SCOPE 64 Bit beta..........?

[dehuszar]

...I suppose. But being able to load the entirety of a BFD2 kit into memory and still have LOTS of RAM left is appealing. ESPECIALLY if you want to do the same thing with Ivory or a similar plug.

I used to have a K2500. It's pianos were nice, but not as realistic-sounding as a plug like Ivory. In a mix you might not 'hear' the difference, but when played alone they're useless in comparison to some of the newer piano sample plugs. Having a mix drop down to a solo piano immediately exposes those old banks as crappy wavetables even if Kurzweil made the best of 'em in a small package. And to me that's an unacceptable compromise.

I'd rather go through the hassle of booking a room with a real piano and bring the audio back to my sequencer if I'm forced to make that much of a compromise in quality. Except if 64bit drivers were available, I wouldn't have to go that route.

I've hit the RAM ceiling a lot using Ivory and BFD2. If there are excellent piano VSTs out there which are far more svelte than Ivory, I'm all ears, but personally, I'd never go back to an old Kurzweil wavetable.

My $.02
Sam

[astroman]

Sam, I see your point as a piano player and I wouldn't suggest all and every piano has to be a 1.5MB sample set
sorry to make this somewhat long-winding, but with every instrument there's what you play alone (or rehearse) for yourself and what you hear of it in a mix.
Referring to that old Korg example it might very well sit a 100 times better in a mix than a giga-whatsoever-piano.
I'm very very picky with my bass sounds at home - I have a top preamp and can sense even the slightest touch and articulation of the strings.
But that's all in vain when it comes to put it in mix (no band currently). Noone is interested in the details unless I'd record a pure solo performance.

Back to the piano a huge sample set is supposed closer to reality - which is complete BS imo.
Sitting in front of a grand or upright and comparing it to it's electrical counterpart one must be deaf to not notice the missing resonance of the complete thing.
Samples cannot cover this, they can only fake it partly by adding reverb or a pedal-down sample.
It's actually a very simple test anyone can do at a musicstore.
Anyone who doesn't mind this difference is a fool to intend on a huge sample set for realism sake.
If someone prefers the latter for a matter of taste, well - that's perfectly ok.
But then there is no need whatsoever, it's just personal preference - like the color or wood finish of the instrument.

There are quite 'realistic' physical models of all kind of pianos.
Whether they generate the base sound from small samples or a synthesis method doesn't matter.
These pianos are in an objective way 'more realistic' because they react similiar to the real instrument.
In any case they don't need more than say 128 MB of memory to perform their job.
That's why I consider 1-12 GB sample sets not only sick but also a naive surrender to marketing - if someone argues with 'realism'
Only then... if someone says: that's my sound - perfect

imho one can apply the piano example to any sampled soundsource - it's (realtively) cheap and easy to produce...

cheers, Tom

[dehuszar]

they don't need more than say 128 MB of memory to perform their job.
That's why I consider 1-12 GB sample sets not only sick but also a naive surrender to marketing

I think this is where your argument breaks down.

First off, the sample libraries tend to be huge because there are a variety of instruments in a given library to select from. With BFD2, I can create utterly convincing drums by using a huge variety of samples, but no one bank is much more than about 1GB in size, and the majority are around 750MB. There just happen to be a dozen kits I get to choose from, swelling the overall size of the library.

Saying that no one needs more than 128MB to perform their job is like Bill Gates asking who could ever use more than 64k of RAM. It's totally absurd. Samples don't have to sound perfect, they just have to not feel cheap. In my experience, 128MB sample banks sound cheap because they take simple samples and pitch-shift them to cover the key-range. This produces lots of tones that don't correspond with people's memory of how the instrument sounds therefore sounds 'cheap'.

Sure a lot of 'semi-pro's' waste a lot of money at Guitar Center on hyped libraries with a bajillion gigs of samples that they'll never have a use for. But the TV and Movie industries live or die by the quality of these samples. They have to convincingly produce an emotional response out of their audience on a shoestring budget, and I can guarantee you any 128MB string library will sound cheap and amateur next to some of the larger sample libraries. That's not to say that there aren't some real bloated stinkers out there, but that particular market didn't just spring up around suckers.

The level of quality I get out of BFD2 literally gets people asking me who did the drums. Using other drum libraries of a variety of sizes have not produced the same results nor offer the same conveniences. But those conveniences and gains in quality take up a lot of RAM. Reasonable people can argue about whether or not there are efficiencies to be made/gained from a slightly different approach, but right now the easiest/cheapest path for the industry is to utilize more RAM now that 64bit systems are becoming more commonplace.

I could just as easily complain that Windows doesn't need to use as much RAM as it does to perform it's job, but I don't have much control over how Windows operates except through some marginal tweaks around the edges. I could 'do my job' with Windows XP, except the amount of effort required to keep it from eating itself or getting eaten by outside attackers makes Windows 7 a better choice in spite of some trade-offs in efficiency (although Win7 is great, don't get me wrong).

My life, and lot of other people's musical lives will run a lot smoother if I can load 2 GB of samples and not be competing for headroom with the OS, Ableton, (and lets face it) SFP's access to the memory bus which I need to get my reverbs, which with one spike in RAM usage could bring a session crashing down.

Using 64bit address-space to throw more RAM at these tools may be a brute-force approach to the problem, but it's also the easiest/only solution out there given the virtual pianos, strings, drums, and the like that are out there and the expectations of quality required in a lot of environments. Find me a piano library which sounds as good as Ivory and only takes up a couple hundred MB of RAM, and I'll take her for a whirl. But I haven't found one yet.

My $1.50
Sam

[menno]

eh, sorry to sound a bit flat on this one, but 64 bit isn't any revolution at all...

Well, it doesnt need to be revolutionary, but I would like to use more than 4GB of RAM in my PC, whether it be for music apps or other applications, and I need Windows 64 bit for that.

[MMC]

My reason for 64 Bit is the common use of the SCOPE Platform (Pulsar II / Scope Home with 9 DSPs) with Adobe (using the Matrox RT.X2 Hardware).
I am switching between Music, Music-Editing and Video-Editing with the complete Adobe Production System (CS4).
As the Sound-System I am using Scope for Adobe too.
So the limits of the 32 Bit affects more the Video-Section than the Audio-Section (Adobe uses the advantages of 64 Bit in the Version CS4 very well yet: in using RAM and processing!) and I don't have to use seperate Systems for Audio / Video that is not the solution if one of you want to suggest me that!!! And it is much more expensive to build the 2nd powerful System and it is stealing my time when I have to move the projects between two systems... and some programme-licence twice...
So it is much easier to upgrade the one system from 32 to 64 bit. It uses only 1 licence of Win7 and a re-install from 32 to 64 bit once! The 8 GB are already installed (you asking why now? Simply follow the price of RAM modules since last autumn... )
BTW: I am also an IT service provider, so I know the advantages between the bits (by experiencing every day with a lot of PC's), be sure!!!

[astroman]

c'mon Sam... 'sounds cheap because it doesn't correspond with people's memory about how an instrument sounds...'
most people (today) don't even have an idea about THAT
I'm not talking about hard dying classical lovers who'll never accept anything but the real MacCoy
which is down in the concert hall and nowhere else - seriously, I know an opera lover who'd never even think of watching that on TV

I also don't mean a GB collection of different instruments recorded in different environments, which a drum sample lib is
Of course it can save you tons of recording gear.
But in the end you hear only that single hit that you choose, not the 500MB of it's rejected compagnons.
You don't have to preload all stuff, but you're absolutely correct about the 'more simple' programming approch

To argue with Hollywood needs is a bit cheap - who of us is in charge in that domain ?
Most folks just record their bands, their compositions...
Ok, some might feel great about having an orchestra at hand, but then... regarding 'realism' demands...
they couldn't handle it anyway, because they are not educated to do so. It is ridiculous to feel a personal draw back out of that situation...

As this seems to go a bit into the wrong direction (and as already mentioned)
there ARE a bazillion more important things to do for a company like Sonic Core to improve their product

non-64bit won't stop 98% of SC's users from doing whatever is their kind of music
and not a single one out of this crowd will produce anything 'better' because there is 64bit

I've listened to tracks by people done with Scope and those folks made the impression to be pretty demanding regarding their tools...
Nevertheless there were (imho) occasionally even better results by some 'competitors' from the native domain.
It's not the tools, but how you use them.

Of course I know that Sonic Core is bound by pure marketing demands to deliver that sh*t...
so the system can keep running in a braindead operating environment.
I only wanted to mention that 'wait' is a nerd's problem - not a musician's

cheers, Tom

[menno]

I only wanted to mention that 'wait' is a nerd's problem - not a musician's

cheers, Tom

If everyone was like you we'd still be banging rocks together to make music!

[dehuszar]

To argue with Hollywood needs is a bit cheap - who of us is in charge in that domain ?
Most folks just record their bands, their compositions...

..you mean besides Hans Zimmer?

Remember how Sonic-Core is positioned, and has positioned itself. To be a piece of high-end, uncompromising gear. To be able to play alongside other production tools the way ProTools can IS important. I do a lot of work with video producers and when they run batch renders in Final Cut, having 8GB of RAM instead of 4 saves them half a day. Guess what else they do? Record in Ableton and Logic. Should they have to buy two machines just so they can use SonicCore's cards? Doesn't THAT seem a little ridiculous? These guys aren't Hollywood, but they're not far away. More than anything, they're PROFESSIONALS, and they need to have certain tools work a certain way in order to express themselves in a way that gives them a creative edge over other folks in the field, even if they are using the same tools.

If the goal of SonicCore customers is just to record their band, then why wouldn't I be okay just getting a USB M-Audio box instead of getting an X-Cite. Using your logic, shouldn't I be able to get by with my Scope and Pulsar II cards? I can always just use less voices and the lower-DSP compressors and delays. No one will 'notice' in a mix, right?

Obviously I find tremendous liberation and room for creativity in the SFP environment and get access to a huge sonic landscape that most folks don't have access to. ...that is until I run out of RAM and everything starts stuttering because the system has to start falling back on hard disk paging. But really the goal is not to make something 'good enough' where no one will notice the compromises I've made, but to make something exceptional, where it makes you FEEL something. Sometimes you can do that with just an acoustic guitar. Sometimes you want to layer things up. But each layer has to reinforce that feeling in a convincing way for the song to work.

And I don't think it's cheap to want to compete with Hollywood. Some of the biggest block-busters in Hollywood were done by the aforementioned Mr. Zimmer with old Creamware cards in conjunction with.... [wait for it] GigaStudio. And at the time, in order to get the sound-scape he needed, he had like 5 computers all maxed out with GigaStudio and SFP. Now, we can get all of that horsepower on one box. But only if we can get past the 4GB address space limitations.

There are a lot of folks trying to get into writing music for TV and Movies, and if they can't do it using SonicCore devices without having to buy 5 machines then they'll buy something else. ...and then that makes your argument kinda circular because then, indeed, who among us will be in charge of that domain. If SonicCore doesn't make tools that serious people can use, it will never be used seriously. It's not just an issue of marketing. I'm not sure why you get stuck on that.

Anyway, I think I've made my point well enough, and for what it's worth, I take your point and on many levels agree with your desire for more efficiency than abuse of horsepower. But I feel like in many ways you're fighting against the windmills. A change in drivers opens the platform up to be used alongside a HUGE and ever growing number of tools in the same single-computer environment, and once that bridge is crossed, we won't have to worry about changing to 128bits (at least not for memory addressing) for quite some time, but there will always be new bugs. It's a comparatively small fix for enormous gains.

And even though some fools won't buy the cards unless there's a 64-bit or a 50GB of awesomeness sticker somewhere on the box, getting those dollars in helps to fix the other issues, and fund future innovations. In this case it also happens to be useful and not just marketing fluff.

Cheers and good tidings,
Sam

[MMC]

Yes... You are all working for years with S|C's Software. Also I am working for 10 years. But in these years the developement of windows and other Software (including Cubase!) didn't stop until now...
It's OK, when you are working with your system so long you can.
But there are several musicians or Multimedia service providers (like me) where systems are upgraded from time to time...
64 Bit will be the future. Why do I have to stop at 32 Bit because some of you are pleased with Win XP at 2 GB.
Try multitasked Premiere Pro with After Effects in CS4 then you will understand that NOT ONLY A SAMPLEPOOL is the only one cause for it...

[astroman]

of course 64bit will be The Future
raising funds and protecting 'territory via bloating up is the way to go
you may call it an 'upgrade' if you like...
but I've had enough opportunities to watch Adobe (and it's products) from a tiny company to a multi-billion $ corporation
they are way less smart than you assume - in technical terms, not financially

cheers, Tom

[astroman]

... And I don't think it's cheap to want to compete with Hollywood. Some of the biggest block-busters in Hollywood were done by the aforementioned Mr. Zimmer with old Creamware cards in conjunction with.... [wait for it] GigaStudio. And at the time, in order to get the sound-scape he needed, he had like 5 computers all maxed out with GigaStudio and SFP. Now, we can get all of that horsepower on one box. But only if we can get past the 4GB address space limitations. ...

I assume that you know the original GigaSampler was a very effective solution to (nearly) unlimited memory in a small adress space
Gigastudio then started to blur the concept by putting too much redundant stuff into it.
After all crackerz brought the company down.
As mentioned above the lesson has been learned: you can't copy-protect anything at all.
The only effective way of protection is to mega-blow it up and try to achieve the 'standard'-position by all means...

cheers, Tom

[astroman]

...Why do I have to stop at 32 Bit because some of you are pleased with Win XP at 2 GB.
Try multitasked Premiere Pro with After Effects in CS4 then you will understand that NOT ONLY A SAMPLEPOOL is the only one cause for it...

if you can afford a full Adobe Creative Suite, it should be easy for you to treat Scope as an external mixer-processor in a 2nd box (in case you have a serious need for Scope specific processing)

not that I want to suggest anything related to your personal choice
But this is the only reasonable business decision in this context. Period.
If you want all in one box and wait for beta stuff, then you ARE a nerd.
If we're talking money an RME 24 Adat channel thing in a neat PC case is all it needs and can be had for just 1 grand.
So wtf are you talking about ?

cheers, Tom

btw regarding to your stoneage comment above:
in 1985 I saw an Apple macintosh in the local store, I had read strange things about in a mag and curiously entered the shop.
a dude introduced me to the machine and it was like BAMMM
THAT was a revolution and I wanted to be part of it
2 weeks later I started my new job in exactly that store.
I've seen it revolutionize a lot of things, since then...
we've introduced it in Fortune 500 companies here against serious resistance of the established IT departements.

Windoze (any version) is a technological yawn at best and OSX a resurrected dinosaur, probably...

[dawman]

I am looking forward to having more RAM for access to more libraries.
They are really becoming ridiculously large, most of them can fit into the 3GB PAE footprint, but not all of them.
This is where the choice for 64bit comes into play.
I actually wanted to go the 64bit way until I atually saw a 16GB machine struggling with load times and gagging just trying to get 8GB's out of the 16GB's for RAM buffers.
These apps are just not designed well yet and take forever to load up. It can be done, and I have heard how Mac guys are getting 18GB's out of 24GB's etc. But that particular RAM is ECC hot swap, and is painfully slow for streaming.
You won't get more polyphony but you will have eveything you want loaded.
It is very unstable and I wouldn't dare add excessive waiting times just to have to re boot because of a hiccup.........
In the future when developers actually re compile their apps for 64bit instead of this cheezy bridging, I will consider it.
Steinberg, and Spectrasonics are the 2 that are way ahead of the rest on this. Apple/Logic is stll catering to the iPad and graphics crowd while Emagic probably fights for a few extra r & D nickels.....
The fact is that there is no money in it for deveopers as we are a small crowd compared to gaming and HDTV. So until they actually are re compiling for 64bit so the RAM can be used in a feasible way, I will just use 1U DAW's that are cheap. But I will use 64bit so I can access 5 to 6 GB's of RAM.
ANything more than that is asking for massive delays and the destruction of any common sense workflow.
As it is now, I can load everything I need for Jazz, Classic Rock and the usual R & B stuff. But I need another 1U which I am building as we speak, for Orchestral Strings and Percussion. If I need both I can run them in 32bit XP until I feel comfortable.

[dehuszar]

if you can afford a full Adobe Creative Suite, it should be easy for you to treat Scope as an external mixer-processor in a 2nd box (in case you have a serious need for Scope specific processing)...
But this is the only reasonable business decision in this context. Period.

Why would you assume that? First of all, I know of 5-6 video and audio shops in Chicago (won't name names) which don't have valid licenses on ANY of their software because they had to drop it all on their hardware. Some just steal for the sake of it, of course, but even for those who really want to push their game ahead and be legit while doing it, most can't afford anything BUT CS4 if they can even afford that. So in that context, you really need to get every bit of muscle out of every penny, and having to buy multiple machines and all the additional costs that go along with that is quite frequently a non-option.

In fact, given the state of the economy, the strength (or should I say weakness) of the recording studio / video production studio / graphic design / animation studio economy, and the vast majority of creative types who are going our own way on creating our own studios, what your suggesting is an UNreasonable business decision. I'm not trying to pick on you or be a naysayer, I just haven't seen what you're suggesting play out in any practical way in my experience.

That level of financial stability doesn't exist until you get to the upper echelons of small businesses (nigh on medium sized businesses).

Most of the creative shops I know of are at most 10 people and have a razor-thin budget. And the developers making the software/hardware are a small team with a razor-thin budget. And to expect or insist that the entire industry will put more investment into leaner better code instead of externalizing the onus onto the consumer to buy an extra 2-4GB of RAM for a marginal cost is silly.

I would love a revolution in the market, but in the meantime I just want to get my work done without having to f around with a bunch of different boxes and their associated costs and maintenance. I use Linux for everything but audio work and browser testing because I don't like working with or paying for Windows OR Mac, and I'll go Mac for audio as soon as SonicCore releases OSX drivers.

I've got my laptop set up to triple boot Win7, Ubuntu, and a Hackintosh partition. And being able to use 6GB of RAM is freaking awesome!! Even for Web Design, I would run out of RAM with only 4GB. I would have preferred all my apps to be better and leaner, but it was easier to just have more RAM.

Anyway, you get my point.

[katano]

beside the discussion, it's a bit too quite around s|c at the moment for my taste, hence the announcement for 64bit beta was before christmas...

[siriusbliss]

I presume those elves are probably working overtime getting ready for possible end-of-quarter, Music Messe release?

Greg

[astroman]

sure I get your point, Sam.
My statement above (which you quoted) referred to MMC as an example for a professional multimedia service provider. (according to his own words)
'Professional' means that you can (at least) afford your tools - no matter of any economic circumstances.
It simply isn't justified to steal even if you're on a tight budget. Then you'd be on the wrong job. That simple.

But let's leave moral aside and just look somewhat closer to the situation you describe...
A significant part of the investment spiral you complain about is based on circumstances I mentioned above.
For which someone called me kind of 'retarded' and possible a 'but back then it was always better'-sayer.

I don't really mind, because I know - and I can call this knowledge because I have made the experience
in particular the experience of continuity in developement, or rather the opposite... after a certain point in time.
I don't call those OSes braindead just for the sake of putting names on something.
They intentionally overcomplicate things to protect market shares.

The only thing I don't understand is that people notice there's something wrong,
but still don't act as customers and vote by the wallet.
(there are more than enough complaints about M$, Apple, monopolists etc)
...the car shows rust after just 2 years ? Won't buy that brand again... Doesn't work with IT at all. Why ?

the big 'Providers' cooperate in the upgrade spiral, ALL of them - they gave up developing 'solutions' long, long ago.
That a service providing business is more concerned about it's machines and software is (almost) entirely self-elected.

one source is the upgrade lie - another one is the mental infection with ideas like '64bit'
I'd be the last one to question the usefulness of a 64bit adress space for certain applications - not even in multimedia.
But it's plain bullsh*t to insist that it's a must have for everyone.

The topic is discussed in a way suggesting exactly THAT - you can't do anything useful without 64bit, the new standard etc bla bla
My only point is THINK about it
I'm living fairly well by the industrial nonsense, they secure my job - so I should be a bit more grateful...
but I just can't stand some kind of rubbish, sorry...

cheers, Tom

[manybro]

Why does any of this matter or do I miss something?

I came here looking for information about scope platform which I since discovered was revived from an almost NDE to come near the top again with xite.

It's a misnomer of a conversation because eventually SC and anything that survives this "transition" will be 64 bits otherwise will stay as a full-duplex 32 bit process. Either way it will happen whether anyone likes it or not because Microsoft have had 64 bit systems for a long time now even though the mixer was (hint) a 32 bit summing engine, like (example) cubase... a 32 bit summing engine, unlike .... Sonar 64 bit summing on a 32 bit mix engine

... intel macintosh, 32 bit kernel in a 64 bit OS is pretty much the norm these days but eventually all the apps there will be 64 bits 'wide'.

What I'm saying is there is not issue and the conversation is null and the illusion of better/worse is void because when the time comes it will happen for everything just like it did from 16 bit computing, etc etc etc

[siriusbliss]

...It's a misnomer of a conversation because eventually SC and anything that survives this "transition" will be 64 bits otherwise will stay as a full-duplex 32 bit process. Either way it will happen whether anyone likes it or not because Microsoft have had 64 bit systems for a long time now even though the mixer was (hint) a 32 bit summing engine, like (example) cubase... a 32 bit summing engine, unlike .... Sonar 64 bit summing on a 32 bit mix engine

... intel macintosh, 32 bit kernel in a 64 bit OS is pretty much the norm these days but eventually all the apps there will be 64 bits 'wide'.

What I'm saying is there is not issue and the conversation is null and the illusion of better/worse is void because when the time comes it will happen for everything just like it did from 16 bit computing, etc etc etc

yup, the 'secret' is slowly leaking out.

Greg

[astroman]

Why does any of this matter or do I miss something?

yes, you entirely miss the point - completely
and you're the living proof that propaganda does work indeed as the industry intends.

those 64-bits are a CPU adressing mode, only relevant in adressing memory - nothing else.
80bit results is a standard since decades, and graphcards do 256 and more.

Yet YOU associate 64bits with MORE precision - thanks
I am indeed sorry about some overlengthy stuff, but most readers will ignore it anyway.
And it won't save SC from having to implement all that stuff.

Of course it (64bit) will come
it's just not relevant WHEN - imho, others have a different perspective and so it winds up a bit.

cheers, Tom