I keep hearing that the best pc these days is a MacPro running Windows. I read (most of) the long Mac vs. PC (VE Mac 64bit?) thread last night and started to draw some conclusions. It looks like development for the Mac platform is a bit of a challenge, due to circumstances beyond VSL's control. On the other hand I've invested a lot in VSL products, and am really interested in seeing a return on that investment. If switching platforms gets me there I'm happy to do that, but I don't want the hassle/expense if it's no better. Here's my situation, I hope someone can shed some light...
I bought a MacPro (2x3GHz Quad-Core with 32 gigs of ram) specifically to be a standalone VE computer. By running multiple standalone VE's I have been able to get quite a large orchestra loaded, but I've had a few issues, and I'm beginning to suspect they're caused by running VE in OSX. I'm using VE version 2 with MidiOverLan and lightpiping the audio from a MOTU 2408 to my host TDM system. I tried version 3, but had the same problems, plus I don't want the processor hit on my host computer that running several of the plugins would cause.
I've been slowly setting up the MacPro over the past few weeks, building custom matrices* for each instrument, and the two main issues I keep finding are:
1) Instruments seem to get to a "full" point, where they won't load any more samples. Once this happens I can't load any more samples into any instrument. The matrix/patch data will load, but not the sample data. This is nowhere near the 2.5 gb limit. For example, I have one standalone for violins 1 & 2, with 236mb of Appassionata violins in 1 slot and 150mb of Orchestra violins in another. That's 386mb altogether, but I can't load any more into this without getting the problem.
2) I get little clicks, which sound like sync glitches, but are not - my MOTU interface is clocked directly from a Big Ben. I think they are some sort of processor protest, and I can make them go away by simply saving a few times on any of the instruments.
Total RAM usage of all instruments so far is 7385Mb, and the memory free shown is 21246. I should be able to load a lot more samples, but keep running into these issues, along with an extraordinary amount of hangs and endlessly spinning beach balls. I'm tired of repairing permissions every time I sneeze.
So - will I be better off installing Win XP Pro64 on this machine and running it as a pc? If so, will I need to re-install the entire library to a pc-formatted disk? And if that's necessary, what will I gain by buying a 10,000rpm disc (or two, since the largest I can find is 300gb)? Also, will I still be able to open the matrix etc. files that I've made so far in OSX? Are there any driver or other issues I'm likely to run into?
I can't be the only person trying to do this with a MacPro. What does everyone else do?
* As a side note, I'd be interested to compare Matrices with anybody running a similar setup. Let's share ideas on how to get the most playability out of this amazing library.