Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs)

My Two DAWs

Like any father with more than one child, you really can't declare to love one more than the other. That's were I stand on my DAWs -- my Macintosh DAW has many good features, but so does my PC DAW. As much as possible I have tried to make them equal, and generally speaking, I select software which is compatible with both platforms and which grants me a license to install on both. Of course, I don't use them together at the same time -- they're actually physically located in two separate locations in my home -- but my understanding is that I have a different feeling when using my Mac than when using my PC.

My Mac DAW

My first experience recording music on a Mac was back in college using Opcode EZ Vision and Deluxe Music Construction Set. EZ Vision was pretty cool, and since all the hot stars at the time were using Vision, I upgraded after graduation and used Vision through the mid-1990's. I actually have a surprisingly small back-catalog of songs recorded in MIDI; this is probably because of my switch to guitar in 1993 and focusing on writing simpler, more pop-inspired music. I'm a far better keyboardist than guitarist though, and my weak guitar chops limited the chords and keys that I could play. A bunch of the bands I've been in have been more rock-focused, but my own material doesn't necessarily fit that description.

I started work on my first professionally-recorded solo album/cd in 2004, and it's mostly been sitting around NOT being worked on. But I've done a bit of processing and editing and dubbing using at first a PowerMac dual G4 and then a PowerMac dual G5 which got zapped and lost its firewire. Even though I've got a more powerful PC, sometime it's a bear moving things back and forth so right now the files are all Mac-based.

I've recently started migrating my work to a Mac Pro. It's an old box from 2006, and the 2 Xeon processors are only 2.6ghz each, slower than my dual 3ghz Windows 7 box. However, I prefer the Mac environment because much of my work is in Logic.

My PC DAW

I've been using a pc infrequently for writing and recording music since 1998 or so. I picked up the Steinberg Dance Production package because it included Mac & PC versions of Recycle (which I never use) and Rebirth (which I toyed with for awhile, but never made full use of). Surprisingly, while PCs are cheaper than Macs, and have more software available for music, I find that more of the work I do is on the Mac whether it's using ProTools to record or Cubase for MIDI recording. It's not that I'm not as comfortable on a PC, it has more to do with the fact that for most of the time I've had MIDI interfaces wired into my Mac, not my PC. That changes in 2010 because I'm moving from the Emagic-designed AMT-8 and Unitor-8 (which used to support Mac & PC) to models from MOTU (which STILL support Mac & PC).

My current PC DAW is an HP XW8000 with 2 * 3ghz Xeon cpus, 4gb RAM, and a single 1TB SATA drive. I installed Windows 7 in October 2009 because I was tired of XP crashing and corrupting. Inside this box is an Emu 1212m PCI card and some kind of ATI video card, and the Emu card is connected to the 1820-style dock. A bunch of Windows 7 stuff doesn't work, and I discovered that I needed to replace both my MIDI interfaces ones that were Windows 7-compatible, and I'd have to say that I'm fairly disappointed with the MOTU Express 128 and satisfied with the M-Audio 8x8s, although it's pretty ugly.

My 2 DROBOs

One of the biggest changes we've seen over the past 20 years using DAW software is the exponential growth in the storage requirements of virtual instruments, specifically those which use sampled content. Back in the 1990's, folks were impressed with a 16-bit mono sampled piano; nowadays there are some sample pianos which use up to 12 layers of 24-bit, 96mhz stereo recordings. Collections like Native Instruments Komplete take upwards of 90gb of storage space. So where should we store all this sample content?

One solution is to invest in a big hard drive, say 1TB-2TB. But a far better solution is to invest in REDUNDANT storage, such as what we would find in a corporate computing evironment. RAID = a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, and it functions by copying data across multiple drives simultaneously. While this is more expensive than running one or two individual hard disks, it's the safest way to store your files. I chose to use a DROBO unit on both my Mac and my PC because it's the best technology available.

Drobos are quiet, hold a lot of storage, and are the simplest RAID I've used in 20 years of being a professional network administrator. They make models in lots of shapes and sizes but I opted for the relatively inexpensive 4-drive model and 4 1TB drives (which yields about 2.6TB space after redundancy is in place). The Drobo software formats and handles replacing failed drives and upgrading to newer bigger drives without much user input required. My PC's Drobo has smaller drives than my Mac Drobo, which I upgraded in 2011; when drive prices drop, I'll likely upgrade all 4 drives in the PC Drobo.