Recording to external Media? Good idea? Bad idea?

Cubase
1

I hope to get some advice from people with more experience. I’m about to start doing recording on a second system I’ve built. It’s an “old” i5-7600, with 8 gb ram, a 240gb nvme, and nothing else. No vstis, no plug-ins, nada. The idea is to use Cubase as a simple cassette recorder. Bring an mp3 or wav, drop it to a template, enter the proper tempo, track instruments.

Worst case scenario, I will be recording 5 tracks at once, at 48/24. Best case, one track at 48/24.

Now for the question. With the above in mind, which of the below would you do if you were in my place (if you have an even better idea, go ahead and tell, please!):

  1. Record to the relatively small nvme, do housekeeping later, delete useless takes, move useful takes to a thumb drive. Take thumb drive back to my “main” PC where the original project lives, throw files in there, go on with life.

  2. Record to an external, mechanical, portable, USB 3 HDD, lug this between computer A and computer B.

  3. Record directly to a thumb drive? Would this work? Like option two, but less volume to carry around.

  4. (Honorable mention, but near impossible) Upload to cloud. With my ~100kB upload speed, I think it would be faster if I grabbed the files in a thumb drive and walked… backwards… in handstand to my other PC.

So, what do you propose? Does the drive’s write speed matter, or am I overthinking this? I think I need about 5760 kbps for 5 channels, my thumb drive is 15MB/s. I should be good, right?

2

What about a LAN connection?
You can record on the small PC and access the recorded data over the network.
You should be able to do the housekeeping via network.
This provides better performance than the cloud sync.

1 Like
3

These computers are not in the same building, and I’m pretty illiterate with networks, that’s why it didn’t even cross my mind. But would it still be possible?

4

Networks are common technologies. Maybe not future-proof like thumb drives, but it’s working quite some time now. Since the 1970’s.

What does it mean? Different cities?
How big is the distance? Less than 100m is no problem with a simple CAT5 cable.

5

Not different cities, but 1km apart, so I can’t run a cable.

6

If networking isn’t an option, I’d go with Option 1. It’s a nice separation of duties, and culling things down straightaway to only useful takes prevents you from drowning in too many takes on your main PC.

1 Like
7

Use the internal disc for recording and use an external usb for backup.
My last project had 19 songs, around 20 tracks per song and the folder is 42GB only.
You could have enought room in your internal disc.

1 Like
8

Thumb drives differ widely in quality and speed.

USB 3 generally is the speed bottleneck. So any external disk, HDD or SSD should be fast enough. SSD is a bit lighter to carry, and hopefully more tolerant to accidental drops.

I’d ensure to make plenty of backups to that portable disk (or thumb drive), though.

1 Like
9

Thank you guys for your advice! Much appreciated!

Since the files are supposed to be brought back to my “main” PC and the original project, most likely the same day, I don’t believe I will be making backups of that. I’ll be only using it as a vessel to transfer the files, not as proper storage.

Ok, so record on the nvme, clean up bum takes, transfer to thumb drive it is!

I wish I could give the solution to all of you, so I’ll just leave it like that. Thanks again! :raised_hands:t2:

2 Likes