My audio workstation and studio.

Rather than just rattle off my system specs, I thought I should probably point out a few things, such as.. I'm not a rock star, or anything else that involves excessive amounts of spendable income. My system and studio are built with old hand me down parts.

For example, I use an old Tascam 4 track cassette recorder as a mixer to connect to the line-in of my sound card. I got it for free since the owner was going to throw it away due to the tape record/play not working (worn out belts I think), but it is still a very functional 4 channel mixer so I snagged it in a nanosecond!

The computer itself is a collection of parts, most dating back to the years 2002-2003. I did luck out a bit, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ cpu and motherboard was pretty snappy for its day, (back when Windows wasn't quite as ginormous as it is now) It's a 2Ghz duel core cpu, and supports 64 bit operating systems, like the amd64 linux kernel.

The motherboard will hold up to 2GB of DDR2(667mhz) RAM, although I only have 1GB installed. 2GB now, found another stick \0/ )

Another semi-lucky thing was the old Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card I found, in a computer destined for the scrap heap. For it's time, it was an acceptable sound card for audio work, and while it does have some drawbacks, like internal downsampling to 44.1Khz, it's proving to be quite capable of doing what I want it to and tons better than the built in sound card on the motherboard.

I am currently using the on board video card, and have 32MB of system ram dedicated to video. Since I have an empty AGP slot, I'm keeping my eyes out for.. really any AGP, or even a PCI graphics card I can find, just to free up that 32MB of RAM.

Also, I have a very old 64MB USB flashdrive, formatted as Linux-swap, so when I know I'll be doing something that is likely to use all my RAM, I can tell Linux to use that old thing for virtual memory before it uses my hard drive.. Granted my hard drive is much newer, but when it comes to pure read/write speeds, the old school swap on the flashdrive trick is loads faster. Just be aware that flashdrives will eventually wear out after millions of reads & writes, and this approach is not recommended for typical day to day use, only when it is a must to ensure a good end result, like mixing mastering tracks to a final cut.

Of course I have a couple of guitars, some microphones, a stereo amp which I use for playback etc. Oh and remember the 4 track cassette deck as the mixer trick because that is also what I'm using as the playback mixer into the stereo amp. and this one is fully functional, so I could record to tape if I wanted to, but there really is no need, I can do everything digitally on my system which I built for pretty much nothing.