Build one super-daw?

Well you probably know what I'm gonna say.

Essentially for me a Mac G5 Dual w/10K Raptor in Drive Slot #2 and a 7200rpm firewire 800 drive (or two) could handle most of what I would throw at it: VSL, QLSO, Altiverb, Powercore Compact, UAD-1, and a good assortment of sample libraries and effects.

But-

Add a VisionDAW PC into the Mix as a 2nd computer and you can do a lot of damage using Giga or Kontakt. (The VisionDAW has 3 SATA ports so essentially you could have 2-74gb 10k raptors plus the app drive.)

you really need dedicated sample playback machines to run things like VSL, QLSO and a number of other libs simultaneously.
The main issues are PCI bandwidth and HD amount/speed. Even if you get a machine with 16gb of ram, you'll run into serious problems with harddisks, if you want to work with a template (and therefore need to have a lot of things loaded and available at the same time).
The amount of harddisks required to allow flawless streaming, would fill up your daw really quick (noise, heat problems), you would need additional HD controllers (which again sit on the PCI bus - but then your soundcard should have most of the pci bus to itself). CPU power is another issue if you wan't to use things like gigapulse for each section.

To summarize, you'd not get done setting up and troubleshoot that single daw setup within a few years.
A multi-machine setup with 1 sequencing/mixing machine (i.e. the DAW), and as many rather low level (pricewise, compared to the daw) gig boxes, which is way less of a headache and more scalable (you want to add samples to your template.. you can easily scale your setup, but try that on a single monster daw which already operates close to breakdown).


Markus

Hi Markus, interestingly enough, I was reading the thread on the Nuendo forum you mentioned and it seems that some users are getting 300+ tracks of audio (I realise this isnt the same as sample streaming) on one machine.

I already run a multiple computer setup over gigabit lan and will be building a dual CPU system soon as a host machine. But when I was reading the performance specs from some of these guys I was starting to wonder if one machine might not be able to handle most tasks.

I agree with you about the issue of adequately streaming hundreds of voices from one computer, but with SATAII around the corner and in a RAID configuration, a one machine "SuperDAW" just might become a reality. One potential problem might be running Giga3 on the same machine, but these days I run all my libs out of Kontakt or dedicated playback engines anyway.

Also, I wouldn't want to wait 30 minutes to load my sequencer each time I go into a new project, because I am running everything locally And what if the sequencer crashes? 30 minutes load time for all the samples again. No thanks, I prefer having it spread out on a few machines which hardly ever crash (GigaStudio).

Good point. Also, I would have a hard time not using at least two computers to spread things out as well plus more articulations online.

You all make very good points. :wink:

I'm still building my DUAL CPU host, but wont go so far as to sell the slaves. :lol:

I've got a VisionDAW of doom (RAID Raptor drives, 3.4Ghz, 2 gigs RAM etc) and it runs pretty much everything I want too... as long as the EWQLSO Gold orchestrations don't get too thick. There are times when instrument voices will drop out if I have, say, 18 tracks all playing at the same time. Other than that tho, I'm pretty happy. And I can always bounce. With a PowerCore complex things get even more possible with one machine... once they get convo verb in there.

Scott Cairns said:

You all make very good points. :wink:

I'm still building my DUAL CPU host, but wont go so far as to sell the slaves. :lol:

Click to expand...

And to think they've abolished slavery....

Gosh, I meant no offense by that remark either... my sincere apologies if anyone took it the wrong way. :oops:

Heh - Scott, I was just kidding! I have a VisionDAW as a slave to my G5 so see? Hypocrisy rules I suppose..