Both sides of the debate offer intelligent points of view, and both are relevant. For example, a single in the box solution would mean one logic or project file (which ever sequencer you use) with total recal, that is a big plus. Learning Windows for MIR is not a big issue, I assume you would just turn it on, start MIR and never touch anything else (if you knew what is good for you) [[:)]]

For elegance and simplicity, an in the box solution is also my preference.

Also, external gear although they are computers, they don't have screens and their jobs are generally simple from a user point of view, I wouldn't count them as the same thing, although your point is also relevant, I mean, if you look at the PC as only operating MIR, then it does in fact make sense that you will only use it for mixing, but there are other practicalities to consider. For example in my studio, i have the keyboard in front with the screen behind that, and the monitors on either side, set up ideally for listening in the room. This is important when composing and putting songs together, but then if I have to mix in a different box, it's going to be in a different location etc etc with a different screen, it would be much more elegant for me just as one user, to be able to just then start MIR and run the mix, hopefully in real time with the sequencer (one day far in the future) but at least on the multitracks as an offline bounce. There is the issue of room - in my studio there wouldn't be any room for another machine and screen. Also, there is the fact of wanting to streamline your expendature on hardware. If I buy a 8 core machine to run VI, why should I buy an 8 core PC machine to then run MIR? I'm going to want to use that same hardware for the two jobs and save money and before you say macs are more expensive than PC's [[:)]] the top of the line Mac is actually last i read slightly cheaper than the comparable Dell machine (current models), and you can run Windows AND osx and OSX with windows apps in paralell all at the same time. So my vote is for a Mac version although I realise the official position is otherwise - never too late to change especially since that decision (I believe) was made during PPC/pre mac intel.

Miklos.

@DG said:

If it has to run on its own machine, then who cares if it is a PC or an Apple PC?

DG

Modern production environments take no prisoners. Having seperate machines is yesterdays news. Why fight with setting up networks or external farms when a single box solution will have the potential to work... and if MIR won't work as an integrated package there will be other options queuing to take it's place.

Julian
Actually if you think about it that's not really true. All studios have multiple machines. Have you never seen all the outboard gear that the top studios have? I'm sure that you have loads of similar stuff in your studio. It just so happens that you don't think of them as computers, but of course that's what they are. I know that you don't want to learn a "new" operating system and would like to run all the computer based stuff from one box, but the reality is that if MIR is so processor intensive this would not be possible if you wanted to do anything else on that machine at the same time.

When Vista is released (and stable) I will probably be as near to doing everything on one machine as ever before, but I'm sure that within a short space of time developers will invent something new that means that it would no longer be possible.

As far as I'm concerned it is not a Mac vs PC issue, it is a matter of practicality. If MIR was Mac only and I felt I needed to get it, I would not hesitate to buy a Mac.

DG

If you start a single project from scratch build it up, mix it, then archive it never to use it again, then workflows can be adapted to whatever set up Mac, PC, external, internal, analogue, whatever. When, which is often the case in my work, you have to bounce between a number of totally different projects that are in parallel development and often have to do remixes, updates, a few months down the line, then having a single file to load that configures the whole system is a massive plus.

You're quite right that this isn't a Mac/PC issue but a convenience/flexibility issue.

MIR may be what could be descirbed as a sweetner tool, I'm sure it will be unique and the best at what it does but, unlike the samples themselves (which could be descibed as origination tools) it will compete in a field already populated by world class proven products that have already helped create some of history's best recordings.

I can understand a complete standalone system being set up to create a fantastic sample machine (Vienna Instruments) but for a post production device that is available elsewhere as a simple plug-in the sell for a devoted system just to run it is going to be that much harder. Therefore the more accessible and user friendly it is for both PC and Mac users the easier the task.

Julian

it is really not a PC vs. MAC question ... it is a question of available bandwidth for several components needed to make a computer work. this starts with RAM, continues over the chipset and various controllers ending at the processor(s) and i'm leaving aside now the slowest of all - the harddisk-part.

every single action on a computer has more or less I/O-operations - read from storage, store data to RAM, read from RAM, load into processor cache, load into processor register, write back to memory, send to (audio-)device, ect. now there are three principles to increase the overall number of I/O operations: increase speed of processor, increase number of processors, increase number of clustered computers - each of them has its pros and cons.

a series of adjustments in computer design during the last years resulted in currently more powerfull machines than we ever had - crossbar technology (ICH-chipsets), larger and shared processor chaches, dual-bus RAM, serial communication (sATA, PCIe), but beyond certain limits it becomes very expensive very quickly. everybody who denies or at least palliates that, is - sorry - IMO a hypocrite.

once we have a really working 64bit multi-processor operating system on the desk developers can adjust their applications to make the most possible use of the offered power and i'm predicting: just to find new bottlenecks. considering the amount of data which is needed to be processed we cannot assume one will see a system running eg. a full symphonic cube (and more) plus an application like MIR on a single system.

and let me add another two points regarding platforms and operating systems:
as soon as we have more power available it will be eaten up by some nifty features no one really needs. just as good as i personally don't need aqua, i don't need the playmobile-appearance of XP and VISTA (the first thing to be switched off after a setup), for some reason the very old and very good openGL idea was ignored, sometimes it actually seemed to be dead and it looks like re-inventing the wheel is the favourite job of GUI-designers.

in the PC world i can run windows95 programs still on VISTA (no matter if i'd even need them or not) but try to launch an application built for OS7 and 68K processors on an ourdays MAC. OS8, OS9, OSX (in several flavours) passed by by as well as the PPC processor. i have still in the storeroom my iMAc 233 from 1998 which was never capable to run more than OS 10.1 - on the other side i have an ASUS P55T2P4 (dual PII 266) from 1997 originally running NT which does - tiring but nevertheless - run windows2003.

so whom should one trust if a decision for a platform has to be passed?
christian

christian you surprise me! you are in fact starting a pc vs mac debate which I won't counter your arguments, which are of course the pc side arguments, and there are many on the mac side, or at least arguments to neutralise some of yours, again I don't want to go into it because it's something that has been running SINCE 1997 all over the net and beyond, and has been discussed and argued to death. As I said, you're the expert, if you decide that it can't be done on Mac or is too expensive or bad for the project, people will trust you decision on that, however, I think backwards compatibility that you have pointed out, at the risk of countering your argument, is one of the great things about mac osx in my opinion, so, it does often come down to a matter of perspective much of the time. I still don't however understand your point on hypocrasy... from reading the thread I think nobody has denied the fact that computers cannot presently run a VI+MIR set up on a single machine, or could in the near future - we're just debating being able to run VI, mix down to bus groups or just audio files, then playback the audio files through MIR with say a machine predicted to be available around January (8cpu machine). In THAT case, it would be good for somebody like myself who would possibly buy such a machine to have it capable of running both VI and MIR on the same machine (but not necessarily at the same time), as I only need then to invest in one hardware box of cpu's instead of two. At least that was my point perhaps it wasn't clear from what I said. PC's and Macs are fairly on par in terms of power and architechture at least compared to PPC Macs, I'm no expert but if you can run most windows apps paralell, that's a pretty big testament to the fact, however, nobody is arguing that MIR is a unique piece of software probably requiring fulll dedicated access to the hardware. Still, my point is simply that it would be better as a mac user to buy one machine rather than two, even if I have to mix down to audio buses or many stereo files than having two machines (in which case I would still need to find a way to send the audio into the pc either via audio files, hard disk or some kind of audio or network streaming,), and although the "single project file" argument seems a small and trite argument on the surface, I think in the real world with how much work people do in audio to be able to save and archive a single project file is really quite a big issue, not just for convenience but also for "backward compatibility" he he. [:D]

However I understand from a purist point of the view the idea is that MIR take the direct output of VI and mix it - that would depend on whether MIR will be designed to run with the outputs of VI being streamed into it over network, or if it will be able to run from audio files generated from VI - which is how I have to mix now anyway.

Miklos.

Command line interfaces are much faster than GUIs. When I first bought a Mac, many colleagues told me that I was getting a "kiddie" computer. They were, evidently, happy typing in codes in Score. Their scores were indeed very beautiful - - although they did not ofer playback. Meanwhile I was struggling with a slow, bug-ridden, early version of Finale - - in which, among many things - - ties did not make it through time signture changes. At that time, Score's printed output was infinitely superior to Finale's. But Score is no longer around while Finale has been vastly improved and Sibelius has come into being. (All those who kidded me about using a "kiddie" computer are now using Finale or Sibelius...)

Similarly, before HTML, the internet was the province of a realtively few people but is now ubiquitous. (Did I mention that Windows was devveloped and became viable during this same period?) It is quite clear that the computer revolution would not have occurred without the development of sophisticated GUIs. But computers are still more difficult to use than would be ideal - - since for the vast majority of people who use them, they are not an end in themselves, but a tool used to other ends. Perhaps the most significant result of the development of GUIs is the de-centralization of power. For example, a composer with relatively little investment can produce scores of very high graphic quality or listen to pretty good mockups of her or his work played by sampled instruments. Not long ago, professional level engraving was the province of music publishers who had made huge investments in the necessary equipment while readings of music required composers to negotiate with and successfully persuade a chain of gatekeepers.

When neither the music font, Petrucci, that originally came with Finale, nor Adobe's Sonata font satisfied my needs, I bought Fontographer and created a music font that did - - something I would never have previusly imagined being able to do. I doubt this would have occurred to me if I'd used a command line interface.

GUIs are going to continue to evolve - - right now there is a lot of interesting work going on in regard to 3D user interfaces where, for example, several programs are open and each inhabits the face of revolving cube or other geometrical figure. In any case, this is not Mac vs. PC issue - it is just the path of development that computers and software are likely to take.

As far as Mac vs. PC all I can say is that I own both. My Windows machine is dedicated to Gigastudio. It runs 16-32 channels of samples - - a little more than 1GB - - (depending, of course on which samples are running.) My Mac running Logic runs 2.5 GB of EXS samples and 2.5 GB of Vi samples simultaneously. At the same time, I can play all those samples (Gigastudio, EXS and Giga) from Finale (running on the same G5 as Logic and the VI instruments) and bounce the resultant "performance" to a stereo track in Logic. MacOSX has NEVER crashed in two years of daily use while performing such tasks - - or any others. The same cannot be said about my Windows machine whose only task is to serve as a platform for Gigastudio.

@Another User said:

If I buy a 8 core machine to run VI, why should I buy an 8 core PC machine to then run MIR?

Because you want to then run MIR!

Frankly, I have a hard time understanding the concern over a product that hasn't even been described in detail yet, let alone released. But never mind that; Dietz and others have already explained that MIR is running ten billion impulse responses at once! How can anyone expect that *and* the whole freaking VSL to run on a single machine?!

We're living in the age of multiple computers. Music software has always been ahead of the machines it runs on, and if anything that trend is only gaining momentum - as cm said in different words. Hopefully 64-bit memory access will make things more convenient so we don't have to use as many machines for loading samples, but what we're doing absolutely brutalizes computers.

Those of us who were doing this in the '80s and '90s are used to having a separate box or even a keyboard to do what a single plug-in now does! As a friend of mine pointed out when I was whining about a fully-loaded Mac Pro costing $5000, a single channel of an SSL used to cost that much. He succeeded in shutting me up.

That's why i have a hard time getting excited if a company announces a really ambitious product that requires its own machine to run on.

***
cm, I hate to admit it, but I *like* all the eye candy in OS X. Of course we don't need it, and it's obviously not very efficient, but I sit and work on these stupid boxes all day long, and damn it, I want it to have a sense of fun and be enjoyable to get around! I like products with a nice sense of design. We're only passing through here for a very short time; why not add some gratuitous rose-smelling to our surroundings.

[:)]

@Nick said:

I hate to admit it, but I *like* all the eye candy in OS X. Of course we don't need it...

I don't hate to admit it. As I tried to suggest above, the whole world we currently inhabit vis a vis computers is predicated on the creation of more and more sophsiticted Graphic User Interfaces. Without these, very little of the software we now take for granted would exist - - obviously including the Vienna Instruments software. These interfaces make it easy for users to access very complex operations that would, if they were available only in a command line interface, restrict their use to a very small group. Along these lines, one of my friends is a computer scientist working on the $100 laptop project (begun at MIT and now backed by a number of governments of developing countries - - http://laptop.media.mit.edu/) and one of his goals (and that of the team of scientists with whom he works) is to create a GUI that will be intuitively intelligble to people who have never seen a computer before. (It is also designed to run off human power - - that is it is equipped with a small generator that charges a battery by means of a crank or foot pedal so that it will work in areas where there are no power lines.) The GUI is not about "eye candy" but about making computers useful to millions of people.

Nick: you misread my post: I said, I would like to be able to run VI and MIR on the same machine, not on the same machine at the same time (at least not yet). That is a different thing. Printing tracks from VI, running them through MIR. I think 10 billion is not the number quoted? or am I wrong? 10 billion?? that wouldn't be possible without at least 20 mac pros running together and would still take probably a week to render offline a 5 minute song. I think, it was said from memory upwards of 100 convolutions at once? That is still a lot, when you consider that a mac pro running altiverb could probably run 20 - 30 before it were totally maxed out... Just guestimating here...

Miklos.

Steven song: good points both on the reliability of windows (as a promise?) and on the gui.

Miklos.

@mpower88 said:

Nick: you misread my post: I said, I would like to be able to run VI and MIR on the same machine, not on the same machine at the same time (at least not yet). That is a different thing. Printing tracks from VI, running them through MIR. I think 10 billion is not the number quoted? or am I wrong? 10 billion?? that wouldn't be possible without at least 20 mac pros running together and would still take probably a week to render offline a 5 minute song. I think, it was said from memory upwards of 100 convolutions at once? That is still a lot, when you consider that a mac pro running altiverb could probably run 20 - 30 before it were totally maxed out... Just guestimating here...

Miklos.

Why would you want to print the tracks before running them through MIR? Won't that mean that none of the VSL meta data is present, so you might as well just run it through any old convolution reverb?

DG

dg: I didn't think of that... [:(]

I guess that means that the only way to do it is with another machine or wait until single machines can do it.

Oh well, as I said, I'm not an expert, I just wanted to make a bit of a case for MIR for mac that's all.

Miklos.

@mpower88 said:

dg: I didn't think of that... [:(]

I guess that means that the only way to do it is with another machine or wait until single machines can do it.

Oh well, as I said, I'm not an expert, I just wanted to make a bit of a case for MIR for mac that's all.

Miklos.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that a Mac version is a bad idea, but it just seems pointless until machines are fast enough to do other things as well on the same machine. If I decide to get MIR (not likely at the moment) I won't care what the operating system is, as I'm assuming that the software for the hardware interface will be fairly intuitive. After all, it's not as if engineers refuse to use large Neve desks just because they are run with a Windows OS....!

DG

Well this is a bit of a trite and ironic argument but.... just to point out again the other factor, that the Mac Pro is slightly cheaper than the Dell of comparable performance (as of the announcement) so price is a factor - at least, if I buy a mac, I know what I'm getting and later when I want to get a better machine for MIR perhaps, I can use that machine, whereas with a PC I would sell it or burn it ... ok I would probably not sell it. [6]

@mpower88 said:

Well this is a bit of a trite and ironic argument but.... just to point out again the other factor, that the Mac Pro is slightly cheaper than the Dell of comparable performance (as of the announcement) so price is a factor - at least, if I buy a mac, I know what I'm getting and later when I want to get a better machine for MIR perhaps, I can use that machine, whereas with a PC I would sell it or burn it ... ok I would probably not sell it. [6]

Actually it depends on which model Mac you get. There is a sweet spot, but some models don't hit it. However, I don't think that cost is ever a trite argument, as there are always better things to spend one's hard earned money on [:D]

To be fair, once more software is ported to the IntelMacs then they will be a good deal at current prices. However, there is no guarantee that the prices won't increase ahead of inflation once the initial cost deal with Intel runs out.

DG

DG cost points - all of those elements and many more are of course in flux in the markets, but I think apple has made it clear that they have an intention to be more price competitive than in the past. Now I'm not going to hold them to that I'm just saying is all. I say trite because the price difference was minimal (so why WOULDN'T you go for the mac!! better OS to start with but I digress) - and also because that price gap could soon close? who knows.

I just thought though, recountering your previous argument... why couldn't VI be updated to print the meta data into the audio files or run some kind of a meta data file(s) when you bounced that would be loaded concurrently with the audio even data on a midi track that ran alongside the audio tracks that would run through to MIR. It would be worth it for the money saved in buying a second box when you already have the CPU's in one box - why buy 16 cpu cores when you can buy just 8 to do the same job? plus the box, hard drive, power supply, etc etc that goes with it (not to mention the copy of windows [8o|]

sorry...i will never handle a project on a PC...it such a pain to work on Window...
no,,no..i am not starting again that old war...everytime..i had to work on window
we just looose time to be a programmer instead of a musician...
you know what i mean Window is a.....sorry not working well for musician on fire
but better for office guys....

Mephisto: I agree man, 100%. I worked on windows for 3 years only because I had no money when I started up my first project studio, went to mac never look back. Despite the problems with logic from apple as the only hiccup - now it runs very well and I would never go back to a PC/Windows setup. Besides that, Macs are cool, I mean it's for me anyway so much nicer to work on a G5 with the alluminium case and a nice big cinema display than a smelly PC, they're very quiet too - and in 2 years I only lost a hard drive (right at the start) covered by apple care. The main thing for me is not having to use windows, that's the main thing, and then the reliability of Macs vs PC's is a big thing too.

@Another User said:

Nick: you misread my post: I said, I would like to be able to run VI and MIR on the same machine, not on the same machine at the same time (at least not yet).

Ah, sorry about that (even though the conversation progressed since my post). Got it.

***
My only real complaint about Windows is that when something goes wrong and it's time to reinstall, you can't just start up from a CD and fix the start-up disk, nor can you replace only Wincows itself - you have to start from scratch with the whole disk, including programs. Everything else I don't like about it is simply a matter of my not being used to it - even though I have three (two working) Windows machines that I use as slaves.

What I like about PCs is that you can put together machines with exactly what you need for streaming samples, and only exactly what you need. And my machines do perform well, so I can't complain about that.

Well at that point, we can't really argue as that comes down to personal preference. The fact is that with the Mac Pro machines, they're already best set up for samples and mixing by the large bus architecture, large shared cpu caches, fast double bus ram, and the abilit to put four large fast sata drives right inside the machine - it doesn't really have anything that you don't need for samples and mixing. Once OSX goes 64bit (and VI) it will be an awesome machine I hope that happens sooner than later (for Rams sake!!). [:P]

Miklos.

@mpower88 said:

Mephisto: I agree man, 100%. I worked on windows for 3 years only because I had no money when I started up my first project studio, went to mac never look back. Despite the problems with logic from apple as the only hiccup - now it runs very well and I would never go back to a PC/Windows setup. Besides that, Macs are cool, I mean it's for me anyway so much nicer to work on a G5 with the alluminium case and a nice big cinema display than a smelly PC, they're very quiet too - and in 2 years I only lost a hard drive (right at the start) covered by apple care. The main thing for me is not having to use windows, that's the main thing, and then the reliability of Macs vs PC's is a big thing too.

Well we all make our choice. I did the opposite and went all PC a couple of years ago as Macs were too slow, too expensive and had that stupid, bloated, unreliable OS. You see, we all have different experiences..! If your PC was smelly you must have been doing something wrong. I suggest that you seek therapy for that. FWIW in a properly constructed studio you probably can't see the case, so it doesn't really matter what it's made of. Did you try putting your PC in an aluminium case so that it would look nice 'n pretty 'n all? You can also get big monitors from other manufactures than Apple, so this is another case of Apple pretending that they invented something. You want another example? Try a mouse with more than one button. Wow, what an original invention [8-)] Regarding quiet, I sent my G5 back because it sounded like an aircraft taking off, and my PC is quieter than any Mac I've ever had the misfortune to experience, in any studio. Of course now that you are all using PCs and Apple has had to admit that they've been lying about the supposed speed of their machines for years and that PCs really were faster maybe these sort of Mac vs PC nonsense posts can become a thing of the past.

The only real point of comparison is the OS; everything else is customisable on a PC, and OS is down to personal choice. All talk of cool, aluminium, quiet is just marketing bullsh*t, and you know it in your heart of hearts [:D]

Now to the serious part of the conversation. If it was possible to print meta data to an audio file, then it might make sense to be able to run MIR on the same machine (but not at the same time as your DAW). However, wouldn't that mean inventing a new sort of audio file? I don't know, but there must be only a certain amount of information that can be included in an audio file before it becomes unreadable by your application. Do you have any information on this sort of thing that you can share?

DG