Hard Drive Space for Music Recording

Video Transcript

"These days, most recordings are done digitally and you're going to want to have your recording saved, stored on a hard drive. Now, there are different ways to go about doing this. One thing you can do is to buy a drive that you have dedicated for your recording. Another thing you can do is try to get everything burned to DVD's. I think the safest bet is to do both. I think that you should have a hard drive where you have all the files stored from the recording session and you should also burn DVD's to have as back up. Because hard drives fail all the time and with all the money that goes into a recording session, not to mention the time and energy and emotion, you don't want it to be all destroyed because of some stupid electronic failure. So make sure that you have a reliable hard drive and also, to have DVD's or a way of burning DVD's as well. Now when getting a hard drive, there are several things to consider. The first thing is how the hard drive connects to the computer. If you know that while you only have USB inputs on your computer, that the studio you're going to be working in requires fire wire and this is information that you get ahead of time by talking to the Engineer, you want to make sure that you have a hard drive that has both fire wire and USB. You also want to figure out what the particular requirements are of the Engineer's studio for computer technology. If the studio computer is a PC and your home computer is a Mac, then you want to make sure that your drive is set up in a way to handle both. You want to have a good amount of space on the hard drive. You don't need too much. I would say you want at least 50 gigabytes of memory just to be safe. I tend to like even larger hard drives. But definitely nothing too small. And the best scenario really is to get two drives that you use to back each other up as you record because you're going to find that you're going to be doing sessions in transit. That you'll be traveling to a friend's house to record guitar here, vocals there and you want to make sure that drive doesn't get damaged or experience too much wear and tear. And the best thing you can do is be backing the drives up all the time. So to have two drives going that have all the information."