Building for music production

I'm currently trying to put some specs together for a mate who would like to build his own machine for music production - both modern and classical, without the need for external black boxes. Although his budget is small (around £700 exc. monitor), i'd got the following together:

Athlon XP1800+
256MB DDR
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum
60GB Maxtor D740X UDMA133 HDD
Riva TNT2 M64 - 32MB RAM
Philips 40X16X10X CDRW
Epox 8K3A Mainboard

I'm personally used to building games machines, so if anyone has any input on this kind of system and these specific specs, it would be greatly appreciated.

If your going for pro (or semipro) you wont want a soundblaster anything. There are lots of good audio cards out there. I have no idea what’s hot at the moment, haven’t been keeping up but hopefully these links help.


<A HREF="http://audiomidi.com/hardware/audio_pci.cfm" target="_new">http://audiomidi.com/hardware/audio_pci.cfm</A>
<A HREF="http://www.echoaudio.com/" target="_new">http://www.echoaudio.com/</A>

Cya


<font color=green>1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qc6?? 4.Bb5 1-0

I bought my sw1000xg of ebay for 1/3 ($250) the cost of new. There are much better/newer ones out their now but It’s got good A./D converters and great MIDI sounds/effects. Plus since it’s all in one card there is minimal noise when I convert the MIDI tracks to wave.

What I’m saying is for recording music on a PC the sound card is key, then CPU/ hard drive. Also the program you use is very important. I’m using Sonar right now. I Just didn’t like the feel of Cuebase but some swear by it. There are also more expensive programs but I haven’t tried them and hate the time it takes to really learn one just to find out you don’t like it and spent a ton of cash.

Cya


<font color=green>1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qc6?? 4.Bb5 1-0