It's been several years since I last put together a recording studio, but my project for this holiday has been to cobble, re-purpose, and generally upgrade my setup.

The wife has incrementally reclaimed the home office previously used for home recording, so this is an opportunity to move all the gear into a proper environment and re-build from the ground up (I'm using some space at our business office for this project).

I would like this setup to allow spontaneous recording sessions by just having everything wired and ready to go. This will enable the agile composition and recording process I'm hoping to achieve.

What's decidedly different about the new setup is the availability of cloud storage. Digital recording consumes massive amounts of disk storage, and recording engineers tend to be packrats, hanging on to lots of tracks "just in case" they're needed for future re-mixes.

Amazon S3 now frees my mind and allows the audio packrat in me to infinitely scale archive storage without purchasing more external USB drives.

This setup has 3 levels of storage:
Local: Real-time recording and mixing
External: Samples, loops, sound libraries
Cloud: Deep storage and archiving