It's great to hear that Graham & Don Mason are having great success with the AMD processor on their computers (when recording music), but I was advised (by several major music software sequencing manufacters, including Cakewalk), to 'stay away' from the AMD processor when recording music because it can 'mess up' both midi & audio 'timing'.

Western Digital makes fine hard drives but you don't specify the model. If you are going to do serious audio recording you really need make sure that the HD you choose is both fast & quiet. Make sure it's an ultra ATA 7200 rpm hard drive. The sound card should have high quality A/D & D/A converters. The popular Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live soundcard is great for mulitmedia entertainment and playing games, but if you want to make quality digital audio recordings (music) go with a 24 bit/96khz card with low latency, like the Midiman M-Audio Delta 66: http://midiman.com/products/m-audio/delta66.php

For sequencing (both midi/digital audio), I highly recommend Cakewalk Sonar. http://www.cakewalk.com/

Sonar really kicks and is relatively easy to learn and is highly supported by a large user base on the PC-Windows platform. There is even extensive 'patch list' support for quite a number of arranger keyboards which is a BIG plus in itself. With this you can access/select all the sounds on your arranger keyboard from within Cakewalk Sonar. Very COOL ! I also recommend going with the latest (current) Windows XP operating system, 'not' Windows ME, because XP really is STABLE and also supports the newest optimzied WDM (sound) drivers (low latency). Cakewalk Sonar is optimized to work best with Windows XP. I recently (3 weeks ago) purchased a new computer myself (Dell Dimension, 1.8 gigahertz Pentium 4 processor, with 512 RAM & 40 Gig HD, with Windows XP, and it seems to be working flawlessly running all my music programs (Cakewalk Sonar, EMC StylesWorks, SoundForge, Band in a Box, etc, and, amazingly, it's been really stable (no crashes, freezes). I think maybe Microsoft has 'finally!' got things right with XP (keeping my fingers crossed).

Good Luck,
- Scott



[This message has been edited by Scottyee (edited 01-06-2002).]