i'd say on the mac side of life this is the ideal machine as long as you hold sample data on an internal drive ... though i personally consider an 8 core as overkill for VI you might want to use the remaining CPU power for convolution or something else ...

also as a personal view i'd prefer a PCe soundcard opposed to some firewire device, my favorite would be apogee ...
christian

Thanks Christian..... I understand what you saying about over-kill. I'm thinking that I can load all the samples I need for a composition without having to freeze or ram optimize improving workflow. Additionally, I should be able to have a few instances of Altiverb without killing my CPU.... I wasn't sure about the 64 bit machine running VI.... Thanks for your input.

Chuck Green

don't forget the machine *supports* 64bit and whereas some parts of OS X also do, the user interface (framework) does not ... and also VI is currently still 32bit.
this means: directly within logic or cubase you will be limited to 4 GB of RAM usage (in fact 3 plus something), but if you have more memory available you could run additional stand-alone instances of VI. AFAIR up to 7 GB usage of RAM has been confirmed.

to be even more specific: logic could address 4 GB (eg. for audio and EXS instruments), the VI AU plugin another 4 GB (related to the vsl-server solution running as seperate application) and if enough RAM available anothe VI stand-alone addressing another 4 GB. just consider the setup might need some technical skills ...
christian

Thanks Christian for the clarification. I was planning on purchasing 16GB RAM so that it would take awhile to out-grow the system. That being said, once VI goes 64 bit, I'm assuming the 3+ GB limitation will be lifted correct? Also, if using Altiverb 6, will that plug use part of the 3+ GB or will it have additional available to it?

Chuck

not sure about altiverb's memory usage now ... maybe maya has details ... i'd assume any memory altiverb needs (and this shouldn't be too much) adds to logic's portion.
christian

just to remind you,
Altiverb6 does not work with Cubase4 on Macintel.

http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Altiverb/AltiverbTech.html

Thanks for the reminder Abel. I appreciate it!!!

I have a 8 core mac with 9GB of RAM and here is what I was able to do

I set up a large orchestra, all VI including Elements and two Kontakts. A total of 24 instrument plugs ins and I also had 4 altiverb 6 instances running, all in DP 5.

And I had no problems at all, somehow, I know people say that DP can't use more that 4GB of RAM, but my activity monitor said that I was using 7.8 GB RAM and around 30% CPU!!!!!

So go for it, it weas the reason I purchased a 8-core.

@Simsy said:

II know people say that DP can't use more that 4GB of RAM, but my activity monitor said that I was using 7.8 GB RAM and around 30% CPU!!!!!

Just so you're clear, no application on the Mac which threads at 32-bit can access more than 4GB of RAM. DP is one of many such apps. It's the way virtual memory pages streaming sample data from your hard drives in and out of DP's 4GB which makes a big difference where using more than GB is necessary for other processes.

It's not as if you can load all 7.8 GB of data directly into RAM. Part of that data is loaded and the rest *streams* as needed.

DP is probably using about 250MB with nothing loaded. The rest of the data are sample references.

just to get it totally clear ... and right:

each 32bit application (be it on the mac or elsewhere) can access and handle an address space of 4 GB. thanks to the design of the Vienna Instruments using vsl-server as seperate application you can access seperate memory space besides DP, kontakt's memory usage adds to DP though (as *true* plugin*)

VI is usually stable up to 3,5 GB, OS X itself will need around 0,5 GB i'd say and the rest is assigned to DP then.

an application and an operating system which is using virtual memory is not usable for audio, especially audio streaming. why: it wouldn't make any sense to load samples (or sample headers/buffers) from the harddisk to another space on a harddisk and from there to memory or processor. this would only be of any advantage for applications like photoshop or similar.

in fact this is one of the few problems with OS X, that even if memory is marked as *wired* OS X sometimes decides to page it out (move data to virtual memory = pagefile on your system volume) so giving you some crackles when played the first time.

the wording *sample references* would more accurately describe the information which is found within EXS instruments, where the references describe where on your computer the samples can be found. exs (if set to streaming) loads about 128 KB sample header for each referenced sample into (physical) memory though (in analogy this applies to kontakt programs)

christian