PC build

The PC is assembled, and is currently being configured and optimised by the chairman of the studio advisory committee.

                       

It made sense to go for a 64 bit operating system (32 bit windows OS can only utilise 3.5GB of RAM, whereas the 64 bit OS can access hundreds of GB), as many music software companies have released 64 bit versions of their software now.

The hardware is generally good mid-range; a quad core Intel® Core™ i5-2500 CPU, 8GB of RAM, three drives totalling 5.5TB (1xOS/software, 1xaudio, 1xbackup), a good graphics card (AMD Radeon™ HD 6790), a relatively quiet Antec P183 case, all powered by an 850w Corsair CMPSU-850HXUK PSU.

We decided to try Studio One as the main sequencer, as it is 64 bit, and appears to be fairly quick and intuitive.  I just really liked the look of it compared to the other main sequencers.  Studio One is quite new, and apparently was started by the former lead developer of Cubase.

The only potential problem I noticed is that for audio importing, if it doesn’t know the BPM of the source file, it isn’t yet able to automatically beat-match it.  As I (used to) work with a lot of samples, this might be a problem.  You can manually stretch samples to fit, so it isn’t as if it can’t be done.  It would just be tiresome to do the task that other sequencers do automatically.