Breaking The Upgrade Cycle

Just when you think you've got your DAW properly organised and stable, along comes another OS or computer hardware change that sends you sliding back to square one — waiting for plug-ins to be updated, bugs to be shaken out and so on. Along the way some of your hardware may become obsolete, such as Mac serial devices after the introduction of USB, or PCI cards after they were replaced by PCI Express. I don't know about you, but I seem to find myself in this situation around every 18 months to two years and even now I'm not convinced my system is really delivering the performance I think it should be capable of achieving. By the time I do have it sorted, it will be time to buy one of those whizzy new Intel Macs and the cycle will start again.

One possible solution that gets discussed from time to time is an 'industry standard' music computer running an OS optimised for music production. But the obvious drawback with this approach is that it too would become obsolete as 'real world' computers became faster and more affordable. Then there's the issue that all the music software and plug-ins would need to be rewritten to work on this new standard OS, and that would require a lot of co-operation and trust amongst the various software companies. However, now that networking audio computers is a more realistic proposition than it once was, perhaps there's another way.

The kind of system I visualise for the future is a dedicated music computer that could be stand-alone or part of a hardware control surface/display/audio-interface system. However, rather than doing all the work itself, it would only need enough power to handle in real time whatever track or tracks you were overdubbing simultaneously, whether software instruments or audio. The trick would be to allow such a computer to use other computers (running a range of operating systems if necessary) as 'galley slaves', providing the horsepower to run all non-real playback functions in much the same way as Logic's Node system does for Logic. In theory, when you had a big project on, you'd be able to beg, borrow or steal as many desktop and laptop computers as possible, hook them into your recording system and have as much power as you needed. Your main music computer would decide what jobs were handed out to which slave machines and it would also look after the audio timing on playback. There would be latency when running the slave machines of course, but that would only matter when you were overdubbing, and in this system, you'd always be using your main audio computer to handle the current track, so latency would be minimal.

I don't know if we'll ever arrive at such a system — I don't even know if the music market is big enough to warrant the effort and expense, but I do know that no matter how fast personal computers become, the software writers will always find a way to use up that power faster than it becomes available.

Paul White
Editor In Chief

Home | Search | News | Current Issue | Digital Editions | Articles | Forum | Subscribe | Shop | Readers Ads

Advertise | Information | Links | Privacy Policy | Support