going insane over firewire, help !

[sanskrit]

Hi,


I've been surfing the next and tons of sites and user groups and
need some assistance.

Essentially what I am looking for is the ability to have a super-portable
8 track recording system for live recording. I basically want to set
up 8 mics (condenser's mostly), go into an interface. Record all 8
mic inputs into discrete tracks (for mixdown and mastering later). While this is happening I want to be able to mix down the 8 into a stereo or mono signal and set it out to a set of stage monitors as well as a PA system.

Here's the catch. It seems like products like the MOTU 896 or
Presonus Firestation with DigiMax can do this. But my concern is
that can a laptop handle so many tracks and all the mixing without
crashing on me or sputtering the hard drive during a 2 hour performance ?

Right now I own a DigiMax and I have a 1 Ghz pentium III laptop with
firewire built in. I figure I could go for something like a MOTU 828, but
I am certain that my laptops hard drive is too slow. So then I thought
I could get an external firewire drive as well; this way I can send my 8
track recording to the drive, which takes away a lot of stress from my
laptop drive. Question is, do these things work in the real world ? or
am I forced to buy a Mac ?? Thanks.

[TeeCee]

Sounds like a good thing to try but I guess there's that investment that you could lose :eek:. Firewire is the same speed on a PC and a Mac. I would be interested in knowing that Mac laptops are available with faster hard drives than PC laptops. I would expect that Macs also use 2.5" IDE drives which do tend to be slow. So can anyone explain why a Mac would be more suitable for this than a PC? This is sure to get the typical "Macs don't crash" response, but with forums like this around, you can find secretive posts about Mac issues that the PC world isn't supposed to know about.

Barring the Mac vs. PC issue, have you contacted MOTU to see if they can endorse your plan? Good luck with them. I've heard very few good things about their support, especially for PCs (I guess that's one reason to consider a Mac).

[DigitalSynthesis]

I do exactly what you want to do... with virtually the same gear. Here's my setup:

IBM Thinkpad T23
PIII @ 1.13 GHz
5400 RPM 48 GB HDD internal
IBM Firewire Card
MOTU 828
Presonus DigiMax LT connected via ADAT
Windows 2000 SP3

I use the ASIO drivers into Logic.

I can record all 16 tracks (8 analog MOTU, 8 ADAT) and the system is still fully stable, and pretty responsive. I can record 8 tracks no problem at all. I use LOGIC Platinum 5.3, and the latency is so low I have even used the system as the sole mixing desk for live shows, many times, using only software monitoring and mixing (through LOGIC). I highly recommend this setup, as I have used it even overseas w/no backup and had virtually no problems. I can play back ~24 tracks, plus loads of FX, off the internal hard disk alone without overloads. The concerts I've recorded/mixed have all been in excess of 2 hours each, using at least 8 tracks each.

If you have a 4200 RPM drive I'd still expect you could do 8 tracks, but prob. not 16. I use a buffer size of between 96 and 256 depending on the demand and how my system wants to behave on a given day. I've never had to go over 512, and even that is completely bearable (at least on my system). Using an external firewire hard disk will also increase your track count and performance, sometimes significantly. I've had negative experiences with Que drives with video though, so I'd suspect them for audio too, but it may be just the one drive I got which is exhibiting other wierdness too.

Hope this helps.

[Justin]

If you're going this route, I'd suggest a external hard drive to avoid stress and issues with your internal system drive. Something like the Glyph Companion would work nicely.