Okay, so I'm switching my studio over from being 99.9% audio recording with microphones to a lot more midi sequencing, sampling, and virtual instruments such as VSTi. I'm having to relearn quite a bit. One thing I'm gonna have to get used to is pushing my computer much harder. It appears that samplers use an enormous amount of RAM and VST instruments use a ton of CPU load.

The first thing I wanted to do to my recording computer (AMD Athlon 64 2800, 1GB RAM, 590 GB total hard disk space) was to get more RAM. So the question is “How much RAM do I need?”. Ideally, we'd say infinite, but it turns out that Windows has some sort of limit that won't make full use of the 4GB. This is a music recording website so I'll spare you the details. (Actually, I have no idea how this works either). Either way, 4GB is too much.

It appears that many motherboards don't like 3GB of RAM or so I'm told. If I'm wrong, please send me an email and let me know. So, I'm going with 2GB of RAM right now. 2GB doesn't seam like total overkill, which is kind of boring to me, but it will have to work!

Brandon