I did, however, just do some upgrades to it that have helped a lot.In fact there are some strategic things you can do (or upgrade) to optimize your Mac or PC to be a beast of a DAW machine. The computer you already have is probably fine.As far as hard drives are concerned, this can come in the form of slow read/write speeds or an operating interface that is frequently freezing or even.In fact, as of this writing I’m still rocking a 6 year old Mac Mini in my studio. Password Protection with Hardware Encryption The My Passport for Mac drive’s password protection and built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption with WD Security software helps keep your content private and safe.The short answer is: no. My Passport drives are designed to look like and be the size of a passport, none of the drives in the passport Do you really need the most expensive Mac or PC to handle big track counts and lots of plugins in your home studio?Yuhtech Travel Protective Storage Bag for Western Digital 4TB My Passport Wireless Pro Portable External Hard Drive, 2 x 25cm/250mm Chihuahua Vinyl Sticker.My Passport for Mac includes USB-C and USB-A cables for universal compatibility with Mac computers of yesterday and today. My Passport is a series of portable external hard drives and solid state drives produced by Western Digital.There are currently six series of My Passport drives Essential Edition, Essential SE Edition, Elite Edition, Essential for Mac, Studio Edition and the Essential SE for Mac.And then just this month I doubled it again to 16GB. I immediately doubled it to 8GB. And great tutorials/support.For example – my Mac Mini came with 4GB of RAM 5 years ago. These days, most DAWs can take all the RAM you through at them, giving you more power and quicker response in a dense mix.Since third party memory is both so cheap and easy to install or swap out, this is the obvious place to start.Since I’m a Mac guy, I’ll point you to my favorite place to buy RAM for my Macs and that is OWC (Other World Computing). This was because the operating systems and DAWs weren’t 64 bit, and they could only allot a certain amount of RAM (memory) to any one program at a given time.Not so anymore.
![]() ![]() If you’re gonna use a p.c. Windows 10 (yeah well eventually nothing else is going to work thanks to Microsoft). And what is one thing you’ve found that helps optimize it for recording and mixing?I’m using a pc here. Preferably dual channel DDR4. Quite the opposite actually.Everything else? Yes, yes, yes…and more yes.RAM…absolutely. I strongly disagree with buying refurbished systems for recording these days unless the demand on the system will always be low which I doubt it always will.I mean, that’s great about 50 tracks and 250 reverbs and there is allot of knowledgeable wealth in that amazing feat of recording engineering but for me, I have heard the “you don’t need that” phrase so many times and it has never lead me to a frustration free (or even a frustration minimum) experience while writing and recording. Just wasn’t keeping up with DAW demand (Sonar Pro) so I did lay down a wad of cash for a BRAND NEW system. A little research will provide all the answers to that one. Don’t even consider it…and use W-10 Pro. For instance Avoid NVIDIA HD software like the plague! Nice, clean, digital graphics can be accomplished and even the use of 2 screens if your system is powerful enough but even the best system will suffer latency issues from trying to run eye candy AND record audio at the same time. (lordy)Isolate audio from system…on a solid state drive (SSD).GRAPHICS!!! Don’t try to go HD on ANY graphics. A spinner back-up drive for storage of 1 TB or more doesn’t hurt though.Lots of USB 2.0, 3.0,3.1, Firewire 800, Thunderbolt if you can afford the absolutely stupid cost of anything Thunderbolt. Not cheap.)SSD…No question. My Passport Platter Speed Drivers With 22 screens…no issues.2 Samsung EVO SSD’s 250 gigs each and one WD Blue 7200 RPM 1 TB for storage.EVGA 850 Watt, Platinum rated power supply. 3Ghz is becoming the minimum pretty quickly with DAW’s so…there it is.8 gigs(and climbing to between 40 and 64…depending) of dual channel DDR4.NVIDIA GT1030 graphics card that DOESN’T run NVIDIA HD drivers with 2 gigs native RAM and runs on simple MoBo (Aorus in this case) native video drivers. Core i5’s are fine but Microsoft is gonna stop supporting Kaby Lake processors (because they’re Nazis) so i5’s could be an eventual thing of the past sooner than one might think.Yes…I did say 4Ghz. It’s just fast)Intel core i7 6700K 6th generation quad core with hyperthreading = 8 cores processing at 4Ghz. 32 bit is a thing of the past now)MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Motherboard. Export contacts from outlook for mac 2016 to gmailSo, the parts I’ve replaced from that ordeal was the motherboard and power supply. These same concepts can be applied to basically any other workstation-oriented task, such as virtualization, simulation, etc.My rig, which is a multi-purpose “do all the things” machine, is as follows:Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB 5400RPMSeasonic G-750 (to be replace with EVGA 750 G2)Windows 7 Ultimate (upgrading to 10 Pro eventually)Thrustmaster Ferrari Alcantara 599XX EVO RimI’ve had to rebuild this a bit once before due to power surges (actually, we got hit by lightning). Which is not meant as a “one ups a-hole” kind of comment here rather, just illustrating that after spending a bit more, and after chasing allot of refurbished equipment…seemingly endlessly I just went as “all in” as I could (not) afford so I don’t have to keep switching between right brain (creative)…left brain (logical…too much logical) just to make what I hope will be pretty sounds when all is said and done.Expect to spend between $1000.00 and $1300.00.Great article, for one. Fans that you can’t even hear running.20 tracks loaded, 5 Stereo buses, Drum synths, Key synths, All the processing you can shake a duck at (if shaking ducks is your thing) the whole system is air cooled and runs between 28 and 40 Celsius and is using between 5% an 12% of the Core i7.I think I can push past that whole 50/250 thing and yeah, this should last beyond the 5 year mark. (Plus I can power my town during a black-out in another grid) Seriously one doesn’t have to go to this extreme but…don’t skimp on the PSU.Corsair super quiet case with lots of air flow and 120 mil. ![]()
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