PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

if one is to buy a system for serious audio use, this shouldnt be an issue at all. You should build your system according to your needs, but i know youre aware of that.

And if you make the mistake of buying a $2990 Dell prebuilt and find that the supplied vista is limiting you, you can do worse than spending $90 on a second OS.

Heck, they will probably switch licence for you for free.

as David Bowies lover once sang;

You cant always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, ju just might get what you need.

piddi wrote:$2990 Dell

(sorry piddi, couldn't resist )

Hifiboom, I think you're perfectly correct ... but you won't be getting a stealth bomber of a platform by running 32-bit math processing to and from memory in a 64-bit enviroment (just one example from a non-coder).

All I know is that I love what I have, and now that I heard about Gigastudio 4 being XP / Vista capable, instead of Vista in 32bit, I do not care what SonicCore does. New cards in 2008, fine, 2009,..no problemo,..........current cards playable till 2014, awesome, Body Of Ralf in 2015 ? Great.

I now know what mobo to ugrade to for this Christmas's DAW w/ DSP's galore.

I know that quad core's rock w/ SSE4 and DDRII, as has been proven w/ GVI. Bidule .095 is now capable of using multi cores also. I love the fact that DSP's rock all by themselves and have no need for 64bit, or 8GB's of RAM. I already can play several large libraries in GVI, so even if 24MB's of RAM is required for the initial sample to trigger via the endless streaming technology that Gigastudio uses ( Rockwell International patent ), that means I can still load 56 LARGE libraries in 32bit, even with the 1.35GB limitation in XP.

I know I have waffled IMO's about 64bit, but now that GS4 will still work w/ Scope,...............As Clark Gable once said in the 1939 epic movie, Gone With The Wind...................Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

I would rather be the old FAT BASTARD playing the old FAT BASTARDS. Even when the demise of SFP in 2015 happens as I envisioned.


I Am FAT, and proud of it !!

JV, you changed the date of that 'demise of sfp' prophecy!!

hifiboom wrote:am I totally wrong now?

but in my thinking its possible to build a 64bit driver for a 64bit os commmunicating with a 32 bit pci card.

yes, but you won't be getting the best performance (probably by a considerable amount) from the 64-bit PC architecture. That's taking into account that if Scope DID move to 2nd or 3rd gen sharcs, their dual 64-bit bus architecture wouldn't be wasted. IE. A lot of the basic platform code & dsp modules would need re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the leap (if you want to call it that) in technology.

Ladies And Gentlemen,...............................................Shroomz II,..formerly known as Shroomz.

Shroomz II wrote:

hifiboom wrote:am I totally wrong now?

but in my thinking its possible to build a 64bit driver for a 64bit os commmunicating with a 32 bit pci card.

yes, but you won't be getting the best performance (probably by a considerable amount) from the 64-bit PC architecture. That's taking into account that if Scope DID move to 2nd or 3rd gen sharcs, their dual 64-bit bus architecture wouldn't be wasted. IE. A lot of the basic platform code & dsp modules would need re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the leap (if you want to call it that) in technology.

Shroomz, this doesn`t apply to a dsp based platorm

scope has some parts that run natively, but thats not that much and never will be a bigger problem with actual dual/quadcore x000 mhz cpus

See it like this: on a well configured system 16 ASIO channels transfered to scope eat about 1% or less. Which performance boost do you expect from a 64bit driver.
I say neglible.

I really see no advantage in the 64bit architecture atm for scope. Its all about compatiblity and future of the platform.

For sure if there comes a new scope, pci-Ex is a must....

But even there a pci-ex bus lane only has one bit (not 32 or 64), 16 lanes have 16 bit for 16 seriell trasnfer channels.

the card bus bits have not much to do with the bits of an os. They are the transfer technique.

some years ago parallel interfaces were the way to go. (printer port, scsi, ide)
now these days all go to seriell point-to-point transfer which has many advantages.

SATA and PCI-ex are only examples.

Parallel had an advantage when speeds were so low that transmitting a byte (or two etc) in 'parallel' rather than one bit at a time made things 'faster' (this was the 'wide' in ultrawide scsi etc as well). Serial of course can clock higher in the long run and so all the old 'parallel' technologies are giving way to serial. In addition to the examples you give, scsi is now known as SerialSCSI and I believe that the Hypertransport protocol is largely serial.

However SGI & Cray used massive parallel interconnects to connect cpu's & cache in one machine to another to make 16 & 32 way machines out of 4 or 8 machines over 10 years ago, so parallel isn't always going to be giving way to serial in the hight performance lane, it's really up to the engineers. In fact moving back from high speed 'serial' pipelines in the P4 to our current more 'parallelized' multicore designs is a good example of that.

So much for anything being the rule in all cases.

Oh and for another example, we're getting past the hump now but something that 64bit proponents don't tell you is that the added overhead in moving around data that is 2x the width (that extra 32bits) adds extra overhead to the processing. If applications are tuned for it you can still reap the advantages (stuffing 2 32bit values into a 64bit register for instance) but it's only the hype you hear usually, not the tradeoffs. In the long run moving to 64bits is as inevitable as moving to 32 was, but even then Scope will be as unique to someone who enjoys it as any quality analogue synth from the 70's is today.

correct parallel isn`t obsolete so far.

for example if a pci-E is using 16 lanes its again some mixture between seriell and parallel, isn`t it?


still there are less colissions on the new busses. for example with ide or scsi disc drives had to share one bus and blocked each other.
The new technologies SATA and SAS which are similar apart from their internal protocols have no such issues as every device has its own port for transfer.

Its a step into the right direction.

now drifting way offtopic...

One big threat is oem (genuine adventage) -softs, which practically force you to change your computer daily.
In my opinion, instead of updating/-grading the system it would be wise to consider making music...
now, we all are it-slaves....constantly forced to upgrade on new equipment after the software upgrade etc etc

only resolution is GPL

I dont know how hard is it to construct a "bridge" between dsp environment / devices and JACK / alsa, but
as an ex stock-holder its awared the aim of companies and owners - to keep you financial-slave forewer.

this is the issue really bothers me......but im just one stupid individual.

ppku wrote:...I dont know how hard is it to construct a "bridge" between dsp environment / devices and JACK / alsa, but as an ex stock-holder its awared the aim of companies and owners - to keep you financial-slave forewer.
this is the issue really bothers me......but im just one stupid individual.

well, I dunno how to interpret the 2nd part of your statement, but as I had the opportunity to meet the SonicCore guys at Franfurt Music Fair I can assure you they are the most concerning individuals about their customers you can imagine.
Guys who still write progress without a big fat i in front of the product name

One shouldn't forget that this company did not start in the first place to continue the the Scope product line - they got the opportunity to aquire rights at the technology rather unexpected.
They had to discuss it and make up their minds about possibilities - chances and loss.
Looks like they considered it worth the effort and obviously they are building up a new developement team supported by some old 'members of the crew'.

But economic reality doesn't make exceptions due to sympathy and afaik noone in the team has a degree in witchcraft...
This isn't Harry Potter but real-world industrial craftmenship
Companies of that size rarely do their job in 'public' , but they usually do it better than purely economic driven enterprises - there is a kind of team spirit and passion around them.
They will not tell big stories but finish their projects - one step after the other.

Developement isn't as funny as it was early 1990 - M$ is squaring it's sh*t every year and Apple gave up their own straightened OS to jump the same train.

Both companies feature exactly the same businessmodel as you quoted above.
Tie the customer in a system as complex as possible and fake convenience
That keeps an endless stream of cash rolling...
Apple, M$, Adobe, Intel and AMD are not really interested in stuff that streamlines system environments.
And unfortunately it looks like Open Source based OSes have nothing better to do than copy the Big Players in the me-too-way

I've worked with true Cross-Platform Developement Tools in the 90s.
Those tools were lightyears ahead of the sh*t you have to wade through today.
Yes indeed - I have vintage code samples that were more powerful and extensible than anything provided by current suppliers.
Well, that's the way it goes - the owners made a few hundred million bucks by outselling the system and now enjoy their life.

Today things are much more complicated, the human resources required are at least 5 times larger than 15 years ago. Media system are confronted with heavy content protection requirements and methods to break into systems are more sophisticated, too.
I fully understand that they don't announce a release date for a Vista implementation - you just cannot predict it with reasonable precision.
A press release wouldn't be anything else but warm air...

cheers, Tom

I'm not holding my breath for any future developments for Scope. We've heard or seen pretty much zero from Soniccore since they took over. I don't expect they have the resources to take Scope to a new level any time soon, let alone the hardware it runs on.
Maybe new ASB's/plugins might come some day...

you might be underestimating the company...
it is of course very unlikely that there will be any brand-new software implementation based on current Scope hardware, but a follow-up product building on the underlying technology is quite reasonable.
The processing unit of a Solaris would fit nicely in a 19" box... not that I've heard even a rumour about it, but that just entered my mind when I caught a glimpse of it.
They have already modelled new filters and at least a part of the Scope technology is optimized according to the new DSP chips - in this context Solaris is a #1 priority project.
Afaik SonicCore has major revenues from customer-specific projects with few public coverage (if any at all).

Why should they keep up Scope support when they don't see a future for it ?
That costs money and CWA's customer policy isn't their cup of tea at all

cheers, Tom

it is my understanding, that Scope is a priority and will be updated. we'll see. the main emergency is just that xp is becoming obsolete, otherwise, even though it'd be nice for further optimization, the thing works pretty damn well, as well as anything else on the market. in fact, nothing else on the market can do what it can do and nothing anywhere near it's price sounds half as good....

whatever priority it eventually really has - it's not ignored and it's taken care of

that's what they say....
the truth is the same regardless of what i think, so i'll just continue using my very useful cards....

2008...