With the direction that home recording is going today, it is very necessary to know something about computer maintenance.  There are a lot of great advantages to working with computer recording software, including the amazing editing capabilities and the options to undo any mistakes you have made.  Even considering that most people have computers nowadays, it still amazes me the amount of options you get when buying software for even under $300.  Most of the sessions I do these days involve recording to Protools, and I realized recently that I do a lot of computer maintenance both before and after the session to keep the session and the computer running smoothly.  So, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of these steps with you all in this article.   

            First of all, to even record audio with your computer in the first place, you need a large amount of storage space.  Usually, a single track of audio being recorded at 44.1K, 16 bit takes up about 5 megs of space per recorded minute.  I figure you can do the math and realize that after a while, you will have some pretty huge sessions.  Therefore, it is very wise to buy a separate drive to store your audio on.  This could be either internal or external, but I prefer external firewire drives, since they are portable, and transfer data at high speeds.  On top of that, the price of drive space has come down drastically in the last few years, and you can get a 100 gig firewire drive for about $250. If your computer is not have a port that accepts firewire, a firewire card can be purchased for about $40.00.  For those of you running Protools, you will need to find a drive that has the Oxford 911 chipset (I don’t know what the heck this means, but it allows you to record and playback from the drive rather than just storing data, and is specifically compatible with Protools).  The best drive that I have found is from a company called EZQuest, who sells an 80 gig drive for about $200. 

You can also get an external SCSI drive that will hold a hard drive stored in a removable tray, called a Hotswap.  These are great because they are so portable, and very common in professional studios.  You can either buy or assemble your own hotswap, but these SCSI drives are another fast format to store to, as opposed to IDE drives, which have slower transfer rates.  The only thing you have to be careful with when using hotswap drives is that you need to mount and unmount them when you insert or remove them from the drive bay.  Mounting is a process that allows your computer to recognize what devices are attached to the computer and are available to work on.  Mounting software scans all the SCSI busses to see what devices are on it.  Before you go to take the drive out, be sure to unmount it and let the drive spin down so as not to cause corruption of the main directories on the drive. 

With all this, let me state that it is not a good idea to store and work on your audio on the same drive that your system software is on.  This is because it is trying to keep the computer running as well as read/write data to your session at the same time, and this may cause a lot of strain on the drive itself, resulting in possible crashes, or corrupt data files.  Once you have the drive, you have to format it correctly using the software that comes with it.  With new drives, this wont take long, but if you are looking to reformat a drive that has already been in use, then expect it to take a while.  More on this later.

So before starting any session, I make sure that I have enough hard drive space to work on, and if not, I back things up so I can free up some space on the drive by throwing backed-up files away.  Backing sessions up is something that you should do often anyway because files can always get corrupted or erased accidentally, and Murphy’s Law states that it will always happen right when you need to work on it!  There are various backup media types that you can archive your files to, and most are inexpensive, giving you a lot of storage space at the same time.  Of course for starters, you can always copy your audio sessions to another drive.  Sometimes, before backing my sessions up, I will copy the whole thing to another drive for a quick backup, if I know that I wont be able to archive it for a few days.  It would be ok for you to backup your sessions to your system drive, as long as you don’t work from them, as I mentioned earlier. 

Next, we have disc media like CDs and DVDs.  CDs hold about 650-800 megs of data, making them perfect for small sessions, and come in two types; CD-R, and CD-RW.  The CD-Rs only allow you to write data to them once and that is it, but the CD-RW will let you erase over that data at a later date and re-write your sessions.  CDs are limiting, however, because backing up big sessions will result in a lot of CDs that pile up and fall over in your corners.  DVDs, on the other hand, hold up to 4.7 gigs of data, making them perfect for storing a few different sessions to one disc, or one large one.  Many computers now are being shipped with DVD burners built in, but just be careful to check what type of DVD your system can burn, since some can only write to DVD-RWs.  Like CDs, there are two types;  DVD-R (write once), and DVD-RW (Re-Writeable). 

Finally, we have tape formats.  I have mainly run into two types, AIT, and DDS.  The AIT tapes look like a Hi-8 tape and can store large amounts of data.  I usually store to tapes having 35 gigs, but the downside is that these tapes are $70 a pop.  DDS tapes are the size of a DAT tape and cost about $20 for 20 gigs of space, making them a more ideal choice of storage media.  Of course, with both of these, you will have to buy the tape drive, which may cost you a pretty penny, but may be completely worth it in the end, especially considering that the tapes take up so little physical storage space.  Just make sure your computer has a SCSI card to hook these backup devices into.  You will also have to have a program like Retrospect or Mezzo to back these files up onto your tapes.  There are a lot more types of data storage out there, but these are the basics.

After backing any session up, it is a good idea to turn off the hard drive where the original session was backed up from, and then restore the session from the media to a new drive.  I do this to make sure the backup went properly and that the session opens correctly.  Turing off the source drive ensures that any files corrupt or missing in the restored session will not be read instead from the original drive.  After the session opens fine, and plays correctly, then and only then should you throw away the original session!   

So now that we have backed up the old sessions, and freed up some space on the drive, I create a folder for my session named after the band or song and will create a template for the songs.  It is important that you organize your sessions within properly labeled folders because they can easily get lost.  I usually have folders for the band, and then folders within this one for each song we do.  The template is a “blank” session that has a generic amount of tracks, with each tracked named with the instrument I plan to record, their relative panning and volume settings, and inputs/outputs set correctly.  By doing this, you can start each song on the template, and then rename it according to the song you are doing.  It is a fast way of not having to set up each song, thereby wasting valuable recording time. 

Occasionally during your session, you might encounter a computer crash or glitch in the software.  What I always do first is save your session (if you can) and then restart  the computer and the program.  Oftentimes, this is just what it needs to work correctly again.  It may have just been running too hard for too long and needed a break.  If the glitches still occur, turn off your computer components for a few seconds, check each cable connection (this is a good idea to do even before any session anyways), and then restart again.  Some recording software have auto save functions that automatically save the session every few minutes depending on an increment that you specify.  It would be very wise of you to turn this on, to allow you to get back to the most recently saved version of your session.  Of course, the moral here is to SAVE OFTEN!  I can’t stress this enough and every engineer working with computers usually has a horror story about a great take they lost because they forgot to save.  Do it often and it becomes second nature! 

Another thing to make sure of is to what drive and folder your session is saving your files.  With Protools, this is called the Disc Allocation.  It is very important because if you work on the session on one drive, and then transfer it to another drive on the same system, but the original drive is still hooked up, all the new audio recorded will be saved to the old drive, creating a real mess.  You may then back up your session and not realized that half the audio was on the other drive.  In a worst-case scenario, you may not be able to even find the newly recorded files.  This is a great reason to restore your backups and make sure they work before throwing away the original session. 

So lets assume that you finish your session with no problems.  You are now left with a big session that may have a lot of edits or unused takes in it.  The best thing to do here is to delete all the files that you are not using in the session.  Protools makes this easy with a special menu command called Clear Selected Files.  Regardless of the software you are using, it is a good idea to get rid of these unused files because they only make the session larger and take up more valuable storage space when backing the session up. 

Finally, I like to use a generic word program like Simpletext or WordPad to write down any mic preamp settings, signal path, mic-placement or amp settings.  Then I save it in the same folder as the session so that I don’t have to look the settings up later when I come back to the session to re-record vocals or guitar.  With Protools, I will often save a copy of the Plug-in Settings folder in the session so that if I go to another studio, the original plug in settings will be available. 

At this point after the session, I perform all the necessary backups, and restorations, and delete the session if I wont be working on it for a while.  This frees up the drive space for a new session.  Now there is only a couple of things left to do, and they don’t necessarily need to be done after every session, although it does help maintain the efficiency of your computer.  When your hard drive gets fuller with data files, they get spread all around it, stored in different locations, and not always together.  As files get stored and erased over time, a lot of the free drive space will be available in only small little pockets sandwiched between other files.  This is called fragmentation, and it is a good idea to Defragment (or Optimize) your drives so they can work faster and not have to look as long for files.  One way to do this is to copy your sessions to another drive, delete the old session, and then copy it back to the original drive.  This will place the session all in the same relative area of the drive (depending on how much free space is available).  Always make sure to check any copied session first to make sure it works before deleting the old one.  Another way to defragment your drive is to use a program like Norton SystemWorks to place all the data on the drive in the same space and bunch all of the available space in the same area.  Of course, you will need to back everything up before doing this because optimizing your drive may corrupt some files.  Sometimes it is a good idea to back everything up on your drive, completely reformat it, and then restore everything. Usually, low-level formats are the best since they actually go through and ERASE the data on the drive, but you can do quick formats that just erase the directories of where all the files are stored. 

Next it is always a good idea to run Norton SystemWorks on your drives to look for problems.  When you are moving things around, especially on a large drive, the locations of the files written to the directory may get damaged and files get lost.  Even the amount of available space may be incorrect.  Norton will analyze your whole drive and look for and fix any problems.  A program like this is really invaluable and usually doesn’t cost much.  Finally, if you are hooked up to the Internet, it is a good idea to have an anti-virus program to keep your computer safe.  These as well don’t cost that much.  

I realize that all these computer maintenance tips are redundant as far as backing things up, but obviously, you would rather do all this work than lose audio that was really important to you.  Don’t let all this work fool you!  Computer recording is a really great tool to helping you get your ideas down, and almost every major record coming out nowadays has been through a computer at one point, so it’s a lot more common than you may realize.  You just need to spend some time maintaining your system and everything will run great.  Happy fixing!