Thursday, December 23, 2010

upgrade #1.








So with the recording and mixdown of Ferocity And Fragility it became painfully clear my trusty 1.0Ghz dual G4 - my first Mac and the one that has been my Trusted One - was spent. Well, not entirely spent. But not up to the task of thirty-plus Logic tracks all loaded down with effects and such. And I really want to move on from the supplied Logic samples to much better ones for piano (namely, a particular Bechstein sample I have in mind) and orchestra (and possibly symphonic choir) which require significantly more CPU and RAM. Significantly. They are enormous.

So an upgrade to The Studio was in order. Namely, a beefier Mac and bigger monitors (to come soon) to properly monitor and mixdown.

This is not the one I really have my sights on (which is the G5 2.5Ghz quad core - read EIGHT processors on four chips loaded with 16GB of RAM) but I could not pass it up and hopefully it will work in the meantime -









A 2.0GHz dual processor with 2.5 gigs of RAM that I will upgrade to eight gigs if it passes the test ... which is to run through F&F without having to freeze every track (the test will be to leave all of the non-piano sample tracks unfrozen while at the same time being able to leave at least one of the, uhh, three piano samples running unfrozen and ready for editing).

So time to pick another element from the periodic table in which to name it and to properly add it to the family ... And I still will likely get that G5 quad monster in the near future but without loss of this one - I can enable Logic's node capabilities and use its two processors over the LAN to help with the computing.



...



Oh, and Uranium passed the test (all tracks unfrozen CPUs operating below redline with some headroom even to spare) -








And without fail I am working on another song project incorporating more instrumentation and orchestration to be uploaded when it is finished (or as a sample beforehand once it is at least a bit further along).




cheers