I've had good luck with the cheapest of the Cakewalk programs, called Guitar Tracks Pro. Mine is the stupidest, cheapest out-of-date one, and it will still do way more than I personally need. The smaller they are, the less memory they use.
~ But if you start recording with very very few bits like at Mp3 level, the sound definitely suffers, so you're better off keeping the tracks at AAC level or better until it's all wrapped.
~ But the memory usage starts multiplying very quickly, because the program automatically records backups of everything you're doing. So you record a track, it makes two. If you change something and save the change, it records that and a copy - so your 500 megabyte twank is now occupying 2,000 megabytes, unless you're wiping out as you go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6_1Pw1xm9U
This caught me by surprise until I figured out what was happening. And you're just getting started.... You can configure it to save part or all of what you're working on to external drives - thumb, Zip or other. Everybody says not to record a track, check your e-mail, record a track, check to see if Boom-Boom still loves you, fix a track, watch a video... but I've done it because I'm not trying to record a masterpiece. Two hard drives are standard for that, one is music-only; oddly enough, as a consumer you can't really buy anything of high quality, anything that's not made out of Chinese prison-labor junk parts, so the most expensive recording computers in the world just have lots of extra cheap Chinese prison-labor junk parts so that everything is backed up a lot, sort of foolproof-like. Oh sure. :toothy11:
( ducks and runs )
