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  4. MAC Mini's and VI

  • MAC Mini's and VI

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    Anybody at VSL have experience of running the VIs on the MAC Mini - it is potentially cheaper and more scalable to run multiple MAC Mini's instead of 1 or 2 Quad Processor G5 MACs.

    Have any of you considered it - or is the MAC mini to low spec?

    Cheers

    Tim
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    @timkiel said:

    Anybody at VSL have experience of running the VIs on the MAC Mini - it is potentially cheaper and more scalable to run multiple MAC Mini's instead of 1 or 2 Quad Processor G5 MACs.

    Have any of you considered it - or is the MAC mini to low spec?

    Cheers

    Tim


    If cost is the thing, why not use multiple PCs?

    DG
  • S
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    Hey Tim, supposedly the Mac mini might go Intel at the January expo. I'd wait and see how that pans out before making a decision between Mac Quads and Mac Mini's. No need to go the PC route and burden yourself with Windows and lame PC hardware.
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    Quite right, you wouldn't want ot get stuck with lame PC hardware like, um, an Intel chip [:D]

    DG
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    [:D]

    However, I quite like the idea of Mac Minis. They are near silent right out of the box and remote controllable via apple remote desktop. Plus they are small, cheap and stackable... I guess finding simple firewire or USB2 ADAT interfaces could be more difficult though.
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    What's a Mac mini?
  • M
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    here you go

    http://www.macmall.com/macmall/families/macmini/
  • N
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    I haven't tried it, of course, but the present Mac Mini seems very unlikely to be a good machine for anything that happens in real time. It has a slow hard drive. More importantly, it holds 1GB. That would leave maybe 500MB for the Vienna Instrument if you're very lucky. And then there's no extra RAM for OS X to breathe, so it's going to use virtual memory (i.e. the hard disk) for caching.

    The Vienna Instrument won't be happy with that going on.

    Plus the economics don't add up, by the time you've brought the memory up to 1GB and stuck a Firewire interface on every one.

    According to conversations I've had and also one of Herb's posts yesterday, one G5 and one other machine is probably enough to run an orchestra.
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    Thanks Martin I'll have a look.

    Nick I have a PC (P4 3.4 ghz) and Dual 2.7 Mac. You're saying that will do the trick? I was thinking maybe I would need another G5 to have a large orchestral pallette or at least get away with lots of universal modes loaded. What's Mr VI say about this VI setup?
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    >>
    Quite right, you wouldn't want ot get stuck with lame PC hardware like, um, an Intel chip >>

    Will we have to stick with those comments when VI is released or can be get a separate VI Mac and VI Windoff forum? This would be another deal breaker [:)] (just half kidding but also a bit concerned. Everywhere you look at mixed forums about software - Ableton or so - you NTSH/Windows-users seem not to be able to live with people that use other OPERATION SYSTEMS (not hardware! - NTSH: Never the same hardware.)

    I also think that RAM is the main point - you can add a FireWire HD. And also it has no Gigabit ethernet for streaming audio over the network (wich should be sufficiet for composition and playback). So you have to add a Firewire interface too. It becomes more and more expensive.

    Anyways, will the VI be coded in 64bit on MacOSX to access more RAM ( so around 12 GB [:)] )

    Best
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    @steff3 said:

    >>

    Will we have to stick with those comments when VI is released or can be get a separate VI Mac and VI Windoff forum? This would be another deal breaker [:)] (just half kidding but also a bit concerned. Everywhere you look at mixed forums about software - Ableton or so - you NTSH/Windows-users seem not to be able to live with people that use other OPERATION SYSTEMS (not hardware! - NTSH: Never the same hardware.)

    Best


    What? I think that you'll find that it's the other way round. Try reading the thread [8-)]

    DG
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    THanks everyone. I'm a lame PC user at the moment, but the MAC Mini looked very nice, is small and silent and would look very good stacked on my desktop where there's not much space for full blown PCs or MACs.

    As an aside is the new Quad G5 64bit comaptible then - steff mentioned using up to 12GB of RAM which surely would be enough to host the whole Cube on a single machine - esp with 4 processors in it?
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    Well, I mentioned it - but be careful with that please.

    Normally GUI-software does not support 64bit - as GUI-programs cannot do it. So it must be a server-client connection between the interface and the processing. I do not know if VI can do that. (It would be nice programming thou and could also serve to control the VIs on other computers from your main computer)

    Maybe you can make use of 12 GB by running multiple instancies of VI - hopefully.

    But yes, and with the DualCore RAM getting cheaper and cheaper, may be definitely interesting.

    also the S-ATA drives should be mentioned of course.

    best
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    Mr. DP Con, my idea is as good as yours at this point - it's just speculation. Even what I said about Mac Minis is just educated speculation.

    But my thinking is that if the new instrument can play twice as much as the old one, then a loaded G5 + a 2GB Windows machine is (extrapolating from what I read here) about 3-1/2 Giga machines' worth of VSL.

    However, if that post is conclusive (I forget which VSL person it was), I'm surprised that the disparity between a 2GB XP machine and a G5 wih 4GB isn't larger than an extra 50% in the G5. With other software the difference is about double in the G5.
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    And how outragreous of you to ask, by the way.
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    I think you pretty well in the ballpark there Nick as far as I can tell from the VSL posts. The benefits of the new VI are indeed outrageous.

    I'm guessing Virtual Instruments Magazine will have a paragraph or two on this little dandy in the near future?
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    Wrong and outrageous as usual. The issue that's just about to go to the printer has a page on it.

    [8-)]