Before starting my new project (one big project vs. small projects, 96kHz / 48 kHz)

the problem with 96 kHz was that I had the feeling that some plugins didn’t work too well with that (the amp series from I think it was TAP) and that my processing power was not enough to master the whole thing with JAMIN.
Now I’ve got a new PC with much more horsepower / RAM, but I still don’t know if it is really worth recording with 96 kHZ when everything is downsampled for the CD (this is the final product).
Are 48 kHz a good middle path ?

The last time I’ve recorded every track in a seperate project (I hope this is a good word for that) - this had the big advantage of beeing pretty easy to handle (big advantage when taking many takes and creating the click track) - but the big disadvantage was that I had to set all the same settings for all the plugins in many different projects.
Is it advisable to create one project with the songs for every “day” I am going to record - so the levels for the songs are pretty the same and I still don’t have to set the release of the compressor for every single track ?

Sorry for writing such a long - winding post - but maybe some of you can give me some tips / infos for this.

The whole project are about 6 songs - maybe 20 minutes of material and the whole thing should be burned to CDs - it is underground death metal / grindcore - so the quality is not going to be “big studio style” - but should be okay.

I’d go for 88kHz if you got the disc space, and your soundcard can handle it (which I guess it can). 48kHz is also a safe bet.

When you’ve set up the first session the way you want it, with eq/compressor/reverbs/whatnot on each track, save it as a template and use that when you start the next session. And also save the settings in the plugins so you can recall them as well.

Also, I’d stay away from the TAP effects if possible. They’re really good in many ways but they’ve suffered quite a lot of bit rot over the last five years and are known to have some serious bugs in certain combinations (http://lalists.stanford.edu/lau/2007/06/0363.html)

Unless you have amazing A/D and D/A converters, there’s very little gained when sampling above 48kHz.

And unless you plan to produce audio for DVD at 96k or 48k, I would recommend either 88.2kHz (if you have great converters) or 44.1kHz otherwise.

Of course you should record and work with 24bit samples or better.

Great converters - hmm - I’ve got the m-audio delta 1010LT (the one without the seperate box).
24 bits samples is checked (but that was one of the thins that was clear from the beginning).

the thing with the template doesn’t really work because I am recording first all the things and then mixing the bits and pieces down at home.

Why wouldn’t the templates work?
You start a template session for song1, import that songs sound files to the regions list and drag them to their tracks. Then repeat for song2…

And I’d go with 48kHz at least, see my take on it at the bottom here: http://ardour.org/node/2465

And even if you can’t use templates, just saving and loading the plugin settings will help you a great deal, I guess.

My problem with templates:
I am recording with punch in/ outs and so I would have to “bounce” the whole tracks after recording (or I think tracks in tape mode would work too?) so it is not so simple to “rearrange” those tracks in a new file.
Bouncing takes a whole lot of time (I think the last CD I’ve recorded I was bouncing for 3 hours - and that was no big fun and I’m not too fond to do this again).

A big thank you to everyone for their opinions !

You could export each track as a region. Click on the track, select the |<->| pointer, drag it along the track, right-click and select Export region. Don’t select the “Master outs” but click “Separate tracks” and select the one you want.
When you’ve exported your first track you don’t need to redo the region select, just right-click/Export region, unselect the first track (and possibly Master) in the export window and select the next.

This is done in freewheeling mode aka “as fast as your PC can handle” so each track should be done in a couple of secs.