Thanks to Myles Mumford and an ebay buyer who backed out, I now have 16 channels of Creamware converters.
The next step will be the Focusrites.
As you may know, I have the buggy version of Pro Tools M-Powered, which allows 32 tracks of simultaneous recording, and an M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge. But I have no converters yet, so this system is useless for now. I was considering a couple of Behringer ADA8000s for the time being. The mic pres are crap but the converters are OK (though one can get a lot better). However, if I want to record hi-res (88.2 or 96 kHz sample rates), I need 96k converters.
Well, they're not so hard to come by, although they're very expensive. And they're mostly A/D converters only. Wouldn't it be nice to have ADAs? There are a few things around, for a lot of money, like Lucid and Lynx. But these either have no ADAT lightpipe I/O, or not enough. For example, the 16-channel Lynx Aurora has an optional ADAT card, but that has only two ports which would allow 8 channels of S/MUX, not 16. The Sonic Core (was Creamware) is the same.
I just discovered that the new Focusrite Octopre comes in two versions: mic pre only with ADAT out, and mic pre with dynamics and ADAT in and out. The ADAT ports on both are capable of S/MUX operation, providing 8 channels lo-res or 4-channels hi-res.
So to do 16 channels hi-res I would need two of these. I could then use another 16 channels of converters without the hi-res option to do 32 channels lo-res, because of course the Octopres can do lo-res too.
And the best bit? RRP on the ADA version is $900 a piece!
That got your attention, didn't it?
As some of you may know, Digidesign announced the end of support for PPC systems. This causes a problem for PPC owners who still want to use their HD systems. Unless you bought the very last G5s, you have PCI slots in your machine. And if you bought earlier, and bought a great big HD system, you probably bought an expansion chassis to hold all the PCI cards your computer wouldn't (since it has only three slots). Your new Mac Pro will have PCIe slots.
So now, if you want to get future version of Pro Tools (from 8.0.3) you need a Mac Pro, or maybe a Macbook Pro with an ExpressCard slot and a cardbus interface to your expansion chassis.
Problem is, a lot of users bought the Digidesign 64-bit 7-slot chassis. This was actually made by Magma and is otherwise known as the PR7464. We have one at work, though it doesn't have the model ID anywhere on it, so it took a while to figure out whether that was what we had.
Now it turns out that most, if not all, of those chassis do not work with a Mac Pro. What you need is a chassis with the Pericom bridge chip. So I took a look inside ours. Lo and behold, there's a great big Pericom chip. It's not the one shown here, but I was hopeful.
Whoops! Turns out that's a clock chip. I haven't been able to find the (incompatible) Intel or DEC chips. So now we have to buy another expansion chassis. And those things are not cheap.
Actually we need two. The studio computer has two HD cards inside it, so we need a new chassis for those cards anyway. But the HD3 system (three cards) is in the existing chassis.
It is possible to replace the boardset inside the chassis. That's about US$1450 instead of $2500. But that's not a big saving after having to spend $2500 on a new chassis and also get two computers.
All this took more than a week. The person from Magma turned out to be helpful, but I could have figured it out sooner if she'd read my first couple of emails properly. I thought what we wanted to do was pretty plain at the start. Still, while Magma is the only game in town for PCI expansion (since SBS disappeared and one wouldn't trust those cheap things now appearing on ebay), they probably do way more business with server farms and the military. As usual, audio is marginal.
Goodbye $15000. (If we can afford it, that is.)
By now, most Pro Tools users realise that "native" versions will always be limited. Whether it's I/O or track count, you have to spend a lot more money on an HD system to get what you want. There is no middle ground. It's $3000 or $30,000.
So when I came across this, I was salivating. That's right... read your way through the first few pages.
An M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge with Pro Tools M-Powered 7.3, 7.3.1, 7.3.1cs1 or 7.3.1cs2 will give you 32 channels of simultaneous I/O, not the limited 18 mentioned in the disclaimer on the M-Audio website.
Thanks to ebay and willing sellers, I have Pro Tools M-Powered 7.3.1 and a ProFire Lightbridge. I can confirm that this combination will indeed record on 32 tracks simultaneously. Since I have no A/D converters, I haven't tried this with actual audio signals feeding the thing.
I went to a Pro Tools 8 demo at JMC Academy on 8 April. It was run by Digi techster Brent Heber.
There are lots of improvements over Pro Tools 7:
MIDI Editor:
- Multiple tracks in one view—events are colour-coded
- Editing looped or duplicated MIDI segments alters all iterations
Score Editing:
- MIDI editor has a score editor mode
- print mode for editing printed scores
- can export Sibelius (.sib) files, but can only read MIDI files—WTF?
Virtual Instruments:
- Vacuum—monophonic, dual oscillator synth. Has about half a dozen overdrive controls for distorted everything!
- Xpand now responds to up to four MIDI channels
- Boom—a grid-based beat box editor like the old TR808 sequencer
- Mini Grand—sample-based piano with a 900MB library and reverb effect
- DB33—a Hammond-style organ with a cabinet effect that can take an external input
- Structure sample player now allows one to drag and drop regions from audio track playlists. Different versions (free or paid) have different features
Plugins:
- all the usual DigiRack plugs with a true stereo EQ3,a new version of Sansamp, new algorithms in D-Verb
- some plugs previously available for money are now free: DFi and Maxim
- Eleven—guitar simulator. Different versions (free or paid) have different numbers of amps and tones
"Comp" edit workflow is much improved:
- Loop recording takes can be in one file (as before) or in separate playlists (new preference setting)
- If in separate playlists, those playlists can be displayed in the edit window below the "main" playlist
- Can copy selection of region in comp playlist to main playlist
BUT...
Digi still hasn't fixed the loop record to include pre- and post-roll in the loop. As before, pre-roll is played before the first iteration of the loop and then only the selected part of the timeline or playlist is looped. I've been asking Brett about this since version 6. For those times when the context of the punch-in is important to the performance—most of the time—loop record is useless.
All in all, it's looking pretty good. There are still things one would like to have, like removal of the 18I/O limit in LE, but Digi has demonstrated time and time again, that they won't do anything that would poach the HD market, and they still don't provide an upgrade path with any "middle" ground between LE and HD. It sucks, but what can you do when they have the market power?