[LAU] Requirements for huge multitrack editing

[Jannis Achstetter]

Am 12.11.2012 20:17, schrieb Paul Davis:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Asa Marco <aesir.ml at gmail.com
> <mailto:aesir.ml at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hello list,
> 
>     For the first time in my life I need to work with huge recordings, I
>     would like to understand how much memory and computing power is
>     required to handle it on a linux box with Ardour.
> 
>     The recording, retrieved from an Alesis hd24, will be about 1 hour and
>     a half long, 24 channels, 44.1KHz, 16bit,
> 
>     What are the minimal requirements to work with it?
> 
>     If I choose sample rate and bit depth to be 48kHz/24bit, will it
>     require much more resources (other than disk space)?
> 
> 
> 
> you could record that on a 400MHz Pentium II (i.e. a box about 12 years
> old) - you don't need any big hardware to record data like that.
> 
> now, when it comes to editing, the question is a bit different, but the
> *size* of the session in terms of duration is largely irrelevant. 24
> tracks is manageable on just about any modern machine. if you edit it so
> that there end being hundreds or thousands of regions, that could cause
> issues, but by itself, the data size isn't really significant.
> 
> what demands big resources are
> 
>    * disk i/o, but 24 tracks should be manageable on any modern disk
>    * plugins, which use (potentially) lots of CPU while processing audio
> 
> without knowing plugins you plan to use, it is hard to predict what you
> would need in terms of CPU power.
> 
> with no plugins, it would be hard to buy a computer today that could
> *not* handle editing that session.

All true. 24 channels, 44kHz and 16bit should not cause problems on any
mid-recent machine. I routinely handle sessions with 24 channels, 48kHz,
24bit. Mostly about 6 busses. CPU-usage can then be a bit high if you
have dynamics and an 8-band-parametric EQ on every channel +
cpu-intensive plugins (ir_lv2, ...) on the busses.
Just try it out and you'll see how your CPU can cope with the DSP load.

Of course more RAM is better since you can cache disk-reads but as Paul
said: any recent machine should be able to get the work done.

	Jannis