256MB will be
pleanty for audio recording, but if you're going to do
any soft synth work with things like sound fonts, you'll want and
probably use the 512MB.
You mean assuming I use large soundfonts, right? I'm pretty sure I
couldn't fill up 256MB with samples. That would be my whole sample
library... Well, that might change of course... Hmmm. Right now i would
say that if large soundfonts are my only problem, I'm going for the
smaller machine.
Aren't there any software outthere that works like GigaSampler, that is
a softsampler that can play directly from HD?
no.
but
http://linuxsampler.sf.net is probably one to keep your eye on.
BTW: I also asked this in my local LUG and one of the posters was
shocked, and said that he had never sat behind a machine with more than
256 MB RAM. Is the "don't go with less than 512MB, or you'll be sooo
sorry"-speach only for windows users or is there some truth in it for us
linux users also?
really depends on a lot of things.
how many programs do you like to have running simultaneously?
Do you have 10 browser windows open? Kde and Gnome apps will probably use
more than simpler ones.
linux has aggressive caching of hdd in RAM which will drastically
speed up certain operations.
how long do you keep your machine on for? If you leave it on for months
you may run into memory leakage problems with beta software, requiring
more RAM.
you probably dont _need_ more than 256M, but i think a ram upgrade is
pretty good value for money performance upgrade. I'm going to upgrade
to 1GB. But if money is tight you can always start small and upgrade later.
best regards
--
Tim Orford