hello people
i've got an original iMac (233MHz) with 288MB RAM,running OS 9.1.
i wondered if anyone knows whether this is man enough to realistically run Cubase with Attack,Absynth,Loopazoid.
what d'ya think?
any advice/experiences will be much appreciated.

Dunno mate. I felt sorry for you having no replies! Why dont you download the demos and see what cpu usage is like.

The absynth engine on my P4 1.7 GHz uses about 15%, by way of comparison.

A couple of years ago i was working with an engineer in a studio that had an 233 imac. If you believe it or not it could easily handle 52 tracks of audio. Also some eq , reverb and compression but at a later stage that we bounced the mix(more channels) from the console to the imac we had to render most of the audio tracks as the mac was ofcourse out of memory. We didn't use vsti then cause it didn't exist but we used some heavy reverb plugins such as the Waves reverb which was available on mac then only.
So i guess you will be able to run a couple of stuff in there but the difficult part will be to actually finish the track(without bouncing).

thanks wongpongding & Villy...
christ!
hard to believe it could run 52 audio tracks!!!
funnily enough,the VSTis i mention all seem light enough on their own but when they're combined into playing tracks in Cubase it all seems to grind to a halt.
i don't really get it.

What so you mean," Grinds to a halt". If the sound stops you maxed out your CPU. Are you using the built in sound card?

Vsts can either be heavy on the RAM or CPU load. I have Attack, but don't really use it... Anyaway, I'm sure it is pretty low on CPu and a good chice since you can get a WIDE variey of sounds from it.

Make sure you have allocated as much memory to Cubase as possible and defrag your drive.

In Cubase you have a CPU performance meter. Turn it on, then you can see how much CPU power your VSTs are draining.

My understanding is the Absynth is pretty heavy on CPU, so watch this one.

I don't think disk streaming is that memory or CPU intensive so you can always bounce to audio after recording a track.

WATCH your reverbs. Wunderverb is very light on the CPU, but most other are slightly draining to HUGE drains.

Dr. Verb is great in this reguard. You can shut offf parts of the reverb to make it drain less.

I'm running a iMac at 600 with a gig of ram don't really need to bounce much.

Hope this helps a bit.
I would have replied sonner but I was in Italy.

[ 03 August 2002, 09:31: Message edited by: iDavid ]