Computers
The heart of my Apollo studio is my audio PC. It has two dual core AMD athlon 64 X2 processors, 4 Gbyte of RAM and 2 ultra fast 200 Gbyte hard disks. I build it myself in an ultra quiet Antec 19 inch enclosure. I installed a dual boot configuration with Windows Vista 32 bits and Windows 7 64 bits. I mainly work in Vista now though, since not all my software works yet in 64 bits mode. Windows 7 is installed on a Solid State disk and there are two normal fast disks in there for the data. Since I have been working in the IT business for a long time, I have seen a lot of backup/restore drama's. So I'm very careful now with my data. After I worked in the studio I make a backup over a Gigabit network to an Netgear NAS with 4 Tbyte of disk-space in a RAID configuration. in my server room. This NetGear does a sync every night to another NetGear that is in a data-center over my Internet uplink. Sound paranoia right? Well it has saved me a couple off times already ;)
The reason I run Windows is simple. My main sequencer software is Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 producer version. I really love this program. It is like a pen and paper for me. I can work with it almost with my eyes closed. Sonar is very good with both audio and midi data. It works very intuitive in my opinion. I did look at other software off course, but I like Sonar the most. On the right you see a Sonar screen shot of a track from my AtmoSphere album. I save every track as audio even when I work with soft synths. A usual projects is about 3-5 Gbyte in size. When I'm done with a project I make an export of all audio tracks and all buses and that will be another 3-5 Gbyte of data. So that is why I need a lot of storage. Eventually I copy these audio exports on a external USB Hard Disk and they go to my label Groove Unlimited for remixing and mastering.
In my PC there are a few PCI cards. I have some extra USB and firewire ports in there, because you are always short on them nowadays with so many synthesizers having an USB connection. My sound cards are two RME HDSP MADI cards. Thay can run 64 channels of audio each both incoming and outgoing simultaneously at a sample rate of 48 Khz. So that gives my 128 inputs and outputs! The sound card can go to higher sample rates, but then you lose channels. And since I have a lot of equipment I like to be able to record without patching I need a lot of channels available. Besides some equipment in my setup doesn't go higher than 48 Khz so I'm limited to that anyway. This audio card has proven to me to be very stable. You can read more about the MADI protocol and what it does in the background section of this website. In the mean time you can read a bit about on the RME website if you like: http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_hdsp_madi.phpIf you click on the list button on the left, you can read even a bit more about the stuff that is in and on my audio PC. I'll try to update this information soon.