Quote:
Originally Posted by charles maynes  People have said that hardware based systems were the way of the dinosaur, but at the end of the day, the hardware systems simply get the job done today, (or as far back as 5 years ago) without having to compromise with tracks being frozen, etc. |
You know, I'm getting most of my work done without freezing/bouncing these days already, too.
Admittedly, I'm not a producer and/or mixer, but I only have a mere Macbook, too. In case I owned a Mac Pro, I probably wouldn't even know on what to spend all that extra CPU juice.
And while you're correct that hardware systems get the job done, that doesn't change much with the fact that they're not exactly needed anymore already. And it's not as if the situation was stagnating, native processing is still improving a lot - there's true 64bit systems to be ready for prime time use any day soon, there's more CPU cores to be utilized and there's probably even some proper "multiple machine CPU load distributing" scenario being developed right now.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against folks going the PT route. Whenever I worked in some PT equipped studios, it has been quite unproblematic. Things usually "just worked".
But that doesn't change much with the fact that native solutions will catch up in serious ways.
Take me as an example. I'm a guitar player. I have a fine amount of guitars and amps (plus some mics to record them). All quality stuff.
And while I love my amps to bits, the last paid "studio" jobs I did (it's a little different for live gigs, which is what I mainly make my living of) were started and finished in an entirely native setup.
To be more precise: When I've been on tour last winter (a shitty Abba cover show, better don't ask for details - at least it pays rather well) I received a call. "Could you record some guitars for me?". I said "yes, but you will probably have to wait for the final takes until I'm back home" - simply because I didn't even believe it myself that the results I could get out of my Macbook, a FW interface and several amp simulations would get the job done as good as possible. After being done with those takes (that I really thought would not be the final versions) I received comments such as "kickass, and the sound is just great!". And it's not as if those folks were rather unexperienced with guitar sounds, more to the opposite.
As said, I was absolutely unsure myself, whether these takes (which I always thought of as "previews") would really cut it. But all too apparently, they did. So the native system actually got the job done.
Well, just my personal experience.
- Sascha