Topic: Best Computer Specs for .Wav editting

[ghellquist]

To be very clear, I only advocate a bit of caution here.

This can be important with large audio files being processed at 32 bit float. Take a 700 Mb recording and start doing some processing on it  in 32 bit float and it can grow alarmingly.

Sure. But audio editors do not work by reading the file into memory and then processing it. They might in the future. But today they read a small chunk from disc and then writes it back to disc before starting with the next chunk. Editing wave files on my PC consumes less that 512mB of RAM memory, regardless of the size of the wave file. This is the reason why the current crop of pure audio editors gain very little if anything on a 64 bit OS. Next version, might change things, but it will not be free to upgrade to next version.

However I think this is all moot. Buy a new PC today and you are guaranteed to get Windows 7, 64 bit and it will all work. So why not go the 64 bit route?

Because my sound card does not work with Windows 7 in 64 bit as the manufacturer has not yet made drivers available. Because my sound editor has not been shown to work with Windows 7 ( it might, who knows ) as I do not want to spend money on upgrading the software right now. Just beeing conservative I guess.

// Gunnar

[digifish_music]

To be very clear, I only advocate a bit of caution here.

This can be important with large audio files being processed at 32 bit float. Take a 700 Mb recording and start doing some processing on it  in 32 bit float and it can grow alarmingly.

Sure. But audio editors do not work by reading the file into memory and then processing it. They might in the future. But today they read a small chunk from disc and then writes it back to disc before starting with the next chunk. Editing wave files on my PC consumes less that 512mB of RAM memory, regardless of the size of the wave file. This is the reason why the current crop of pure audio editors gain very little if anything on a 64 bit OS. Next version, might change things, but it will not be free to upgrade to next version.

However I think this is all moot. Buy a new PC today and you are guaranteed to get Windows 7, 64 bit and it will all work. So why not go the 64 bit route?

Because my sound card does not work with Windows 7 in 64 bit as the manufacturer has not yet made drivers available. Because my sound editor has not been shown to work with Windows 7 ( it might, who knows ) as I do not want to spend money on upgrading the software right now. Just beeing conservative I guess.

// Gunnar

These are all reasonable, but the OP was discussing the purchase of a new machine I thought?

BTW: Even when editing wav files that are being chunked from disk, it doesn't circumvent the 2/3 GB program limit. So if you run out of memory address space (which I have in various programs from time to time manipulating large files), you will get errors.

digifish

[bhtoque]

Couple quick bits to add.

1. Dump CEP. It IS slow. I switched to Sound Forge and noticed a big difference on the same hardware.

2. Don't get a system with less than 7200 rpm sata drives. As was already mentioned audio work is much more hdd than ram intensive

3. You'll get better results using multiple drives. Keep the apps and audio on seperate drives and make sure to allocate plenty of space for your audio aps buffer

JAson

[mmedley.]

I think it is funny that people think that 64bit OS's are these awesome huge speed increasing demons.

The only benefit of a 64bit operating system is memory access and more memory registers. That's it. You are not going to get this huge speed increase...actually, you might even see decreased performance. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. When software is written exclusively for 64bit architecture you *might* see a slight performance increase. Ask any major software developer and they will agree. 32bit compilers are still not even close to being maximized for performance, let alone 64bit compilers. It will be several years before 64bit compilers will be optimized to take advantage of pure 64bit processing and even then only marginal performance boosts are expected.

Point is, 64bit will not be any faster than 32bit for, at minimum, the next few years....and certainly will not be any faster than what you are using now. Add to that support for 64bit drivers and hardware compatibility to take advantage of these benefits and you have one big mess.

[Brian Skalinder]

1. Dump CEP. It IS slow. I switched to Sound Forge and noticed a big difference on the same hardware.

Off-topic, I know, but wanted to chime in on the above comment...

FWIW, I found CEP/Audition slow, too, and experienced significant speed improvements (with the same or better quality results) when I switched to Samplitude SE.  I've always found CEP/Audition's UI the most intuitive for me, but I didn't particularly care for the less-than-ideal workflow (again, for me) and slow speed.  Love the Sam SE workflow, even if my learning curve was a bit slower than CEP/Audition.