Computer under 1000 for music recording

Have a look at the Sweetwater Creation Station series. I've been using an older version CS-250 for two years now and it's been rock stable with virtually anything I've thrown at it. The newest versions have an updated CPU and increased RAM capacity (32gig). Model CS-200 is right at your price point: Tommy V

First and foremost regardless of the computer (Mac or Windows) you need: SSD for OS/apps/*audio workspace (Note: The advice of a separate drive for audio is for HDD's. A single SSD with everything outperforms this by magnitudes.) Then large HDD's for storage. Get what you need for convenience. * The workspace on your SSD is your premium workspace. This would be required for, for example, running live sound while simultaneously recording all the inputs multitrack to the drive. If you get 7200rpm HDD's for data drives, you will also be able to run large sessions with audio on the HDD for studio post work. Convenient. USB external drives are a great choice for backup volumes. You don't need speed or high performance here. Now look into the computer. I still recommend Mac. Buy one 2nd hand if you want to save a LOT of $$. $1000 will get you a lot of system.

A computer for under $1000 is certainly very easily doable. That Sweetwater machine is priced pretty high though, I hope their support is well worth it, or it ships with a bar of gold. I just built an i5-750 machine using parts I had lying around and spent $100. I would say that if you were careful about the parts you ordered, you could build a very capable machine for under $800. A current i5, mATX motherboard, decent case, hard drive, RAM and graphics card should all be under $600 if you choose carefully. Get into a more advanced build, and you'll see $800. An i3 machine for so much needs to come with some really good tech support to make it worthwhile. At my shop, some i3 builds will get into the thousand price ranges, but my shop provides extremely good service with all machines, along with a very generous warranty on parts/labor for all machines. Any current machine should be easily capable of running several tracks with minimal effects on each track before running into any latency issues whatsoever. Even a Core 2 Quad machine should be plenty capable with 6-8gb of RAM. Core 2 Duo and older machines will see more issues with higher track counts, and plugin use.