Prefferred PC Set-up

[Boneman]

I am looking to change my PC set up in the near future and I am looking for ideas for the best configuration for Sibelius 5.1

I am mainly just a user and not a tweaker so it will have to be plug and play as far as I can.

I am looking for a good playback through 5.1/7.1 so the best soundcard might be one of the ways to go.

Anyway if you have anything that might help please post.

[stevel]

Originally Posted by Boneman

I am looking to change my PC set up in the near future and I am looking for ideas for the best configuration for Sibelius 5.1

I am mainly just a user and not a tweaker so it will have to be plug and play as far as I can.

I am looking for a good playback through 5.1/7.1 so the best soundcard might be one of the ways to go.

Anyway if you have anything that might help please post.

Why are you looking at a Soundcard Kevin? That is the bottom of anyone's list.

Hardware synths are best.
Virtual Synths are next best.
Soundfonts are OK
Soundcards are shit. There are some top of the line PCI cards that people use for multi-channel audio, but a consumer can buy a firewire device to do that and much more, for a fraction of the cost.

Are you using Sibelius? Doesn't Sibelius come with a kick-ass set of sounds? The examples on their website sound damn good. Why can't you just use those?

Steve

[Boneman]

They are quite good but memory hungry! I have 1 gig of ram and if I am working on a large score I get errors on the sound front

[stevel]

Originally Posted by Boneman

They are quite good but memory hungry! I have 1 gig of ram and if I am working on a large score I get errors on the sound front

Ok,
Question # 1: How good do you want your sounds to be?
Question # 2: How much $$$ are you willing to spend?
Question # 3: Are you upgrading your computer? If so, how much do you have to spend on everything? If not, what type of computer do you have now (give me all the specs - memory, processor, etc.

Steve

[Boneman]

1. The best! (but easy to use)
2. About £800
3. I think that to uprade an existing PC might prove troublesome.

[stevel]

Originally Posted by Boneman

1. The best! (but easy to use)
2. About £800
3. I think that to uprade an existing PC might prove troublesome.

Would you consider buying a new PC?

What about increasing the RAM in your existing PC?

Steve

[photowriters]

Originally Posted by Boneman

1. The best! (but easy to use)
2. About £800
3. I think that to uprade an existing PC might prove troublesome.

I agree with Steve that an audio card probably will not help much. As to what you should do, it depends. If you are just going to upgrade your computer, you should add as much memory as your mother board and operating system will allow. If your disk is more than 50% full, get another hard drive.

If you are going to buy a new computer, you want to get the fastest processor, the maximum amount of RAM, and the largest hard drive possible, and that means more than £800! If you are having system/program crashes, one of the things that you can do that only cost you time is to open the Windows Task Manager <ctrl-alt-del>, click on the Processes tab, click on the User Name bar and delete all of the processes that are running in the background before you start up any software packages.

Windows XP and later are far better than any previous versions, but it still has problems with trash collection and memory allocation and reallocation. Additionally, software developers too frequently do things that they should not that result in overwritting memory that is already in use with the obvious consequences. Closing down all of the background tasks that software programs run in the background may increase the time it takes for the affected programs to be up and running after you double click a program icon, but it often eliminates some of the most troublesome and irksome conflicts and subsequent system crashes or program failures.

Hope that helps.

Bob

[Boneman]

Thanks Steve and Bob!