Chapter 1 - Anqi

Chapter 1 Getting Ready

This chapter gives a detailed description on how to set up a DAW. As the first chapter of this book, it gives the readers a soft start and made the materials less intimidating to readers new to this field. Most part of Section 1.4 Setting Up Your Work Environment, is very well written. I really like how this book gives specific brands, models and variations for each hardware and software component, saving the readers a decent amount of time on searching the right equipments. Also, this section explains the mechanism behind each hardware, seeming very appealing to a science student like me. But I found section 1.3, How this Book is Organized, quite irrelevant to other parts of this chapter. Basing my experience with other textbooks, I have been having trouble with figuring out how to use the books, especially supplementary materials and all sorts of icons. I think placing how the book is organized and what the icons stand for in another part of the textbook would be less confusing to me. It is really personal preference. Overall this chapter is very well helpful, and easy to follow.

Learning supplements:

- Setting Up Your Digital Audio Workstation

This learning supplement walked me through setting up one’s own DAW from perspectives of both hardware and software. What I like about this part is that as the first exercise of this book, it wraps up the practical components of Chapter 1 and gives more details on the setting up of software. However, I was expecting this exercise to be more standing on its own and possibly to be read as a separate article for the readers who are on a need-to-know base and do not have much time to go through the whole chapter. As this article elaborates so well on the perspective of software, I hope more information on setting up the hardware would be given just in case some readers might have difficulties working with the cores and plug-ins. As the hardwares are already set up and softwares are installed in our lab as well, I cannot say much about the efficiency of this learning supplement, but virtually it makes sense very well and answers the questions I had earlier such as why we chose ASIO driver over others, how we work between a Mac and PC etc.

After reading Chapter 1 and its learning supplement, I am more comfortable with playing with the DAW in front of me.