How Bigs-a-Gig

Hello all, I'm having a guy spec a computer for me based on the Allenstien thread. I'm going to get a 002. This will be my first DAW and I am not a computer expert. I am trying to decide what backup method to use. It has been said here that if your sessions are less than 1 Gig then CDRW will work. If larger go to DVDrw or external hard drive. I have a question. How big is 1 gig ? I don't even know what frame of reference to ask for other than tracks and time. I will usually have 16 tracks or less with Effects...verb,compression (maybe), EQ. Does mix automation get saved too ? Sorry... I won't always be dumb, but I am now. I know there are lots of variables. Ball park me with any frame of reference you think will work. Thanks, Gary

Thanks...makes sense and no doubt will be very useful to me when I'm up and running. But you may underestimate my newbieness If I have deleted unwanted info, I'm lookin for an idea of what to expect to be able to get on a Cd in backing up. One song ? 5 songs ? In general terms when people refer to "session" here, what kind of measurement is that ? Or is this just impossible to estimate ? Thanks much, Gary

its impossible to estimate. if you use a lot of midi and just record a couple of guitar tracks and stuff, you could probably fit 4 or 5 sessions onto a 700 mb CD. if you're recording a band and you have lots of drum tracks and overdubs and backup vocals (ie: lots of audio tracks), you may end up splitting a single session to fit on 2 CDs or more...

Thanks, actually you did estimate That's what I needed to know. I am recording acoustic...string band instrumentation usually. After culling to usable tracks, it would be a quite large tune to have 16 tracks. Plug ins would probably be one verb per track, perhaps some compression, and some EQ. Based on what you are saying, it should be no problem to expect 1 session to one CD. I'm mainly concerned about backing up keeper*performances*anyway. Everything else is just a matter of time to replace if something crashes. Performances sometimes can never be replaced. So..I'll have the guy spec a CDRW. Later perhaps a external HD if I need it. Thanks, you've been a big help. Gary

A 16 bit, 44kHz, Stereo wave file is roughly 10.5 megabytes per minute of recording. 8 bits = 1 byte, 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte, 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. Hope this helps.

For back up consider an external HD, firewire or usb 2.0. I have a external 120GB for back up and session transfer. What's really nice is my partner and I can edit sessions on it without transferring them to our system data drives. For session size, I'm currently working on a 9 song, 31 track + 10 aux, aprox 50+ minutes that is around 11 GB when consolidated and up to 22GB when it was in the overdub/punch-in phase. Get as much HD space as you can afford as it gets used quickly. Cheers, Toby

See for hard drive requirements... Generally, as has been mentioned, you'll need about 7.5 megs/minute per mono track (at 44.1kHz 24 bit).. so do the math. See that page for other session sample rate and bit settings. Rail

Thanks to all. I saved your links to refer back to. I'm going with CD for now but insuring connectivity for additional external firewire HD for possible use later. I'll probably have more questions later. Thanks again. gary

CD is a mistake, IMHO. You can by a 120GB Firewire HD for around $200 these days, fully portable, plug-and-play into your friends' PCs (unless thay have somehow old machines - a FireWire PCI card is $20 anyways). This is the same cost, or close, to a CD burner, and contains about 150x more storage.