13 Sep
2014
13 Sep
'14
7:44 p.m.
Thanks for reply.
it is kind of live use. But not on stage, but in my humble homestudio.
So I do not have to be mobile, but I am not arranging, I am just playing
live - that is, enjoy turning a lot of knobs without any real clue. And
if it sounds crap for a given day, I at least do enjoy all the blinking
lights.
The card is an old RME Hammerfall (not even DSP), and I'll be using X
with a standard distro. Gentoo or Arch - or maybe KX, if they really
should drop ubuntu as a base, as I've read somewhere. Depending on the
software I'll be using in the end.
So we are talking about a simple desktop PC in a tower case with an 21"
CRT Monitor.
About multitrack: Being able to run 32 effects (8 Tracks x 4) would be
great, 16 tracks perfect, but my budget is not infinite and I doubt I'll
really use 16 Tracks at once. And most likely not really reverb on all
tracks, that is just the worst case to find out a proper CPU.
However, there will be differnt rooms on different tracks. There is
still an external master reverb inserted into main mix. If so desired.
Maybe I'll try to control some of the effects via Midi - I do own an old
Doepfer Drehbank controller, but not sure, wether I'll have the patience
to program it before winter. Maybe handy for the EQ. But it's also
occupied for the microwave II.
However, EQing with a mouse is a PITA and something I will have to solve
sooner or later. Way worse then setting up reverb or delay. imho.
I do not plan to use effects via aux sends, just stack one on top of the
others in a serial manner - as if I would do, if I had 8 hardware effect
devices plugged into my mixer.
There won't be any mixing (as in mastering) - at least not on this box,
I am oldfashioned and need real faders. I do have another box for
recording - mostly straight to /dev/null, that is unfortunately.
This box will just be plugged into the inserts of my mixer - therefore
the ideal of 16tracks - which I suppose will be cheaper and better to
use than buying a couple of multieffects. I do not have any more ADDA
convertes anyway. And for my lousy ears, the quality of named plugins is
more than adequate.
So it's basically -> jack-in->effect1-effect2-effect3-effect4->jack-out
with 16 permanent physical connections bewteen soundcard and mixer.
Though not all of them will be used at once.
I do have the soundcard (which I finally do inted to use properly after
all those years) and the ADDA converters, the screen, SSD and the case.
All I need is a mainboard, CPU+cooling and some RAM. And maybe an el
cheapo graphics card, if going the AMD route.
I doubt I'll get usable multitrack hardware for that money. Sure, I am
screwd if one of those parts breaks, it's all yesterdays jam and hard to
get besides waiting for ebay.
The price limit is a bit difficult as prices are varying between
countries. As I've said, an upper class intel i5 or AMD is about what I
am thinking of, until general consesus is, that there is no way to
accomplish this with standard, upper class (as opposed to high end) PCs.
Then maybe I'll wait a little more and save some money.
But, as you mentioned, I do remeber running softwareeffects, even not
really in parallel, way back on an 2GHz AMD 3200 in decent quality even
on WIndows, so a modern multicore, I would suspect, should be able to
run a couple of them. Just which would be the best bet.
For hardware devices: Behringer is out of discussion. As is Alesis. I do
have a couple of midiverbs and found the quality of calf to be way
better. If maybe not for the algorithms, then at least for the noise level.
Indeed, I am planning to sell those. For peace with my drumheads and of
course for better useability.
So again - are plugins really FPU heavy? Or would it be more important
to have feature X, like AVX or SSE27 or so? Unfortunately I am not
really into this recent hardware stuff and all the latest buzzwords.
And I usually do not trust benchmarks, but that's all I have and the FX
series did quite well in some so called media benchmarks, like
rendering, however, I am not sure whether this can be tranferred to
running multiple audio effects without problems. AS maybe rendering is
just two fast threads instead of 16 medium ones. Dunno.
The price advantage for the AMD would probably be eaten up by the more
expensive colling - I prefer it rather quiet - and the higher energy
bill. But if it would be the more adequate CPU for this very workload, I
would go that route. i7 are all HT, so that would leave the i5 as only
other option.
Am 13.09.2014 18:14, schrieb Len Ovens:
On Sat, 13 Sep 2014, Ede Wolf wrote:
I may be putting together a box dedicated just to
act as a multitrack
effects unit - without planning any recording. The effects stack will
for most
My guess is that this will be used live then? So you must have an audio
interface in mind and a channel count. I am guessing that this will end
up rackmount with a MB that has PCI(e) slots? Will it have a gui screen?
or be run via MIDI/OSC/custom control surface? (I would recomend
something sort of standard as it may be nice to have a MIDI control
surface on a desk particularly for EQ use... though a touch notepad
Interface might work too)
channels most likely look like this: reverb,
delay, EQ and maybe one
of flanger, chorus or rather seldomly compression. Anyway, just the
classics, planning so far to only to install the calf and invada lv2
packages. Though I am open for recommendations here, too. And of
course I am looking for a suitable effects host/rack.
Because you have (I would guess) a set number of channels you have the
option of looking at either a multitrack mixer such as non-mixer or a
set of stereo racks. I would put all the possible effects in line but
have the ones not used bypassed... at least I would try that. This is so
that it is easy to set up a midi controller. I suppose I should also ask
if you are going to do any of your own coding to glue this together. You
will probably at least need some shell scripts to set things up unless
you will have some sort of UI that will allow manually setting this up
every time.
Another question... Will X run? Or will you be running all CLI?
However, I do suppose, the reverb will be the
most cpu consuming item
and I am wondering, what feature an a cpu should I be primarily
looking for? I guess, for effects, especially reverb, the floating
point performance will be paramount?
Without a track count, it is hard to know. multitrack could be 4 or 24
tracks. Even then, it would be hard to tell as I have found changing
parameters within a plugin can change cpu use of that plugin. Of course
knowing what latency your IF is capable of and the latency you intend to
use is important too. It would be pretty easy to say that a dual xeon
board would handle it, but then one of the new 8 core atom boards may
work just as well... note: I don't know how far a single audio chain can
be split over cores.
WRT reverb: Do you really want each track to have it's own reverb?
Having one reverb (or two) service a number of tracks through sends is
not only done to conserve CPU cycles. It also lets the sounds be in the
same virual acoustic space. However, setting up the sasme reverb 5 times
does allow each track to be dealt with separately.
Another question: will you be mixing the outputs? (sometimes, never)
As HT generally has a bad reputation for audio,
currently, the AMD
FX-8350 is on top of my list, as the floating point preformance is
said to be rather good and lots of cores should be ideal for running
lots of effects in parallel - though unfortunately not every core does
have its on FPU. As it is not going to run 24/7, the insane energy
consumption is somewhat acceptable.
But, beeing no coder, I may be completely off track with my
conceptions here, so I am asking for some more insight or alternative
recommendations, maybe even with a short reasoning
What parts do you already have? What is your budget? What is your reason
for wanting to do this in a computer rather than just buying something
that has these things. By the time you buy the interface ($500 for 8
i/o), case, MB, CPU, memory, PS, HD, midi controller and PCIe card for
the audio IF... you are getting close to the $2000 mark already. (this
is noting that you said this is a one use box) You can buy a digital
mixer with 16 channels already. You have said that there is not some
effect that you want in particular, but generic effects.
Look at:
http://www.allen-heath.com/ahproducts/qu-16/ ~$2100
http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/X32-RACK.aspx ~$1200 (Sweetwater)
I am sure there are others too.
This is not to say your project is not valid. I am just trying to make
sure you have some perspective. BTW, the units I pointed out do not use
one fast CPU, but a number of ARM and DSP units. If you already have
most of the parts on hand... particularly if you have a spare computer
even with only two inputs. I would try it out with that for two tracks
so you have an idea of what sw is around. You can try more tracks than
two by just setting them up, as jack does not care if inputs are
physical or not. Playing back *.wav files does not take much cpu.
I was able to do quite a lot with just an old P4 even at low latency,
The new i5 already makes audio use much less cpu. (even with jack set
16/2) All of todays CPUs are beyond yesterdays super chips.
--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net