This is a long answer, but be sure to read all of it, cause i put the deep stuff at the end.

Most people learn just by doing and experimenting on their own. You'd be surprized how much you can teach yourself. Everyone tends to stumble onto the same bag of tricks sooner or later. The suave tricks are sometimes explained in interviews in magazines such as Mix or Electronic Musician or Keyboard or EQ or Sound On Sound. Even in Urb magazine there can be useful info.

Since you like house, I'd suggest reading Sound On Sound and Urb magazine. It helps to pay attention to the kind of equipment that your favorite musicians and DJ's use. Even when you watch TV and see somebody in a real recording studio, pay attention to what their stuff looks like.

Personally, I think Digweed is really lame compared to people making house back in the 1990's, but that's just me.

Lots of popular musicians use sample CD's from companies like EastWest. In addition to that, most electronic composers all gossip about the same programs and keyboards and drum machines.

For example, people who like making beats sooner or later run into the MPC-2000. A lot of R&B Folks liked the ASR-10 sampling workstation keyboard. Akai samplers have always been popular too. I've heard tons of house people insist that a synth MUST have LFO's which can be synchronized to MIDI clock. I tend to agree. Lots of effects units and now plug-ins are set up to do that now.

I have a theory that whole genres of music have been created by specific programs. Hammerhead and Acid and ProTools (not in that order) were/are insanely popular. Not too long ago, FruityLoops seemed to gain popularity too.

I suggest Tuareg (the FAT version) for playing with filters and breakbeat editing and delays and panning and distortion and gating. This is good for you if you have a PC. I know it sounds silly just talking about one program like it's all that, but maybe it could be, for you.

In general, production techniques usually involve creative ways of routing signals and creative ways of layering them and pushing them to extremes. Most audio noises and errors can be used deliberately for an effect if you choose to.

I suggest that at minimum you need these things:

1) An external mixer for mixdown.
2) A multitrack recorder with analog outputs so you can mix with your external mixer while recording onto spare tracks.
3) Something or someone that makes beats in time.
4) Something that can edit your tracks before or at least after your mixdowns. You need to at least be able to cut, copy, paste, and clear audio data.
5) Something that can add sound effects such as reverb, delay, flange, chorus, etc.
6) A CD recorder for your final mixes.

Personally, I think recording live drums and then turning them into samples is great. You can combine loops with beats and sequence them creatively with your editor or sequenced sampler.

Last but not least, most music which actually makes musical progress involves real creativity on part of the engineer/producer/musician.

Take time to read the jacket and liner notes on your favorite house CD's and 12 inches. Most professional albums involve at least a dozen people to make the album really smoke.

Composed by = ?
Performed by = ?
Remixed by = ?
Contains samples by = ?
Engineered by = ?
Assistant engineer = ?
Mixed by = ?
Programming by = ?
Additional production by = ?
Mastered by = ?

Any given recording studio often has interns helping out too, but they won't necessarily get credit. For that matter, plenty of important musicians and technicians and vocalists get left off the credits all the time, unfortunately. Sometimes it's a surprise, other times they're just left out unfairly. Or maybe they don't like the album so they don't want their name on it. Who knows.

Read the Thank-You's too. When an artist lists other artists, it's not always just to give respect. Sometimes those other artists actually helped teach them how to sound a certain way. It's a good indicator of what else you should listen to also. Also, some artists like to sample each other for extra power.

You may not like industrial, but on one of the last Frontline Assembly albums, (a rather good one) he sampled lots of Massive Attack. He probably didn't worry as much about getting sued because Massive Attack broke up. He has also sampled plenty of Nitzer Ebb and Tears for Fears.

Pretty much everybody samples or copies James Brown, Kraftwerk, Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Led Zepplin, David Bowie, Technotronic, Peter Gabriel, Parliament/Funkadelic, Soul II Soul and Nine Inch Nails. I don't care what style of music you are into. Somebody in that style copied off of one of those groups. I'm not saying that you should too, but tons of music is incestuously related.

If you really want to make cool drum tracks, listen to as much African, Latino, Asian, Oceanic, and Middle-Eastern music as possible. Try counting the beats and noticing which beat certain drum sounds tend to land on.

For example, if you like beats by Prodigy, you might end up counting lots of beats as 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5 or 1-2-3-4-5-1-2-3 instead of counting 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. It seems really abstract until you actually sit down and listen to a track and count up the beats. Then all of a sudden it's really easy to catch onto what's going on. If you use software drum machines then you know what those beats might look like on the screen: (use your imagination)

*---------------*
|o| | | | |o| | |
+---------------+
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
==>

Well, i hope i've given you some useful information. It probably sounds pretty dull,
but it's usually the dull stuff that ends up
kicking ass as soon as it's actually played.

I mean, I'd hate to look at a printout of the
programming code which was used to create Rebirth or Reason or see the blueprint for the Kurzweil K2000. But I know that they sound good because some suave technicians had tons of patience through the dull parts of their master creativity.

You need to talk to the Roland company. The Roland company can list hard drives that will be good to use with your VS-2480.

Sometimes only certain drives will work. Ask for a list. Contact <b>Technical Support</b>.

Make sure the drive is fast enough:

RPM >= 7200 (Bigger # is better)
Average Seek Time <= 12ms (Smaller # is better)

EIDE is better than IDE
Fast & Wide SCSI is better than SCSI
Try to get "Firewire" if you need SCSI, if it works with the VS-2480. Firewire is the fastest kind of SCSI.

Also, be sure to get short cables. Long cables slow down hard drives.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.
A list of drives is available from Roland UK, though.

Do you now?

Andy

Maybe, maybe not. Why do ou want to use them, anyway? It won't change your card into a Live! 5.1

Andy

I really respect that you are into programming for audio. I hope your project turns out as cool as you intend.

<A HREF="http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Courses/422/projects/WaveFormat/">A very clear depiction of the WAVE format</A>

<A HREF="http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/wavefiles.html">Index of WAVE file structure</A>

<A HREF="http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/wave.htm">The RIFF WAVE format</A>

<A HREF="http://sharkysoft.com/software/java/lava/docs/javadocs/lava/riff/wave/doc-files/riffwave-frameset.htm">WAVE structure for C programming</A>

Before you start creating web pages, you will need to learn proper <SUP>grammer</SUP> and punctuation. Ever heard of a question mark<b>?</>

OK. Sorry. Well, most people use MP3's alot more than RealAudio, and I know that the Macintosh Real Audio/Media stuff has lots of bugs and security flaws in it.

Look into encoding files as mp3 and transmitting them as m3u data (diced and thrown mp3). Or, you could just stick with the normal mp3 format which allows folks to download the whole deal. There's more freeware out here for mp3 files too.

There is also an EMBED HTML command lurking on the net which allows you to have web pages automatically play little mp3 tidbits too. You just need to make sure the tidbits are really tiny, or people who visit your page will hate you for force-feeding them relatively large audio chunks very slowly.

Don't forget, you can also use AIFF (.AIF) files for high-quality demos and samples. Most browsers automatically support .WAV, .AIF, and .AU (really lo-fi and tiny old UNIX sounds)

Adios.

The best CD players will still play your discs if you made them alright, but cheaper-made CD players will always fail. This is because blank CD's aren't as accurate as PRINTED commercial CD's. Printed commercial CD's are stronger physically, and don't involve the same technical problems as CD-R blanks.

For more reliable CD's, never burn them at faster than 4x write speed. Also, never use disks of capacity more than 74 minutes. Disks longer than that are just too densely packed to be read safely enough. Computer drives have more brainpower to read those discs, (more error-correction and retry algorithms) but computer drives also tend to have lots of inherent troubles.

Here's a list of troublesome things...

invisible scratches on your new blank discs
any fingerprints on your discs
any dust on your discs
any dust inside your CD-R
any labels on your discs
any vibrations going to your CD-R
any vibrations coming from your CD-R
computer CPU-fans are vibrating the CD-R
speakers are vibrating the CD-R
your legs keep bumping the CD-R
your keystrokes keep vibrating the CD-R
a misaligned laser in your CD-R
any electrical interference going to your CD-R
any magnetic interference going to your CD-R
not enough available RAM for your CD-R programs
not enough available RAM for your CD-R drivers
not enough CPU-time to your CD-R programs
not enough CPU-time to your CD-R drivers
a slightly faulty hard disk drive
a slightly faulty disk operating system
an overly fragmented hard disk drive
too many programs running during CD-R burning
your CD-R runs too hot

I'm sure there are other reasons, too.
Just keep as much in control as possible.
Keep any and all junk off the blank disc surfaces and treat your CD-R drive like it's a nuclear bomb triggering device.

By the way, most cheap portable boom-boxes (ghetto blasters) almost always misread burnt discs, and even commericially printed 80min CD's.

Consider a standalone CD-R such as one made by Marantz and selling for about 1-2 grand. These aren't worth all that money, but they do have excellent resonance damping.

I use a Technics CD player to play all of my CD's. CD's NEVER skip on this player, unless there is practically peanut butter on the discs, and it never gives up when trying to read a CD. In fact, if it doesn't read a really f-ed up CD, you have to turn off the player just to get a chance to eject the disc because the player is so busy still trying to read the damned peanut buttery disc over and over again.

It's also bullshit when you go to places such as Disc-Go-Round or Cheapo or whatever to sell used CD's and they pay you less cause there's a tiny scratch. Only many big scratches should matter if the CD player is of high enough quality to read the disc's table of contents (TOC).

Another tip...

Never use more than 80% of the blank disc's full capacity. You need to leave a margin around the outer edges so that people's fingerprints or the CD player itself won't mess with the last song(s). Most commercial albums are about 50 to 60 minutes for this reason. Most stop at about 55 minutes (around 510 MB of music files).

If you have Easy CD Creator (also known as Toast) you can look up errors in the built-in help within the program. There is a humongous list of types of errors during CD-writing. Most of those errors apply to all CD burning, in general, regardless of the system or software.

happy hunting.

CDex works excellent...

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

Oh yeah... dBpowerAMP...

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

Both awesome and free!