Mixing music on an ancient computer

[EtherealWidow]

I have a 2008 Mac book with some songs I have yet to mix on it. Just about all the files I need are on there, but the projects are too intense for the poor old geezer. I recorded all the audio just fine (some years ago) at 24 bits, 176.4kHz/sec, which, at the time seemed more necessary than it was. I'm looking to build a new computer eventually, but would just like to replace whatever is so worn out in this Mac book to just finish the album. CPU? RAM? Carburetor?

[Reeltarded]

You are going to have to take the files to someone with an appropriate converter and downsample everything to a sensible sample rate if you can't yourself.

Unless you are specifically doing audio for video, anything more than 44.1/24bit is... not prudent.

Deeper bit rate sounds better. Higher sample rate is a.. don't do that. You have to convert in the end and in processes bec.. it's a farce.

[xtian]

I would look at Audacity as an option to convert your files as Reel suggests. You can also use it as a DAW to mix songs. It's been around for years, so hopefully you can run it on whatever OS you've got.

Maxing out the RAM is the best strategy for performance, and the least expensive.

[gui_tarzan]

I'll second that and add that it's also very easy to use.

[vibratoking]

Audacity is free and worth every penny. I would never use it to mix anything with more that 2 tracks. The interface is very limited and effect implementation is great if you like destructive editing. You can torrent quite a few good DAW apps if that doesn't bother you.

Reel's comments are spot on. Bit depth helps the quality of many effects, but eventually you are going to end up with a red book standard 44.1kHz and 16 bits.

[sliberty]

If you can bring the files into Audacity, you don't need to convert anything. Audacity runs on all platforms (Windoze, Mac and Linux) so you could just move the files to another machine.

Not that you shouldn't convert. Just that you wouldn't have to.

Just saying...

[Reeltarded]

His problem is bandwidth.. the program doesn't matter, the files are too large for the pipeline.

[EtherealWidow]

Yeah, like I said, years ago I was going for what I mistakenly thought would get the best audio quality without investing in worthy gear, thus, now my computer has a lot of math to do. Might as well spend a couple hours reducing everything to something reasonable. Learned a lot of things to avoid to save time making this first album. Thanks for the opinions guys.

[Reeltarded]

I record everything except A4V at 24/44.1 and the final process is the conversion. Video wants 48k files to fly in.

I used to be a record producer until the conflagration of the music business. Free is unsustainable. We'll never see anything grand if there are no more symphonics or expensive mistakes.