Quote:
Originally Posted by escape  It only needs one shortsighted CEO who thinks "never change a winning team" and why spend all that money on research when it only cuts into my bonus to make digidesign gradually join the ranks with NED Synclavier, Akai samplers etc. |
Pretty much exactly. As said, just ten years ago everybody laughed about native processing. Then there came Gigasampler, usually still requiring a separate machine to make good use of it, but that started a revolution in terms of sampling. These days, apart from probably seeing some live useage, all hardware samplers are more or less gathering dust (unless they're occasionally used for some more or less esoteric and unique features that can't be found in software land).
I'm not very familiar with PT, but from what I gather, just two HD acceleration cards will set you short the same amount of money you could as well get an Octo Mac Pro for. And I'm absolutely positve that the latter will offer more computing juice.
Now let's assume that one day the node concept that is already existing for Logic will be a little easier to deal with (there should be some automatic switching, so all "non-live" tracks would automatically be "noded", and there should be no need to install your 3rd party plugins on the node machine, either, the latter should simply just add to the computing power via some ultra-fast data transfer protocol), then you could as well just work with a "farm" of computers. And with some proper freezing implemented, you could as well just take huge projects with you on your laptop.
IMO that's pretty much the direction things will take.
Also, it's not exactly as if us audio folks would really need more than the processing power of, say, 2 octo core machines. And that very same power will be available in a single box more sooner than later. Look at something such as IR reverbs. Not even 10 years ago only the folks owning the most sophisticated machines could run one instance of Sonic Foundrys Acoustic Mirror in realtime. Usually you simply had to make it an offline process. Today I can run several instances of Logics Space Designer on a mere Macbook. I can as well run over 1000 sampler voices on it. Or good sounding EQs and comps on each and every track. Etc. Native processing has really come a long way and once certain issues are weeded out (such as stable low latency operation at high CPU loads, something Logic is already fairly good at), I fail to see why anybody would really want to deal with all that extra stuff (and money) external DSP solutions require. Assuming there's the same set of plugins, you can give me *any* Logic project and I will run it on my Macbook. Yeah, I will have to do some freezing or bouncing, but in the end the session will run for sure. My entire studio (ok, minus proper monitors, minus a bigger MIDI keyboard and minus an option to record more than stereo signals simultaneously) fits in a single backpack. I just *love* that.
As said, I have already been recording guitar tracks (that I've been paid for) in whatever hotel rooms late at night. People were even asking me which amps I was using because they liked the sound a lot. I have also been mixing, monitoring and recording live gigs with a single laptop and an RME Hammerfall only (not even the drummers (good drummers that is) complained about monitoring latency, I could run the session at 64 samples, resulting in something a little less than 5ms of overall system latency), using Logic and a hooked up Behringer BCR (to quickly control some levels and FX) for everything. Mind you, that was back with a 1.86 GHz Centrino Samsung and with Logic 5.5.1. My Macbook has around 5-6 times the CPU juice (in some areas even a lot more).
Native processing is the way things will go, IMO there's absolutely no way around it.
- Sascha