DAW? Whats Your Recomendation?

[sparkin8]

I have a budget of £750 and need advice on what the best compatible, stable parts i should buy for a really powerful PC. The budget is for The CPU, MOBO, RAM, Hard Drive's, Sound Cards Graphics card ect.
This computer shud be optimised to record, create, mix and master music but im asking for advice as i am a complete novice at building computers and REALY NEED SOME HELP!!!! Thanks

[passerby3141]

Well, being an American I am not entirely confidant in my exchange rate knowledge, but your price seems like you'd be able to build a rather nice computer. I would mention though that you have posted your question in the software forum, and you seem to be asking more about hardware. I am not an expert by any means, just a experienced novice, but based on the info I got here when I built my system this past summer, I built a computer around an AMD Athalon 64 3500+, with a Gigabyte board with the Nvidia Nforce 3 chip set and have no complaints. I use an M-Audio Delta 44 sound card, and a very basic Nvidia graphics card. With your budget you may be able to do better though.

I don't record many tracks, the most I have attempted is around 12 using a software based drum machine and sampler based bass-line, and haven't really had too many problems.

If you are more into recording live musicians, Mackie's Tracktion 2 has worked out really well for me, as far as the software end of things goes. It has a very reasonable price considering the amount and quality of plugins that are included. Some of the most notable being the compressors, the reverb plug is great (part of a plugin upgrade package that was free to Tracktion 2 purchasers), and Finalmix a mastering plug with three band compression, pre and post compression eq, and DC filtering. I have heard that Tracktion is lacking in the midi department though, something I don't use much anyhow.

I'm sure others will post with more experience and knowledge to help you out.

Best of luck!