PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I am a touring hardware man who recently converted to software. The VSTi stuff didn't even come close to my Hammond Leslie,Oberheim,ARP,Kawai MP-9500,D6,EMU, setup.Then I heard a demo/master,where the keyboard player was using a Scope/Gigastudio 2.54 DAW.I then contacted him and paid him to let me play his rig through my barbetta's and leslie. Needless to say I immediately had a rig built for me. My question is since I play live, I'm really having trouble with load times,i.e. projects, and samples.Would the new Gigabyte i-ram help me with load times? I'm almost ready to start using the rackmount DAW live, but I'm still nervous. Any thoughts on this Solid State product.

4U rackmount
Supermicro P4SCT+II
Intel P4 3.4GHz Northwood
Kingston ECC/Unbuffered DDR 2GB
Scope Professional ( My new love! )
Matrox G450 32MB
WD740G x 2 ( Raid 1 for GS3 samples )
WD360G ( Gigapulse )
WD360G ( O.S. + APP's )

P.S. The B2003,Minimax, and Saturn ( for my Expander sounds) are practically indistinguishable on A/B scenario.God I love Creamware.

hi, just wanted to welcome you aboard!

Thank You,
I only hope I can contribute like everyone else on this sight. Hopefully,I can suceed in my live endeavor and pass on any tips along the way.

Yeah I look forward to the day when I have a live act together so I can use my DSPs on stage. I decided not to sell my Magma chassis for this reason

off topic; u dudnt play base before did u? does "the magicians" ring a bell?

I wouldn't overestimate the PCI-disk performance for this special application.

the PCI card is not a part of main memory in context of clock and data throughput (CPU access)
it has no DMA, but rearranges bits to move as a disk controller expects them (lots of overhead)

according to my memory Gigastudio 'load-time' depends on the complexity of sample programs, not on their respective data volume.
I'm not sure if the 'pre-load' action or the arrangement of data in memory is more demanding.
In the first case a memory disk could indeed be significantly faster as there are no mechanical parts involved.

you already have a RAID system to improve disk performance.
the thing is limited to 4 GB, which could be a limit (?)

anyway, even if $60 isn't exactly cheap for a disk controller, it's still interesting.
In fact thanks a lot for the hint, as it seems the perfect solution for my no-moving-parts programming workstation...

cheers, Tom

Astroman,
Thanks for the reply. I was actually wondering if it would help out the DSP board. Giga doesn't require any help, for I preload an entire show , and only use a little over 1GB out of the 2GB of RAM. I'm still green on how Scope uses main memory and CPU cycles.

Well, if it's the Creamware setup that you have a problem with, an easy but not exactly cheap solution is to simply buy enough DSP's to load all the creamware-plugs you need.
Look at Ebay, used CW-cards are not that expensive any more.

for a Scope 'live' application it might be worth the expense if you consider to reboot the machine in a very short time.
Other than that there's no use for it.

SFP uses the main CPU just for loading the DSP code from disk to the chips AND for the user interface. The graphic programming is not very effective, a common experience with cross platform systems.
For a 'life' application it almost doesn't matter at all - you're probably not going routing while playing

the PCI bus is only a concern for very long delays and high quality reverbs, like SpaceF's and in particular those by Warp69 (distributed by SonicTimeworks).
But I doubt anyone in the audience could tell the difference to a less demanding reverb
(there are pci-light versions of all)

the PCI bandwidth as discussed (frequently), may yield a wrong impression about it's importance - 4 hiQ Lexicon processors (simultaneously !) aren't the typical 'budget' studio equipment

cheers, Tom

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-07-29 16:22 ]</font>

Astroman,
Thanks for the info. I bought the P4SCT+II because the Marvell SATA routes all HDD activity through the PCI-X, leaving the PCI for Creamware only. I don't think I need more DSP cause I only need the card for B2003, mixing, and certain FX, which can be brought in and out with buss muting.I only need tape-delay,chorus,phasing,etc. for FX, the GS3 does all resonant body, and ambience, while the MPX-550 handles all other reverb.
I understand the nature of the DSP's now,thank you astroman. I won't be needing the solid state drive ( i-ram ). I'm always preparing for the live catastrophe that so far has never happened. Creamware's GSIF 1.0
drivers, although not GSIF 2.0, work without incident. I will stop tweaking shit, and shutup and jam. I guess the world of software is going to have me nervous for a while, that is the nature of the beast.