Any use for an (older) desktop PC?

The Lounge General Discussion
1

Back in 2011 I custom built what I believed to be a whizz bang desktop PC for all my audio needs. Which served its purpose beautifully until I replaced it with a macbook pro.

These days my fancypants PC doesn’t seem quite so fancy (although it’s not actually obsolete) and has been gathering dust for a while. Having begun the task of cleaning out the hard drives & reinstalling windows in order to donate it to the less fortunate, I’m finding that I really don’t want to let it go.

So my question is, has anybody found another (non DAW & general internet) use for a desktop PC?

2

Have a decent soundcard for it, and some way to get MIDI in to it?
You can just treat it as an extra synth or two- if it was fairly well specced in 2011, it’s not obsolete at all- it can probably handle most any VST you want to throw at it…

3

Fx teleport
http://www.fx-max.com/fxt/purchase.html

is free because sadly they went out of business - but can use the old pc as an fx rack for a more up to date machine. Quite neat!

4

Good call. I suppose in a similar vein it could also be used as a dedicated sampler…

5

FX teleport looks interesting

6

Am in a similar boat btw - I have a desktop custom built around that time (little older I think), remember being blown away by it. I mean MULTIPLE CORES!!! IS LIKE FRICKING STAR TREK!!!

7

Not to mention the super industrial looking case and giant cpu cooler… its actually got more (& better?) ram than the mac

Perhaps i could donate it to the dept of defence??

Ill be interested to hear how yours ends up…

8

I have a similar machine that I converted to a home media server. Just added few cheap USB drives on it and put all my CD/Vinyl/DVD collection on it.

Now I can access all the media from it anywhere in my house. If I want to sample some of my old records/CDs, I just pull it out of that server. Very convenient.

9

I hang on to my old desktop PC because of my SonicCore Scope cards. These are old PCI sound cards with DSPs running a very flexible “virtual studio” environment with loads of mixers, synths, effects and a well-spec’ed modular synth (300 modules!).

If I get a new PC without PCI slots I’ll probably have the old one in a corner without a keyboard or screen attached and just use vnc or some other remote desktop solution to access Scope. The synths sound fantastic, some of the mastering tools are invaluable to me, and if nothing is routed between Scope and Windows there is no latency either.

I expect these cards can be bought for next to nothing these days. So that might be an idea?

http://sonic-core.net/joomla.soniccore/index.php?lang=us

10

Righto… So having given it a bit of thought, I’ve come up with a plan. It’s a pretty simple one. Surprised it didn’t occur to me before:

I’m going to try setting up the PC as a studio computer again.

EDIT: Didn’t really need to go on and on about it…

(TLDR version was, the pc wasn’t anywhere near as outdated as I thought. May as well use it for what it was built for and use the laptop for general duties…)