How many Megs does a 4 minute song with maybe 3 stereo tracks/13 mono tracks take up?

[Sergeman]

Can someone help me with this question please? I'm going to get an iMac flat panel 700Mhz G4, which comes with a 40 Gigahertz drive, and I was wondering just how much does one song actually take up? With a couple of plugins, nothing big.
Thanks to all!

Sergeman

http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/317/serg.html

[Carl Z]

If your at 24 bit then it roughly 7.5 meg per mono minute. If your bit rate is 16 bit figure 5 meg per mono minute.

You have 19 mono tracks at 4 minutes = 19*4*7.5
or 570 meg (at 24 bit).

Carl

[Sergeman]

Thanks Carl, that's what I needed! Another small question... if then, it takes that for 19 mono, then I guess most or all of you really record songs (whatever lenght and track count) and then save them to CD as both final mixes (and masters) AND ALSO completely dry (with no plugins I mean)? Do you do this?

Thanks again!

Sergeman

[Morningstar]

Uh, not exactly. Mixes, and 'masters' yes, I keep those in a seperate folder. But as far as the 'dry', no. I simply back up the entire session upon completion (after clearing all unused files) to a CD-r. The 'mastered' versions and mixed (pre-mastering) stay on my HD (I use iTunes as a personal catalogue of my material). If I ever need to do an alternate mix I just pull it from the cd-r.