Building New PC For Recording

I have done a lot of recording in my time but after a 3 year break I have decided to throw myself back into it. I am building myself a new PC for the job. The last of the components should arrive this week. Here's what I got;

Intel i5 2500k

Asus P8p67 MB

750w PSU

Corsair 64GB solid state drive

WD 1TB secondary drive

Coolermaster hyper 212 plus heatsink

8GB DDR3 ram

I always used to use Logic Plat on PC even long after it moved over to Mac because I just loved it and it did the job fine but I've been away for a few years and a lot has changed. So now that I'm gonna be running a decent system with 64bit windows, what software setup would you recommend? I'm guessing that I'll probably end up switching to Cubase but given the rate of development with software, I'm curious to hear about some of the new and impressive synths and plugins that have shown up since I've been away. More than anything I would love to hear about any really good packages that could replace Cubase. I've never been crazy about it and I'm slightly dreading having to make that switch. Also I still have a great sample library but always on the look out for more. Any websites/torrents etc for grabbing good samples would be appreciated. Thanks.

If you want to experiment with a new DAW give ol' Reaper a go - http://reaper.fm/

It's completely free (well, if you like it and plan to use it then the registered one is $40), has a 64bit build, is super efficient with resources and is just generally brills....

Wow! that really surprises me that there is such a cheap option out there. Price doesn't really concern me too much at the moment so would you say even pitted against the more expensive packages like Cubase that Reaper holds up well?

The fact is there is a big gap between the average price of commercial DAWs and the actual quality of Reaper. I mean that it's really cheap BUT IMO it works a lot better than any other commercial DAW I've tried such as Cubase or even Pro Tools ( ). I admit this is a bit provocative but seriously, compared to the last, almost all I've tried to do with it was 3x more intuitive.

Sonar

I gotta try this Reaper. Might be the perfect solution.

reaper is like linux software -- ugly and quirky, but it'll do what you want if you're willing to put up with it.

i keep it as a wav editor, but i'd never want to do multitrack on it.

i vote to keep cubase !

How about some good synths and plugins? I remember with my old PC I had such a clutter of vsts that it was difficult to keep things organized. This time round I would like to establish some high quality core basics. Compressor, reverb, delay and eq.

  On 4/6/2011 at 8:24 PM, hahathhat said:

reaper is like linux software -- ugly and quirky

Come on, what's ugly about that ?

You can even see on the picture that you can run it with about 6 other applications docked in the task bar

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I use Reaper since about a year for all my tracks, with Renoise as a Rewire slave to do all the beats and use Reaper for the synths and VSTi which needs precise and easy automation, and it perfectly works.

I was still sceptical about using it for the recording and editing of a band (let's say a standard rock band) and just used it for that purpose a week ago, and once more this soft surprised me : the recording and the editing are just easy and intuitive. This actual project contains about 60 tracks (some are audio, some are Renoise rewired, some are midi with VSTi) and it just runs fine on my poor laptop.

Also using it with my Behringer BCF control surface works way better than it did when I made my tracks on Nuendo.

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BTW what kind of work do you want to do on your new computer ?

The type of work I do is all soft synth based. I rarely ever use audio tracks and I never plug instruments in. Purely midi sequencing. A lot of automation on a lot of channels with plenty of synths loaded up and several busses. I use Reaktor all the time and often kontakt or impakt for offset drum loops.

antape -- it was a few versions ago, that looks better. :)

but i remember getting annoyed at the piano roll, just like i did with ableton -- not enough "tools." i want a pointer, scissors, etc.

cubase not only has those but lots of bizarre crazy shit for midi. it has curve tools, just drops arcs of notes all over the piano roll. line tools... a retarded (but useful) mini-scripting thing for batch-processing bits of midi...

too bad logic went mac.

Just want to chime in that Reaper is magic and I like it more than any other DAW by far.

So far I've been drawn towards trying out Kore 2, Sylenth, Nexus and Zebra. Has anyone had any experience with those?

I just finished putting together my machine. Took a fuck of a long time. Powered up and everything seems fine except most of the case fans are not working. I'm using a Sentey Burton Extreme Division case. all of the fans seem to be linked together into a single 2 pin molex which i attached to a similar molex from the psu labelled FAN. I cant see anything else to connect these things. Im fucking lost on how to fix this. Does anyone have any suggestions? I could really use the help right now. This is a huge disappointment.

nevermind. I fixed it. was being a mong

  On 4/7/2011 at 7:57 AM, Fraxinus said:

nevermind. I fixed it. was being a mong

plz 2 define "mong" !

Woah, I haven't heard that term in about 10 years. Takes me back to secondary school days ....

I don't know a lot of VSTs and VSTis because atm I tend to use the same ones when I'm pleased with it. Also I like to find free or cheap ones that works good.

VSTi

- Crystal is very nice and versatile. It's a free modular synth with 3 oscillators and a lot of customizable envelopes and LFOs (for some reason I didn't really succeed to use the LFO very well). Crystal is ugly but it's very good anyway.

- I discovered aSynth very recently thanks to the topic "Mosca free plugins list" right there, and I've to say I'm very impressed with its sound. It seems to use more resources as a regular VSTi and use it to do a better emulation of the analogue sound (anyway I read that on their site). I don't know how this processing actually works but indeed and as far as I've used it (i.e not much at the moment), it sounds warm and powerful.

- Voyager is an unfinished synth by Arturia which lacks velocity (the only things that I regret in this unfinished version) but is very nice. Versatile too, you can program tons of sounds with it. It uses subtractive synthesis.

VST

- The Reaper suite contains all the basic tools that one need for mixing purpose. I always use the EQ and the compressor in my mixes. They just sound neutral, they won't add extra colour to your mixes but are precise and well done (the compressor has a few parameters that you won't necessarily find on standard other ones, and once you get how to use them they are very useful).

- Devastor is a commercial (but quite cheap) distortion plugin that kick ass !

- SIR I is a free convolution reverb that works just fine. (the free version has some delay that won't allow you to use it live though ; check SIR II for the commercial / without delay one)

  On 4/7/2011 at 11:34 AM, mcbpete said:

Woah, I haven't heard that term in about 10 years. Takes me back to secondary school days ....

i immediately pegged it as a word i need in my vocabulary.

It was like the late 90s/early 2000s schoolboy equivalent of spastic / retarded. Usually said whilst your bottom lip is pushed out by your tongue in order to emphasise the mentally handicapped nature of what was said.

All done now. Total success.

Doest it also burns the toasts or something ?

I am currently spec'ing out a laptop for Ableton performance. I figured I'd rather post in here than in a new thread. Assuming I'll be playing back waves only (no vsts) and sparing vst EFX, what sorts of specs (CPU, RAM, HD speed/type) do you think are the bare minimum to pull this off?

486 DX 33 w/8meg RAM & 500mb disk

  On 4/7/2011 at 9:44 PM, mcbpete said:

It was like the late 90s/early 2000s schoolboy equivalent of spastic / retarded. Usually said whilst your bottom lip is pushed out by your tongue in order to emphasise the mentally handicapped nature of what was said.

i'm not sure i understand the lip thing; i'd need a pic or vid. thanks for the rest, though !