What do I need to process 24 tracks of simultaneous effects?

[Mongoo]

I want to use a yet to be built computer as an audio effects box. Via the RME Hammerfall HD96/54 I will Either plug 12 in (ADAT) and 12 out (ADAT) or just 24 in and record all to the harddrive.

With 12 in and 12 out at 24bit/96khz, I would add real time audio effects (Maybe multipule per channel) without ever writing to the internal hardrive.

What is important for this to work? I've heard a fast processor, but what about ram? The signal is just passed through the Computer so I don't know whats important and not.


Conversly, If I wanted to send 24 tracks of 16bit/48khz into the computer (add real time effects) and then record those 24 tracks to the hard drive, how fast does my hard drive need to be?


I've been leaning towards a AMD 64bit processor, maybe the 3500, but do you think this will be fast enough? Is AMD vs. Intel a mute point here or is intel better?

Any other recommendations?

Thanks

Mongoo

 

[Mongoo]

I didn't see a sound forum here, maybe I missed it. If so I can move this thread, if this is the wrong place.

 

[erikistired]

be patient. you're asking a specialized question, might take awhile to get a good answer.

 

[sharkeeper]

PCI-X at 133MHz and intelligent SCSI or FCAL HBA would be highly recommended to have glitch free recording at these resolutions.

Use only approved hardware!

Cheers!

 

[Arcanedeath]

I'm not sure how much bandwith each trac takes at that bitrate and w/out that information I'm not sure people can give an accurate rec. for your usage. Although some type of Scsi raid 0 or 5 setup w/ 15k drives might be worth looking into if the bandwith requirments are pretty high (and I suppect they are, so your going to need some serious hardware)

 

[cheesehead]

Although I do'nt know terribly much about music workstations (I learned Cakewalk on a celeron 500 mhz system) for something that can handle that many inputs, I would lean twoards a dualie workstation. 2 Opterons would'nt be a bad idea, as socket 939 is the only way to go for PCI-X. 2-4 GB of RAM is a good, along with a vast number of extremely fast hard drives in a RAID array. You do'nt need a fancy graphics card, though-shoot for a Radeon 9600 or wherabouts, preferably the one with dual DVI.

 

[thirdlegstump]

24 tracks at 24/96 isn't much even to a regular 7200rpm IDE drive.

In terms of realtime effects, raw CPU power is the biggest factor however, you may have plugins that doesn't take up too much CPU but instead takes up lots of RAM, such as software samplers...but most likely we all use a combination of plugins in realworld use so have more than enough for both and unless you're using realtime software monitoring, you don't need to have low latency settings, which exponentially increases the CPU usage and you get closer to 0ms.

A good rule of thumb is increase latency to 45ms or so during the mixing stage and only if you absolutely must monitor live signals through realtime plugins, lower the latency to the point where you see a steady absolute max CPU usage of 60%. Never more than that or else you're asking for it.

For audio, A64 is the ruling beast. P4's also have the denormalization bug which may get really annoying at times.

One other thing, no matter how powerful your system, you DON'T want to monitor input effects while recording 24 tracks. That's just too much work. Monitor them DRY under high latency and then only during playback or monitoring 1-2 tracks, use the effects. Otherwise most likely you'll get dropouts or run into other small glitches.

Hope you understand the difference between live input effects monitoring and realtime playback effects monitoring.

 

[disastinator]

I put together a DAW for a friend a couple of years ago (i845PE based mobo, P4 2.4B GHz, 256 MB Corsair PC-3200C2 RAM) with a couple of RME Multiface units. My friend runs Samplitude on it.

My friend says in practice, 256 MB seems fine and CPU utilization is low when playing 16 tracks or more (he feels he can play up to 50 tracks so long as there are no effects applied). CPU utilization becomes really heavy really fast when processing effects are applied (reverb, Eq, compression, etc).

The question I have is how much of this behavior is due to the RME (which claims "zero CPU load technology") and how much of it is due to Samplitude.

At any rate it would seem that for your application it would be wise to invest on the most powerful CPU (or CPUs?) you can afford than on memory.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: Cheesehead
Although I do'nt know terribly much about music workstations (I learned Cakewalk on a celeron 500 mhz system) for something that can handle that many inputs, I would lean twoards a dualie workstation. 2 Opterons would'nt be a bad idea, as socket 939 is the only way to go for PCI-X. 2-4 GB of RAM is a good, along with a vast number of extremely fast hard drives in a RAID array. You do'nt need a fancy graphics card, though-shoot for a Radeon 9600 or wherabouts, preferably the one with dual DVI.

Correction: socket 940 for dual Opterons. There are no dual 939 pin cpu's. PCI-X is also usually only on dual socket 940 (I have one as you can see, a Tyan 2885) And the bandwidth question is not only about the hard drive speed, but the speed at which the audio card needs to get data from the cpu. A 133mhz PCI-X slot is about the same bandwidth as an 8x PCI Express, and you only get 1x (other than the video slot) on those new boards. It does sound like dual Opterons with 2-4 gig of memory (I would lean towards the 4 gig) is what you need. On the sound card recommendation, thats out of my league.....