@Guy said:

Ok, I'm becoming less ignorant by the post. But since I want to not wait too long before making my purchase and be sure to buy the needed hardware, I'd like some realistic advice for a proposed budget. This is what I was use to: G5, Logic and VSL. But now I want to buy the Complete Orchestral Package and I have no sound card. My budget is $15,000.CD tops.let's: $13,000 USD, (stupid canadian dollar!) For the moment I'd rather stick to one computer but have it working well enough to not give me TOO much trouble with saturation problems. If I could reach 80 or 90 tracks live, that will be pretty good for the moment. I would really appreciate some suggestions giving me basic specification on what to order or buy in that budget. G5 dual 2.7? new dual core? Ram? Soundcard?etc.

Guy

Just one more thing to confuse you. If you a certain that you are going to do everything on one computer then it might be worth converting your solo samples into mono as that should save RAM. This way you will be able to get more instruments and articulations at a time, assuming that your Mac is fast enough to cope with all this.

DG

Okay! Okay! Okay! You've convinced me, there's no way aroud using 2 computers/gigastudio for my needs. I'll have to take your word for it, I doubt my paperboy will know about this... BUT if I start with my initial idea, 1 computer and as powerful as possible I could always add gigastudio any time, right? And all I'd have to do is buy a PC (any specification for the PC?)
and make the connections, right? Is this complicated to manage or install?

@Guy said:

BUT if I start with my initial idea, 1 computer and as powerful as possible I could always add gigastudio any time, right? And all I'd have to do is buy a PC (any specification for the PC?)
and make the connections, right? Is this complicated to manage or install?

Why would you want to do that though Guy?

Why waste time with Gigastudio if you're going to get a G5 2.7 with loads of ram? That's starting to get unnecessarily complicated to me.

And why GS - why not say, Kompact?

@Guy said:

Okay! Okay! Okay! You've convinced me, there's no way aroud using 2 computers/gigastudio for my needs. I'll have to take your word for it, I doubt my paperboy will know about this... BUT if I start with my initial idea, 1 computer and as powerful as possible I could always add gigastudio any time, right? And all I'd have to do is buy a PC (any specification for the PC?)
and make the connections, right? Is this complicated to manage or install?

Of course you can add as many PCs to your system at any time you like. The only extra potential expense is that you will also need a sound card and of course GS itself, but once you have that you can get site licences for additional PCs. Then, of course, you will need to buy a side licence for VSL, as I doubt that the conversions will work too well due to the complexities of VSL mapping. However, if you're not intending to use any of the Performance instruments GS might just do the conversions adequately.

GS is not complicated to install, and as long as your PC is set up only to run it you shouldn't have problems.

DG

@PaulR said:

And why GS - why not say, Kompact?

I assume that you mean Kontakt; Kompact is a different beast from the same zoo [:D]

The downside to K2 is that the Pro Edition is not available, so for Perf instruments one has to do conversions.

DG

Thanks Paul.

Because nobody yet told me that with loads of RAM I will be okay. If only one person could testify to that I wouldn't hesitate, but I have no guarantee that it will work fine, maybe it won't be able to process it fast enough... Would you know for a fact that I'll be able to easily manipulate 80, 90 or 100 tracks all in RAM? That's really my concern. Many people have said that using 2 computers is the solution. But maybe with the dual 2.7 it will be different, I don't know...

And do you think I should wait for the new dual-core, will that make a big difference?

Just to add: I will be using lots of performance instruments and pleny of articulations.

Thanks again guys, very helpful [:D]

Guy

@DG said:

I assume that you mean Kontakt; Kompact is a different beast from the same zoo [:D]
The downside to K2 is that the Pro Edition is not available, so for Perf instruments one has to do conversions.
DG

Yep - brain fart on my part right there Daryl. [:O]ops:

@Guy said:

Thanks Paul.

Because nobody yet told me that with loads of RAM I will be okay. If only one person could testify to that I wouldn't hesitate, but I have no guarantee that it will work fine, maybe it won't be able to process it fast enough... Would you know for a fact that I'll be able to easily manipulate 80, 90 or 100 tracks all in RAM? That's really my concern. Many people have said that using 2 computers is the solution. But maybe with the dual 2.7 it will be different, I don't know...

And do you think I should wait for the new dual-core, will that make a big difference?

Just to add: I will be using lots of performance instruments and pleny of articulations.
Guy

Actually, a forum pal of mine emailed me from America yesterday with this very question. Hmmmm. That's a difficult one.

Nick Batzdorf is the guy who really helps me when I'm in trouble over this stuff, because like you, I am a computer moron and too lazy to get to grips with the technical side of things - because like you, I had a guy who did all this for me. So, like you, I now have to learn all this from scratch in some ways, which is a royal pain.

My 2 cents at the moment would be Guy - if you are in a hurry and can't wait, I would maybe go for a 2.7 with as much ram as you can afford (but see later at the bottom) - things may change when Logic is updated and can see roughly more than 3.4 gigs - BUT - this may only be applicable to Logic, when Apple bring out the new sort of hybrid processors maybe sometime next year - maybe. [[;)]]

Another good pal on this forum, Strawinsky was telling me the other day he was going to get the new duel core that is due out imminently - I forget how many Macs he has at the present. [:D]

Guarantees is word I've tried to avoid most of my life - but I would imagine you will want to build a large template. A lot of the members do this I know - like Evan Evans for example - but 80 to 90 instruments? I don't know about that. I don't ever use a template personally, maybe I should, but I don't get hung up about reality and articulations as much as the others- maybe I should.

I would wait for the duel core if it was me and not in that much of a hurry - but maybe the other guys can jump in of they read this.

Well, I'm hearing good things about the new dual core, good thing I still haven't bought my computer yet, I'm pretty much set on it now.

Template. [:D] I think it's something you eat.

Template! [*-)] No, it's a car model.

Template? [:O]ops: Maybe it's a plant...

Template #!@%?? [:'(] It's not a fast tempo?

OK! What is it? [8o|]

Preconfigured setup with the most needed articulations and your tracks ready to load. Just to save you time on choosing those patches and be ready to compose once you booted.

I suspected it was something like that. Thanks.

My recommendation I'll try to not confuse you like some of the other posts confused me... youre question was simple enough how do I go about buying all this stuff...

Obviiously you want a mac (good on you...)

the 2.7 is the way to go, don't get a slower machine than that, 4.5 gigs is plenty - they come with 2X256 RAM sticks, buy another 4X1gig sticks. Later, you can ditch or sell the 2X256 sticks, and buy another 4X1gig sticks. The reason for this, Logic will probably be updated to access a lot more ram in the near future, I'm guessing in the next 12 months. For now, 3.5-7 gigs is actually the tops as has been stated, however, if you have a external SATA RAID system, with about 4 fast drives (at least 7200 RPM) you can set you virtual memory in EXS to use more drive swapping than RAM, increasing then number of samples you have in memory. Also, you can freeze tracks if you use a RAID system of another 2 or 4 drives you should be able to freeze at least 64 stereo tracks for play back, plus have around another 64 stereo EXS instruments running in realtime, for a total of 128 stereo EXS tracks. If you freeze an instrument that you are not altering particularly a legato performance instrument, it unloads the sample from memory and just reads the audio file from disk - very handy. What this means is that you can do a lot with just a single system, and personally I just have one system for samples and sequencing and it works great and my system is only a 2.0ghz not a 2.7 so you should have no problems running all that. Bear in mind with the dual core: 1. you can buy the exisitng machine cheaper when the dual core is release, 2. there will probably be reliability issues in the first 3-6 months with a new processor with a very different design - does anybody know if they will be able to make use of the dual core with logic straight away or will that require an update?

As for purchasing, I recommend you go to 3 different music shops, and give them your list of the things you want, G5, Logic Pro extra ram, raid systems and say what's your price for this. Choose the one that gives you the best price AND service and seem like they know what they are doing and do this kind of thing all the time. With the raid system, do some good research into what is good can't help you there I don't have that yet.

Miklos.

mpower88,

This is great, many thanks!

I must admit that I'll have to digest it slowly, a few things are a bit fuzzy to me. But this seems like an excellent post to my question and as it becomes clearer I'll probably get back with specific questions. [:)]

Guy

mpower88,

I'm tempted to wait for the dual-core to be released and get that since I haven't bought it yet. Would that be wise? And would it have big advantages?

Is the way to go with "Logic Pro 7" for film scoring, compared to "Logic Express 7". Or do they both have the same essential fonctions and the rest is gadget like?

Guy