How To Build A Kick@$$ Digital Audio Workstation
A completely irreverent (but hopefully not irrelevant) guide (© 2009) by David “TwoRocks” SunDancer
Prelude In B(usted) Flat
The year: later than originally anticipated
The location: TwoRocks’ secret recording cave
Our SPYCAM (with lousy audio feed) picks up a guy that we will come to know as TWOROCKS, singing to himself, totally unaware of what he’s doing (not like that’s anything new…), to the tune of the Beatles’ “Girl”:
“Is there anybody going to listen to my story all about the DAW I built to play? She’s the kind of DAW you want so much, you would be sorry if you delayed your build another day. Aaah, DAW-a-ha-aw! (Dood’n-dood’n, dood’n-dood’n) DAW-a-ha-aw… (Dood’n-dood’n, dood’n-dood’n)…”
Suddenly, we hear some strange popping, clicking, and crackling noises emanating from the computer in front of TwoRocks, and just as suddenly, and still completely unaware of what he’s doing, TwoRocks changes his tune to an old, well-known animal farm song:
“Unca McTwoRocks built a DAW, ee-eye, ee-eye, AW! And in his DAW he had some clicks, ee-yikes, ee-yikes, AW! With a click-click here, and a pop-pop there, here a click, there a pop, drop-outs ’til I drop-drop! Unca TwoRocks wants a beer, or two, or three, or four!”
Okay, seriously, though (and that’s gonna be really, really hard for me): I’m that “TwoRocks” guy, and quite some time ago, a desire arose within me to create & play some kick@$$ music. So I set out to build myself a digital audio workstation (DAW) that would cost me less than an arm and a leg (because I wanted to keep all four extremities — and we won’t talk about the fifth to keep things PG-rated here), and selling a kidney wasn’t an appealing prospect, either…
So What’s In A DAW…
… I asked my self. And self answered: basically the same stuff as in any of today’s personal computers, only kick@$$-ish better. Personal computers these days are so powerful that it seems outright ludicrous that these “power horses” don’t seem to able to handle — at least not “out of the box”, or “off the shelf” — something as “light-weight” as some audio coming in, getting processed, and going out.
In principle, all the components are there — even in the cheapest of the cheap computer boxes you can pick up at the local computer discounter, or order online from DULL computers and the likes.
You get your “audio interface” (usually called “high definition”, or even “high end” these days) that allows you to plug something — a microphone, an instrument, the output of an MP3 player — into an audio input (typically via a 1/8″ mini stereo jack), have that analog audio signal converted (analog-to-digital conversion) to something the computer’s “innards” can work with (digital audio signal processing), and finally get it back out into the analog domain (digital-to-analog conversion) as a stereo or multi-channel signal.
So why not call all of today’s computers “digital audio workstations”? Well, in principle, we can. But as the saying goes: “Your mileage may vary.” We sure can get an audio signal in, process it somehow, and play the result back on some speakers (and/or headphones). The thing is: even in a world where a lot of people are “just fine” with the sound that even the cheapest portable music players with equally cheap ear buds produce, in a world where music has mostly been relegated to a “background noise floor”, those otherwise extremely powerful computers we get in stores today usually fail at giving us an uninterrupted stream of audio “data” while we attempt to create our “masterpieces”. That ole MP3 player that cost less than a pizza may be “noodling” all those tunes without any interruptions, yet even a lot of “high end” computers, costing several thousand dollars, seem to be unable to do the same thing: give us a steady, uninterrupted stream of audio.
How can that be? Well, it’s very simple: blame Bill Gates. (I’m joking!) Seriously, though… you may have plenty of “horse power” in that hardware in your computer to handle all that audio processing just fine, but the software platform (operating system and programs) that “sits on top of it” was never created with the intent and purpose to process the information flowing through it in “real time”. Small delays are usually no big deal, as long as it’s just a matter of a web page loading a millisecond slower, or a character being typed on a keyboard showing up a tad later in a word processing program. But the moment the same kinds of delays happen with anything that requires a continuous stream of data (typically audio and video), we notice it. Have you ever played back a DVD on a computer with a software DVD player and encountered those annoying, fraction-of-a-second “stutters”? There you go. The same goes for audio: poor sound quality we may have gotten accustomed to, sadly, but the moment there’s a glitch in the playback, we notice.
So can we do something to keep that audio stream flowing continuously? Short answer: yes, absolutely, maybe, it depends. Long answer: this “travelog” of mine, chronicling my adventurous trip from knowing a lot about putting computers together (I’ve been a system builder for over 20 years, among a lot of other things) and knowing bits and pieces about audio work on a computer (I started out with an Atari Mega ST and Logic Audio’s “great-great-grand-daddy” Creator/Notator, also ’round about 20 years ago) to getting a custom-built digital audio workstation to work like a well-oiled machine and “kick some serious @$$”.
Before we “dive in”, let me just get one last thing out of the way. I’ve been asked: “So, TwoRocks… which components should I buy?” Now, I could simply go ahead and say: “Get motherboard XYZ, add graphics card 123, plus RAM Sha-zam”, and so forth. But if I did that, I would not really do you a favor. For one thing: what may work right now will certainly be outdated the moment I take a nap and wake up a few hours later. For another: what I may want from a DAW may differ greatly from what you want from it.
Most importantly, though, I’d like to quote an old proverb to get my point across as to why I’m not giving any simple “get these components and nail them together” advice here:
“Give a man a fish, and he’ll have fish breath for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ll never, ever, wanna get near him again.”
Or something like that.