I'm Giving up and in.

[sleepwalker]

Originally Posted by remo

as is Samplitude, Sonar and SAW Studio... and welcome to Voxengo plugins!!

I'm sure there are heaps more...

Exactly. I "switched" to MAC, but it's not like I won't have at least 2 PC's at all times. Frankly, I don't know how any studio could not have at least 2 boxes of each type.

[sleepwalker]

Originally Posted by stag

In your opinion, i guess. btw have you read the forum rules? Is it okay going into a apples thread and brag abourt my fanless, 4xQuad CPU little machine?

No. I haven't read the forum rules. Everything I state is my opinion. I assume, it's assumed.

You're certainly welcome to brag about any computer you own.

I'm a MAC AND a PC fan. I use both extensively and have a lot of advice to offer for either platform.

In all fairness, my experience with OS9 was with Vision DSP and Cubase VST32 and it wasn't good. The G3 days were bad. That's all I can say.

[sleepwalker]

Originally Posted by manning1

water...

4. make sure you have a power supply that doesnt puff out as you add peripherals in the future.

Can't underestimate the power supply in a home built PC. Also, get samsung or crucial ram. Cheap ram can bite you in sneaky and not so sneaky ways.

[Blackwater]

Is it true that CD Architect doesn't do VST???

Thanks,

Chris

[Joseph Hanna]

Honestly the overall "landscape" of Mac's and PC's has changed SO dramatically over the last several years I'm surprised this isn't discussed much.

Here's what I mean.

I'm a Mac guy. Have been since day one. I love my Mac's but........

Looking back I bought a beige G3. Great machine, lasted forever, outlasted all of my friends PC purchases by years, ran like a top, was a solid and wise investment and I was sorry to see it go.

Bought a G4. Even better machine, ran flawlessly for a solid five years, virtually everything you could ask for in a computer and as far as longevity out paced PC's embarrassingly. To this day I still use it as a server. Yet another great investment that out paced the upfront cost.

Bought a G5. Well built machine and I didn't have a lick of problems with it. I was however SHOCKED to see in a very short period of time ( considering all the Mac OSX operating updates) how quickly the machine had become antiquated. I got a year and a half at best before there was a Mac available that was MUCH better equipped to handle both the current operating system and my software in general. A $3000.00 machine put to rest in less than two years.

Looking at the current quad Mac's. Roughly $5000.00 to $7000.00 and a future of OSX updates that'll make this machine look slow in a very short period of time.

So I started to research PC's. A quad core PC can be built for around $1600. A friend has one and runs Pro Tools LE with mind boggling results. Mind boggling.

Will it become obsolete quickly....ya of course. But $1600.00 vs $7000.00 is a whole lot of upfront value.

Makes me think the game has changed....yes?????

[manning1]

joseph.
re your last line.
spot on.
imho by the end of this decade, us musicians will
feel quad cores are kinda novel/antiquated even.

imho this isnt the decade for makeing 7k investments in computers unless
one owns a high revenue produceing studio where its a drop in the bucket.
due to rapid obsolescence with i expect more and more cores coming.

the prudent person might even consider buying a quad pc el cheapo used
once octos come out in big volume.
then a used octo once 16 cores come out in volume...
then a used 16 core once 32 cores come out in volume etc etc.
see what i mean ??

the above is prolly gonna be my strategy for limiting money spent in the next ten years.

[mdme_sadie]

Um, well not really, no-one forces you to get a top of the line mac to make music with, there are lower end options. It costs the same to make a PC that is in fact equivalent of a Mac Pro or one of the workstation Dells (though don't forget that you should never buy ram or HD's from Apple, and you get free support with a vendor such as Apple or Dell).

Really it's the opposite way that you're viewing things.

The PC was far in advance of the apple very shortly after the G3, and it kept improving, thus newer models mean if you want cutting edge, more upgrades. Meanwhile Apple kept on with the same chipset and didn't upgrade for years! Same deal with G4's only by now Apples were falling way behind and what's worse they put in a fan that sounded like a damn vacuum cleaner. The G5 comes along and by this time there's so much heat dissipation from this really very slow chip that they have to put in a watercooling system to get the thing to work, so the noise issue is gone, but you've still got a slow machine with very big gaps between Apple actually producing updates, good for those that like to stay at the cutting edge of a particular line, bad for those that like to have actually cutting edge kit.

Meanwhile PC's have been busy updating all the time even when they already have much faster computers than Apple does. So now Apple does a very astute thing and ditches the whole IBM/Motorola chipset and switches to Intel just as Intel pull out in the lead by a huge margin in terms of power consumption and architectural superiority and speed over rivals AMD.

The new Macs are in fact just PC's with a couple of extra ROM's and very high quality parts, you can run OSX, Linux, Windows on them natively with full support, and compared to the cost of making the same thing yourself they're a good deal. Yes they're still workstations and thus at the top end of components, meaning you suffer all the problems of diminishing returns for how much you pay, just as with any other high end workstation PC, but if that's what you want then they make as good of a deal as anything else.

If you either put together a PC or buy from a vendor, or even buy a Mac there is no good reason you could not still be using the same machine 3 or 4 years down the line with absolutely no problems. If you desperately need to have the best of the best then Apple are still running a slightly slow update cycle (faster than before though), but in general with any PC you will find that upgrades come thick and fast and leave you with substantial holes in your pockets.

BTW Intel have said they want to have 32 core by the end of the decade, the issue though is how multithreading friendly are the applications that you use. So far not a lot really does take full advantage, especially with regards plugins, and there is virtually nothing in Audio utilizing 64bit architecture even though that's been out for years. Software has a fair bit of catchup to do to the new architectures (and there comes a point currently of diminishing returns with that too, while you may see a 1.8x speedup with 2 cores, with 4 you only see around 3.2x in general every day use, the big bottleneck right now is RAM rather than the CPU).

[Joseph Hanna]

Originally Posted by mdme_sadie

If you either put together a PC or buy from a vendor, or even buy a Mac there is no good reason you could not still be using the same machine 3 or 4 years down the line with absolutely no problems.

I certainly agree in principle with most of your content however....My G5 simply can not handle the current crop of soft synths I use for composition.

I could still use it but not without paying the price of a horribly slow machine.

I could of course invest in a new quad Mac and have NO doubt it's every bit as fast or more so than a quad core PC. It just simply doesn't make as much sense as it ALWAYS has in the past.

A composer friend of mine had a quad core PC built a few weeks ago for just at $1600.00. His Pro Tools comp rig simply flies.

I don't really like where things are going and perhaps it's a tale of The Emperors new Clothes but as I see it I need to invest either $1600.00 or $7000.00 to get up to par.

Right now $1600 looks..............more better

[mdme_sadie]

Well unless you're using NI stuff it should be able to handle things fine, if you are using NI stuff then that brings even an 8 core system to it's knees, especially as their stuff last I checked only really makes use of a single core (though maybe that's changed). There is an issue that the G5 was essentially underpowered anyway all through it's life in Apple products compared to Intel/AMD chips so even a very low spec PC is going to kick its ass (sad but true).

BTW I'm not sure where you come up with the $7000 figure from on the Mac, as far as I can see you can pick up a quad core mac pro from $2200 (quad 2.0, quad 2.66 for $2500), you don't need anything but the stock graphics card, memory & hd's you should buy elsewhere (for less than half the price), hardware raid is nice but perhaps unnecessary, perhaps apple care but that's about it, the machine apart from that is good to go with all the connectivity you'd want or need.

[astronmr20]

I'm running B4 and Acoustik on my G5 Dual 1.8 w/ Logic 8... no problem! Ram is 3.25.


Although perhaps there are NI apps that eat more resources.. I don't know.

[clonewar]

I've got the parts for a quad core pc build in my Newegg cart and its just over $1000, and that's with a high end mobo (Abit IP35), 4 gigs of Corsair XMS2 ram, two SATA hard drives (750 gigs total), a Zalman cpu cooler, oh, and an NVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB video card (for when the mood to play Crysis strikes!). I would reuse the case and power supply that I already have, which is one of the things I like about building my own pc's.

That said, I'm waiting a month for Macworld SF to see if an updated Mac Pro is released. I want the ability to take advantage of 16 gigs of ram on my DAW to use my huge sample libraries without having to deal with farm machines, and the Mac is the way to go for that setup right now.

The biggest problem with the Mac Pro right now is that its extremely overpriced. It was a good value when it was first released. The whole 'Its the same price as a Dell' argument doesn't hold water any more. You can reference my system build price above.. or you can just order a quad core Dell tower for $899 (which I still wouldn't recommend).

And here's some food for thought: Right now on Newegg, a 2.66 Woodcrest Xeon (dual core, the ones used in the Mac Pro) is still $735. A 2.66 Harpertown Xeon (quad core) is $529! How is it possible that the older dual core is $200 more than the new quad core? I think its clear that Intel is artificially keeping the Woodcrest cpu's price inflated for Apple, so that people don't freak out paying $2500 for a box that has two $200 cpu's.

So, long story short, we should see 8 core Mac Pro's soon for the same price or less then the current quad cores. Really, they should be less, because when the Mac Pro first came out the 2.66 Woodcrest was over $1000. So that's $1000 less just in the two cpu's. But of course we are talking about Apple...

[manning1]

clonewar.
believe it or not ....
i really DO SEE why people want to address large amounts of ram
for samples etc.
conceptually ...in theory....its a lovely idea to have a totally "soft" computer.
with copious large orchestral collections/libraries/samples etc easily "on tap".
i would love the same thing.
luscious orchestras n violins n various sample collections at my disposal.
but what has kept me away from doing this is the practicalities.
as well as cost.

ive just seen too many people try to shoehorn this need into often underpowered
computers and have never felt that personal computer architectures
have reached a level of maturity yet to give us musicians this nirvana we seek.
ive seen too many people run into issues just running a few softsynths with largeish
trak playback counts.
the point being oodles of tasks place considerable resource demands on any
computer hardware. while at the same time playing back lots of traks n fx plug ins.
it will surely get there, but i dont think now personal computer architectures have matured enough. ie..more blinkin power is needed imho.
just my opinion. cos the ability of an OS to address copious amounts of ram is but one
part of the issue. there are many others.
i'm sure some will disagree however and feel just more memory is the solution.
(i'm talking bout things like memory speed itself as well as internal computer pipelines/architectures and their speed etc.)

[clonewar]

manning1, take a look at this thread from the East West forum:
Some really good news regarding memory access with PLAY - Soundsonline-Forums

Their Platinum Pro orchestral library is one of my main tools so this is very big news for my setup. When it comes to audio recording and mixing, ram is not an issue, but working with these huge sample libraries is a completely different thing, its ALL about memory access. CPU isn't the bottleneck with large sample libraries, its hard drive speed because most of the samples are streamed from the hard drive. Having the samples loaded in ram dramatically increases the number of samples you can use at the same time.

My dream system has always been one that will allow me to run my entire templates from my main DAW, without having to use farm machines, and I'm very very close..

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by chymer

Man, get SOUNDSCAPE and be done with it ok.
Mac vs PC....who gives a toss.
get soundscape....
Chymer

Originally Posted by chymer

Ok, so its not a stereo editor.....
Chymer

Another vote for Sound Forge -- but then I've never used Wavelab, so my insight's value is probably limited.

That said, I find that I rarely have to leave Sonar Producer for most stuff. I have EQ and compressor plugs I really like. Sonar's got sample-level editing. About the only thing I usually even open up SF for is getting the stats on a given file or to get the advanced control over burning a CD one gets in CD-Architect. I really like SF's Statistics report -- gives you a good overview of the file. But I don't actually work songs in SF, as a rule. All my DIY mastering goes on in Sonar, most times.

[manning1]

clonewar.
i gotta say that east west orchestral library product looks dam nice.
i can see why your excited mate.

yes its hard drive performance that also worries me.
on that quad build of yours i would be real curious how that works
out. viz a viz..
for example how many sample traks will you be able to play back with other
normal multitrack audio tracks.... like lead vocs/various rhythm traks which have been recorded ?
nice link...kudos.