Music editing and production PC.

[Muchoman1]

If he has a digital mixing desk (which is different from a virtual mixing desk) then it should have fire wire out already on it. If that is the car, keep the desk.

 

If he has an analogue desk, then he will need a special interface to add to his collection of towers, if that is the case you could still the desk to buy that.

 

But keep in mind it is move to mix on a desk rather than on a virtual desk, but the reaper software that can record and mix is 20 bucks and very good.

 

Depending on the size of the desk he has now you may want to span reaper across multiple monitors

[ericgcollyer]

well, i cant writeup a full thing atm, but just so you know, as i am involved in a fair bit of professional sound,

 

most, if not all audio is handled through firewire interface, that goes from the mobo to a audio fx unit and splitter, allowing lossless multi channel capture and multichannel playback.

 

maybe look into getting a high end sound card for headphones? depending on his setup he may have headphone audio straight from the computer or maybe through firewire to the mixing desk

 

as for the rest of the system, get a nice i5 2500 and the like, no need for a i7 if only audio editing, it really isnt too intensive even with lossless multichannel

 

as for software, i use vegas, adobe audition (even though its stopped being updated, i still like it) and for audio capture via the firewire i mentioned, i use reaper. which is like a virtual sounddesk that also allows for multichannel recording

They recently updated Audition 3.0 when they released CS 5.5. Its now Audition 4.0 (or CS5.5...not sure which). It seems like they will continue to support it as they are releasing it with CS 6 collections.

[ericgcollyer]

I would be interested in hearing what he needs to connect to his computer. If everything is truly analog, you may be in luck. Generally you chain analog devices together and then plug the end of a chain into an Audio Interface. That audio interface is the only thing you may need to plug into the computer. For example, you would plug your microphone into a preamp, that into a compressor, and that into a mixer. The mixer would then be plugged into an audio interface which would interface with your computer via Fire wire or USB. Here is a pretty good diagram from Presonus: http://presonus.com/media/diagrams/In_the_Studio_with_the_StudioLive.pdf that visually shows that.

I've worked in several recording studios, and I currently work at a Classical Music radio station. We have a pretty state of the art music recording studio, so I hope I can help you out a bit.

[F13Bubba]

Without knowing the specifics of his rack of gear, it's hard to know exactly what he will need. The computer part should be fairly easy to get down, an i5-2500k and 16gb of ram will do fine, then you need a crap ton of HDD space. All of the gear in that tower should be running to a patchbay, and then into the mixing board. This is where things get tricky, if he wants to record multiple tracks, he needs an interface, or multiple interfaces that he can run sound out of the board, and then into the computer. Getting an interface/s with enough inputs and outputs is the hard/ effing expensive part. If he has a digital mixer, you're golden. If not, then you have to figure out how to do the 1:1 patching that I mentioned earlier. Here is a website with some good digital mixers. On the same site, there is this interface that has 20 i/o (ins and outs) that he would run 1/4" cables into from his mixer. Look around that site, and check out the equipment. You can also call them, they are more than willing to help you get what you need, you just need to know what everything he has does first.

[ericgcollyer]

Any additional information on this? I'm interested to hear whats going on with this.

[ericgcollyer]

One last bump