Tips for Buying a Laptop Computer for Recording Purposes

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about buying a laptop computer for recording purposes. Now there's a couple of things you need to consider when buying a laptop computer for recording; and that is the amount of memory that's in the computer because you're recording software is going to need a lot of memory in order to record multiple channels at once and a playback multiple channels at once and also, the size of the hard drive that's in the computer that you're going to be buying. Because raw recording files take up a lot of space on the hard drive, so you're going to want, you know, probably a 150 gig or at least a 200 gig hard drive in there just to store all the files you're going to be working on. Now after you bought your computer, there's a couple of things I want to show you. Laptops are generally not very well align for recording because they're usually only provide eighth of an inch input and outputs for headphones and line in and microphone in. So you might want to consider purchasing something like an external sound card. Now this is a, just a simple one and it has, as you can see, a quarter inch input for whatever recording hardware that you're using and also it will allow you to plug in some headphones too; so you can have another output for listening to your audio while you're recording it. This one also has a little bit of channel mixer as well as headphones volume and it also provides phantom power for whatever device that you're plugging into which is not all, some devices require that phantom power so it's good to have it. I will suggest that you purchase a USB external sound card and the reason is those little eighth of an inch input on your laptop are very flimsy and, and can break easily. Now software wise, you know, there's a high dollar paid software out there for recording. But I'll suggest that you try this free one; it's called Audacity and it is a very good audio recorder program and it is absolutely free to download and use. And, it will do multi-channel track recording; it has built in effects; you can generate different effects and also, you know, things like white noise and metronome and things like that that are built into it. So it's a great program for recording. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just talked to you a little bit about buying a laptop for recording purposes."