Hey Dave:
Yeah, the site was down from this end, too.
One other little trick with solo strings is to pull the filter down a bit. It's nice to have a little "bite", but for that less obvious "rougue" player or two, a good low pass works wonders on solo strings tucked into the section. If you wanted to get complicated, have two solo instruments per section-- one to add a little "point" where needed, and the other to represent the 7th stand player who didn't do so well in the concert master audition.
My G5 2.5 dual has 4.5 GB RAM. DP doesn't see anything over 4 GB, but I'm not maxing out DP just yet. I really don't know how the Mac actually uses additional RAM-- if having 8 GB will help the performance or not. Clearly, if one is running VI as both a plugin concurrently with VI Standalone, the benefits are clear. You've got 4 GB for each processor with some consideration for the OS to take up some of that. I'm still suffering from the OS9 mindest, and my first instinct for years has always been to max out the RAM. The one benefit is that RAM for older Macs is cheaper than it was. Maybe going full wack is not a bad thing, but the few people I know with max RAM are experiencing other problems which RAM hasn't solved. My Quad friends are asking the most questions about this, although they are experiencing other benefits not RAM related.
I just read that MIR has to process offline because computers are just not fast enough yet to do everything in real time. This is frustrating. I'm tired of buying new computers which can't keep up, only to see a newer computer released weeks later that don't solve the problem either.
I'm seeing a few more "helper boxes" like these:
Native Instruments KORE
http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?kore_usWaves Nutshell
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/APA44/
Muse Receptor
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Receptor/
Focusrite Liquid Mix
http://messe.harmony-central.com/Musikmesse06/Content/Focusrite/PR/Focusrite-Liquid-Mix.html
Virtual instruments in general reduced studio clutter, but continues to easily overwhelm computers. I'm still not convinced that AU is as efficient as it might be. I think the VI team has made the best use of AU I've ever seen. But these "helper boxes" might take considerable load off our current CPU's-- moreso than with UAD-1 or TC Powercore. While some are touting forthcoming brilliance with Intel Macs, I've always seen Apple's improvements as being in small increments, however innovative... 1.8-2.0, 2.5-2.7. My favorite was 867 "up" to dual 800!!
Sub-bass:
Beat Kaufmann works on a PC, but posted this on his site regarding cinema bass:
http://www.beat-kaufmann.com/tipspcmusic/vslacoustics/index.php#53248296fa00f2a1e
I'm still not clear on how this is done, but it seems that it's added synthetically. Some type of harmonizer might work best for this instead of pitch shifting an audio track or needlessly boosting EQ on the low in where it doesn't belong. One might make a copy of the contrabass and manipulate it, but that doesn't address the overall low end of other instruments-- tuba, contrabassoon, perc, etc. Not sure what the best way might be, but if I sort this out I'll let you know!
In any case, Beat's tutorials are brilliant-- there are mp3's demonstrating "before and after" effects. You may want to go through all of his tut's because he gets into some serious basics and more with mixing sampled orchestras-- specifically VSL. I love his comments about how something like Altiverb can take the "point" off of the timp when it's placed further back in the orchestra-- and how to compensate for transients lost for the sake of stage placement.
Back OT-- I was surprised to have had a pretty good day, technically speaking. Granted, I was doing projects with Vitous Philharmonik, but I was able to load in a few instances of VI. DP reconciled the bit depths quite smoothly without anything special needing to be done.
No crashes to report, knock wood!!