[QUOTE="Spiritgod"]

Thanks everyone for the replies. Sadly this may be a lost cause. I'll speak to them everything that was said, but more than likely they'll scrap the idea completely since I can't guarantee the machine will work like they want. It's easier for them to see a box without knowing the ins and outs of what goes on behind that plastic/metal PC cover. Thanks again everyone, and if this little project is green lighted then I'll post my progress in this, or maybe another, thread.

kraken2109

The first big problem is talking to people who aren't tech savvy, the ones that automatically think that PC hardware doesn't age or become obsolete. They assume their 10 year old PC should last forever, and when their CD burner began acting up, which I had to replace, then a reality set in that they don't really want to admit. I replaced the drive, and all has gone well, but it is much slower than their old drive, and they can't understand why. They came to me about building a new one, that would replace both the old PC and their old duplicator that works half of the time, and that is why I came here, because even though I've built PCs before, doing one with the specs they want is something I've never tried...and telling them that it might work isn't an option since this is a church I'm talking about. Second problem is, with people telling me that I'd need a hard drive per CD drive, you're talking about four hard drives and four CD drives, and there are a few members of the church that think they know everything about everything and have shot down that idea because in their eyes "its stupid", add that with the fact that their budget won't cover the parts. I would try some of the ideas I've seen in this thread, but right now if I can't guarantee the computer will do everything they want it to do then I'm not going to even try...if it were my project that I needed then it would be a different story. The final say isn't here yet, as I've spoken to a few people about installing one large capacity drive and two burners to start off...to see how well it does, and kind of go from there. I guess it all depends on whether or not they can let go of their old PC.

Thanks everyone for the replies. Sadly this may be a lost cause. I'll speak to them everything that was said, but more than likely they'll scrap the idea completely since I can't guarantee the machine will work like they want. It's easier for them to see a box without knowing the ins and outs of what goes on behind that plastic/metal PC cover. Thanks again everyone, and if this little project is green lighted then I'll post my progress in this, or maybe another, thread.

Sorry for the double post, but I had a small idea. I just realized they make a master CD for archive purposes of all sermons. Would copying multiple disc from the same master cd eliminate the slow down from burning from a hard drive? I know this isn't a fix for their goal of burning different sermons at the same time, but after speaking more with their audio guy, he told me they do a lot more duplicating of the same sermon.

What audio inputs are we talking?

XLR? Generic mic?

You probably need a decent external sound card.

kraken2109

Yeah they already have a sound card that handles what they throw at it. They are recording everything fine with their 10 year old PC, but they really wanted a better way to burn the audio they record. I couldn't tell you anything about their setup, besides the PC they use is an old Dell hooked up to a lot of soundboards and other audio equipment.

Well, you could start with a single hard drive and 2 burners and just try running 2 copies of burning software at once (I use CDBurnerXP) - each running copy would be burning to a different burner and just see if it does slow down. What duplicators help the most on is simultaneous burning, but they are still just pc drives. It's been a while since I tried to burn multiple things at once, but I just remember it having issues. While not ideal, this may be a way to start - again, 1 hard drive and 2 burners. If it works with a single drive and 2 burners, you'd want to just try adding a 3rd burner, and if that works, then maybe you could burn 4 at once. At least it would get you started and since it's cd data (around 700MB) rather than DVD, then you would know more quickly if you can burn whole disks without issue.Stinger78

Thanks! I'll run that by them and see what they say.

Ideally, at least with a Windows-based PC, you'd want 4 burners and 4 separate hard drives from which to burn files - 1 dedicated hard drive per burner, as burning multiple files on multiple drives from a single source will either slow all the burning down or produce bad disks. As far as processing power and ram, well, technically you could do that with a basic Windows XP machine as the speed of it would be determined by all the drives - so you'd get by with even something less than a dual-core and 2GB ram - but that's about the minimum I'd recommend to anyone anymore. The hard part might be getting recordings from multiple audio sources. I know most computers come with 'mic' and 'line-in' and you could install some kind of sound card to get 2 more 'mic' and 'line-in' inputs, but I'm not sure you could have them all running at the same time. Perhaps there are software programs out there that can capture multiple sources at once, but a way around it would be to record all sources separately - then combine/mix with some software.Stinger78

I forgot to mention they have everything setup to record audio, which they still record with their 10 year old PC right now...I mainly kept that within the message in case some newer technology was available. I won't be able to convince them that installing four or more hard drives will be doable, this will be a church computer with a very low budget for this build. If they were making three or four disc from the same material, that shouldn't slow it down that much would it? Pretty much the way they want it is, there will be a lot of projects where they need several copies of the same disc (used for shut in groups) and maybe a few times they will need to burn a few copies of all different material (a sermon or two) for members of the church. There has to be a better way to go about this than installing a hard drive per disc burner.

I've been asked to build a fairly inexpensive PC. The two main goals is that it needs to be able to record audio from several mics, and have the capability to record onto at least four disc at the same time. I know they make CD/DVD duplicators, but from what I've been informed, they haven't had the best of luck with that route, and they also just wanted a machine that did everything they needed to do, without having several boxes hogging up what little space they have. I had never really thought of a build like this before, could anyone give me a few pointers? Would I need a lot of RAM? Would a dual core CPU handle the load of burning to multiple disc at the same time? Is there any factors I'm not aware of? Any advice on this would be highly appreciative. And thanks in advance.

[QUOTE="Spiritgod"][QUOTE="superclocked"]Did you manually set the RAM voltage, speed, and timings in the bios? If not, you should check them asap...superclocked

Tested all four sticks. Two passed without errors, one failed with over 600 errors (I didn't allow it to continue after that, I figured over 600 was enough proof that the stick was bad). I'm confused on one thing though, after testing the last stick I get a whole bunch of nonsense that fills the test screen. I can see the very top of the test but the rest is just a bunch of incoherent symbols that repeat and fill the screen from almost the top to bottom. I've perfomed the test twice on this particular stick and all goes well up until the 7-8 minute mark (each stick has taken about 12 minutes to go through) Does anyone know what this is?

Did you manually set the RAM voltage, speed, and timings in the bios? If not, you should check them asap...superclocked