Recording studio box setup. (Updated)

This is a single core P4 2.39Ghz on an Intel board with a pretty standard SoundMax AC97 integrated audio, driving a secondary sound monitor.



It's centered around a EWS 88MT system (Digital 8 track recorder with external breakbox), PCI, used as main recording hardware. There's also two FireWire connectors on a PCI card I just added in case I would ever need it.


I have a ESP Ltd F200 guitar hooked to a Fender Mustang 1 guitar amp by USB in addition to regular cabling, of course. The only problem here is that the audio jack will be disabled when you connect the USB and fire up the Mustang software. So if you need the advanced amp settings, you need to store them locally on the amp it self. (Not true, I had some setup errors.) The only feature I miss from the Mustang is to be able to monitor the guitar trough the amp itself while also pushing the signal trough the jack out. (Which doubles as line out)

Also, a Creative Soundblaster Live! PCI card for driving a Sony Digital Amplifier (not pictured yet) for main monitoring.

EWS88MT front connectors

Overview

The Fender amp doesn't have a line out, but it has a phone jack which can be used.

Special cable resembling a parallell cable connects the breakbox to a PCI card. (bottom card)
It also has digital out/in jacks and a mini jack monitor output.

Drivers for the 88MT can be found at TerraTec's FTP server
There is drivers for Linux, 98->XP.
Supposedly the download for Phase88 (mixer app for the card) contains drivers that should work with Windows 7. (citation needed!)

This setup gave a very clear guitar recording. A very very slight hiss could be heard at times when I did not touch the guitar. Much better than onboard capturing that usually records PCI bus noise as well. I can't tell if the almost non-existing noise was from the amp or the computer I played it back at.

Installing a good digital amp reduced playback noise considerably as well. Initially I had a Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 card installed, but I decided to downgrade to the fanless 440MX card instead to further reduce system noise. I could also turn off both the NIC and onboard audio as well as other controllers if I wanted, but it seems pretty quiet now.

Only having one video monitor, I use Nvidia's virtual desktop to have separate desktops for recording, mixer panels, and so on. Also, I spent a good hour on setting the computer up for being mostly mouse driven. Added window autofocus, and had all studio applications pinned to the start menu, etc. This is pretty handy when you're still holding the guitar while needing to do something on the computer.

Applications used:


GNU Solfege, for ear training
Reaper for recording, has low latency, comprehensible UI and a good routing/monitoring interface
Audacity and CoolEdit for secondary editing. CoolEdit used to be my favourite (now Adobe Audition) but it did not play nice with my hardware this time)
VLC and FooBar2000 for media playback, will probably reinstall WinAmp again purely for the fact that it is the only application I know that rewinds on pressing the arrow keys. (Vital for my guitar practice)

This is now pretty much a self contained studio and could be moved around to do various recordings. It can to at least 8 tracks at once, though both the SoundBlaster and the integrated audio has more recording slots. The breakbox has one additional 9 pin mic as wel,l and it's card has two SPDIF's as well. All this at 16, 24 or 32 bits samples up to 96Khz. Seems most of the audio hardware and drivers are proper, since the CPU seems rather unaffected by activity in the audio applications.

Specs for my once planned 2007 gaming rig

So I found some notes in a worksheet about the first "Dual CPU" computer I was going to build. I thought I was going to laugh at the performance, but actually, it's a machine I'd actually rather still have! I wonder how many fully functional Tyan boards got dumped by companies :(

One option was the Tyan Thunder S2895A2NRF (image from NewEgg)

 K8WE Dual Core Opteron DDR400 SATAII Audio GbE LAN IEEE1394a USB2.0

Specs: Dual CPU, Single/Dual Core Opteron (Socket 940) 800Mhz HT, North Bridge: NVidia 2200 and 2050 as well as an AMD8131 memory controller. 8x184 pins DDR 400 PC3200 (Total 16 Gb ECC/REG RAM). 1xPCI, 2xPCI-X 100Mhz,1xPCI-X 133Mhz and 2xPCI Express x16 for NVidia SLI. 1xATA, 4xSATA 3Gbps, RAID0+1+10.Dual Gbps ethernet ports. 4xUSB2.0

That's a "Dual CPU Dual Core|" with 16 GB and SLI support. My current board has 16GB, a single hex-core CPU and two more SATA ports. Oh, and it has DDR3 and 2xUSB3.

That is an impressive rig even by todays standards. That motherboard was from 2007. The rig would be about 2300 USD. (2007 rating). That's excluding PSU, case, mouse and keyboard! The current rig I have was about 1300 USD (2012 rating).

I was going to populate it with two Opteron 225 (Single Core, the Dual Core was too expensive), two 7900GT's and 8x1GB of DDR400 RAM. Which would probably just give me 4GB since it was probably arranged so each core was linked to a bank.

The other was a Tyan Thunder S2882UG3NR (image also from NewEgg)

It had similar specs, but the first one was slightly superior for gaming. This was more of a server board.

Windows 7 Command Prompt Here

So I was trying to install the trusty old CmdHereToy.exe from Windows XP, but Windows 7 would have none of that. So after a quick Google, like you just did, it's actually already built into Win 7.

The trick: Just hold the Shift-button while Right-Clicking and you get a few more options:

The usual menu

The OMG you just need to hold Shift menu