Hey Jerome, Im going to New York on Wednesday and will buy or steal one and bring with me home. [:D] So I'll hopefully be back with some test results from my slave in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and that Lemur looks like one of my wet dreams! [H]

Hy Vagn Luv -- where are you from?

Copenhagen Denmark my friend. [:)]

What is the VAT over there? In France, it's about 20%. Everytime I go back for vacation, my friends and family ask me to bring back stuff. iPods, tennis rackets, shoes...

Last time I brought back my old Mac Mini and a 18" screen! No joking.

[:D]

Jerome

Heh, VAT is same here as in France, but also the fact that the Euro is currently strong against the dollar makes it very favorable to bring back nice fancy toys from the states. [[;)]]

Hey guys -- just wanted to say that if you were interested in the whole "Mac Minis as VSL Farms" concept, I've written three articles on the subject.

They are available on my (new) website, here : http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=7">http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=7

Please let me know your thoughts, comments and suggestions!

Jerome

Thx Jerome, I have already been at ur site for the read. Great Lego StarWars movie. [[;)]]

All that remains for me now is to find a working KVM switch for the Minis, and think I have digged up every single brand and unit out there available. Problem is I dont know if they will work without flaws or if they will drop the VGA connection as reported. Any of you managed to find a purely DVI based one?

You can find DVI switches, but they're very expensive; buying two 4-port DVI switches is basically the price of a Mac Mini ! [*-)]

J.

I can tell you about the IOGear 4-port Miniview SE that I used for a couple of years: it works really well with Mac and Windows. The only problem is that it switched horizontal and vertical ball-scrolling on the Mighty Mouse. I used it with a PC mouse that had a scroll wheel rather than a scroll ball.

So, here's the latest update on our setup. I consider it to be 95% finished now. Here's where we stand :

78 "instruments" / 872 articulations loaded at all time (about 18 GB of samples)

No performance issues.

The setup is based on the following slaves: 8 Mac Minis (2 GB) and 2 Powermacs (4 GB)

Jerome

Hey Jerome:

Two questions:

1. Do you have backup power "just in case"?

2. What other considerations do you have for the remaining 5%?

Cheers
JWL

We have a backup Mac Mini in case one of them goes down. Also, the whole library is on an external, 750 GB hard drive, so that we can reinstall it quickly if needed.

The remaining 5% are for a small bug that I've been trying to fix for some time: notes are dropping off when being played the first time. They work fine after being played once. It only seems to happen on the Mac Minis where the samples are streamed off the hard-drive.... so I need to install an external hard drive and see if the problem still happen. Until this thing is fixed, I have to consider it's only 95% operational.

Jerome

Jeremoe

re: the first note bug. Are you using the mini's in OSX as I still cannot get the VI to behave without drop outs under OSX. WinXP is fine. I have used external FW400 drives and the internal one and still get this problem.

Why not try a bootcamp mini (you would need to use MOL if you aren't already) and see if you get the same issues.

Best

Tim

Timkiel > are you using Logic ?

Jerome

@Jerome said:

We have a backup Mac Mini in case one of them goes down. Also, the whole library is on an external, 750 GB hard drive, so that we can reinstall it quickly if needed.

Hey J--

I was thinking more in the way of a power outage if you keep these machines running and loaded around the clock. But, if you're setup for quick reloads anyway, I guess that's the wisest thing one can do.

We have three APCs for the whole setup. One of them can hold up to 2200 W, we use it for the Quad and the two Powermacs. Another one has up to 900 W, we use it for the mac Minis.

The third APC is used for all the gear (audio interfaces, firewire drives, etc).

Jerome

Jerome

I'm using Cubase for the DAW and plasq rax for the mac mini's.

[edit - I lost some of this post and am fixing it before reading Jerome's response]

Have they improved? Last time I checked the UPS couldn't handle a single Mac with two hard drives.

That aside - and I'm not trying to sneer at Jerome's set-up again, because I'm willing to be convinced othewise - my argument has always been that if I'm working at the machine, I save subconciously every single time I do something I don't want to lose out of habit, so the APC shouldn't be necessary; and if I'm away from the machine, I've already saved anything I want.

But I do have my computers on two (or three) reasonably good power strips in series, and my audio equipoment is plugged into a fused isolation transformer box.

When a big power outage happens (and in California it happens fairly often I'd say), I don't think it's good for the gear to be shutting down like this. I think it's a pretty good idea to save your work and shut down manually all your equipment in the ± 15 minutes you have before your APCs run out.

But of course, saving is done (and should always be done) on a fairly recurrent basis.

Jerome

Yeah, it's better to shut everything down smoothly. But in reality we've all had to shut down machines badly lots of times, and I've never heard of a computer getting damaged that way. I suppose a split-second power outage - i.e. the power shuts off and back on before the power supplies' capacitors have had a chance to discharge - could cause hard disks to lurch. But that seems like a long shot.

And I think power outages are really pretty rare here - like once every couple of years. The big crisis was 2001, five years ago. But you can also trigger circuit breakers in your house if you have too many gadgets on, in fact I think that's a more serious concern. I had a separate circuit run into my room several years ago, mostly for that reason. (The other reason was to isolate it from bad stuff like dimmers and the refrigerator, but I'm not sure that really works.)

But I could also be wrong about power outages here:

http://www.latimes.com/business/local/power/la-me-dwp8nov08,1,5300638.story?coll=la-headlines-business-power

Anyway, sorry about going OT.