First of all I had better say that I don't use my PC for making music. The reasons for this are many and varied, but mainly I only have a 486 DX2 PC and I'd really need a faster 486 or a Pentium to do anything remotely decent on a PC. And secondly, following directly on from that - I can't afford it! So what do I use???
Well, I use an old Commodore Amiga 500+. It's got a total of 2MB RAM and just a single floppy disk drive, but it works fine! I do all of my sampling and sequencing on it and have done for quite some time now. The advantages the Amiga has over the PC are :
1. I run it through an old TV
2. If anything breaks I have 2 others to take spares from
3. With such little memory it still competes with the fast pentiums
4. The software is free
5. I love it!
I use a tracker editor called OctaMed which can be found all over the web, and I understand there's even a PC version on its way. The UK Octamed site has downloads for Version 4 and for OctaMed SoundStudio, and there's also OctaMed chat and links to other sites. The versions of OctaMed I use are Versions 3, 6, and SoundStudio 1. It's a really good program ... I can create sounds using the Amiga's internal sound chip (Paula), I can load samples of any format (AIFF, WAV, etc), edit them, mangle them, etc and I also control all my MIDI equipment with it.
There is a maximum of 64 Tracks of sequencing, but only the first four can be samples. This is because the Amiga only has four channel sound output - ie it can only output four sounds at once. This can easily be got round by mixing samples together and so on, so if that's something I need then I just mix two samples together in the sample editor and then boost the resulting sample's volume.
I suppose I should add that the Amiga can actually play more samples at once than mentioned above, but this needs both a faster processor and more RAM, neither of which I have. OctaMed SoundStudio has up to 64 channel sound mixing which I imagine is a very strong and unrivalled feature of Amiga music software, but sadly I can't run those kind of features on my machine. Ahh well, never mind, it's fine for what I use it for! :-)
In depth look at my equipment setup