as much RAM as possible. There are some computer systems now that have up to 8 GB of RAM and so, buy as much as you can afford. What I usually tell people is that, if you want to record at home, have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM. Also, it is helpful to have two Internal Hard Drives on your computer. One of them is for System Files and this does not need to be a huge Drive. Something between 80 -100 GB would be plenty of space for a System Drive and then have another Drive that is the large drive that will contain all of your Audio Files. The Audio Files that we record are huge, so you will need to have a disk that can contain as much information as possible. The other possibility that you could look at for a Drive space, is to get an External Hard Drive. External Hard Drives are available in both FireWire and USB formats and you can use those External Drives to store your Audio Files as well. The main thing to remember is that you want your Drive speed on all of your Drives to be 7200 rpm or greater. Those are some aspects for your computer and once you have your computer set up to those specifications or better, you are not going to have any problem at all setting up your system for home recording. So, in next step, we are going to be talking about interfaces for sound and audio. Thanks so much.