[nycbug-talk] Would a G5 be able to handle it?

[pete wright]

On 8/26/05, David Rio Deiros <driodeiros at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> Perhaps this is kind of off topic but I thought I would be interesting.
> 
> A friend of mine is planing to buy a G5 for his mini
> sound studio. He is planing to record cds for different music
> bands which are trying to start in the music world.
> 
> He doesn't know if he should buy the most powerful G5 (Dual G5 2.7G)
> or to go for the cheapest one (Dual G5 2G).
> 
> I asked him what he is planning to run and he told me that he
> wants to use a sound program (Protools if I remember correctly)
> with a DIgi002 soundcard from digidesign to capture 24 sound
> channels. The sample rate for each channel will be 96Khz,
> having 24bits for each sample. Once having the samples,
> the program will apply some "effects" to them in realtime.
> 
> Apparently the soundcard does not offer hardware processing so
> the CPU(s) will do all the sound processing. I read the
> protools requirements but they don't mention anything about the
> # of channels/Cpu requirements.
> 
> I calculated some numbers considering G5 speed, memory speed, channels
> and data per channel, but they are pretty rough because I don't
> know exactly how many instructions/opcodes the CPU will trace
> in order to perform the sound processing for every channel.
> 
> Any advice?


I know some other people on this list work with sound studio's some times so 
they may have more info (cough jesse cough) but I think you would be fine 
with a slower G5. It may be a better investment to purchase a digitizer that 
does hardware processing though, as this will lengthen the use of the CPU 
you choose to purchase. From what I remember about protools is that it is 
not too CPU hungry, especially if you can off load processing to hardware 
boards.

There are some pretty bright folks at Tekserve (at least they where a year 
ago) in the audio department. I'm sure they can give you the skinny and even 
let you demo units as well.

-p 


-- 
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org <http://www.nycbug.org>
NYC's *BSD User Group
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