DAW Basic Checklist

After few research and readings here are some basic checklist a Digital Audio Workstation might have:

  • PC - that should be a dedicated computer for recording audio. It is advisable to have a separate computer for doing other applications such as internet surfing, word processing, anti-virus etc. Why? Because some of it might interfere during recording. Audio “drivers”, which is basically the interface or gateway between your recording hardware and software might affect its stability if used with a PC with different applications. One more concern is the memory usage that we would want to fully maximized for audio recording.

  • Audio Interface - this piece of hardware is used to convert sounds into PC. An audio interface can be in a form of sound card, preamps, direct boxes and analog-to-digital converters. Although there are lot of components to be categorized as an audio interface, modern sound card that you might have might support all of these from preamps to analog-digital converters. In my case at the time of this writing I use SoundBlaster XFI Fatal1ty sound card that supports line-in for his guitar instrument.

  • Softwares - are applications that we’ll use for recording, editing, and finalizing the output of our music. There are many softwares available around the internet from freeware, sharewares and trialwares. Some of these are Sony’s AcidPro, Adobe Audition, Guitar Tracks Pro, Sonar, CubeBase and list goes on... Depending on how far we would want to go with our recording will also depend on these softwares. Testing these softwares whether it suits our needs is a must. Another benefit of testing is being able to check the compatibility with the current hardware and computer’s setup.

  • Input Device - of course this would not be off the list as it will be the input source of our recording. These could be instruments such as guitar, keyboards, drums and/or microphones.

  • Monitors - when we say monitor it is not the same as the flat panel screen or cathode-ray tube displays. Rather the term “monitor” here consists of either speakers or headphones where you hear the output of the the mixed audio.

  • Storage Device - finally, to be able to keep our recorded audio we need a media where we could store these digitally encoded files. It can be in a form of CD, Hard Disk, etc. It is also preferred that a separate hard disk to use when recording audio as to improve recording performance such as speed that would have an impact when recording multiple tracks.