suggest a rewirable host with PDC support (Live + powercore)

[_pix_]

Hey folks,

I need your opinion on something but first let me introduce it a little.

I´ve been toying around with music for some years now but I always have followed the hardware route. Recently I had to sell all my gear and invest in a portable solution, since I moved country.

I thought and can now confirm that softsynths/samplers have come a long way and there is really no *need* for hardware counterparts in what concerns sound quality.

However I´ve been battling hard in what concerns performance issues. I need (or lets say would like to have ) 5x more processing power than I have now.


who wouldn´t right?

My laptop was purchased recently and it has a P4M 1.8GHz cpu, so upgrading the laptop doesn´t really seem like a good option (comparing with top of the line laptops atm). So a possible alternative seems to give the processing tasks to a DSP card and use the PC cpu for intruments and such. Following this route the only option would be the powercores from TC since they´re the only ones to offer viable portable solutions. Now the problem is that I´m in with Live4 and I´d really like to keep using it as my main composing tool. Problem is Live 4 has no sort of plug-in delay compensation (the famous PDC).

Now what I´m thinking of now is to get a rewirable host to rewire Live and mix and process the tracks within the DAW environment.

Now, what I´m afraid is that another open app will eat even more resources leaving no cpu left for intruments and such, ending up in a more cluttered system.

What´s your ideas about this?

Is anyone using live and the powercores using a similar scheme?

Are there other alternatives I´m not considering?

Any PDC supporting host that you´d recommend to use for this specific task (routing/mixing/processing rewired tracks)? (preference with live)

I´d highly appreciate any input on this matter, and sorry for the soap-opera-like thread

cheers!

[Alan]

Sonar/Cubase/Nuendo all support PDC and Rewire and work fine with Live.Choose your poison.

[olafmol]

i've had word from ableton that PDC is in the lines..probably version 4.1 will have it, they understand how important it is...

[Alan]

i've had word from ableton that PDC is in the lines..probably version 4.1 will have it

If they find a way to make PDC work(in all buses)and a totally gapless engine work simultaneously,my hats off to them.Personally I wouldn't hold my breath,at least for the immediate time being.

[_pix_]

i've had word from ableton that PDC is in the lines..probably version 4.1 will have it, they understand how important it is...

yeah, I´ve heard about that as well but until it finaly comes out (who knows if only in v5) I was looking for a temporary solution.


Anyone using tracktion with DSP cards?

Does cubase SE support PDC?

Any other "budget" host that you suggest?

Thanks a bunch!

[Alan]

Does cubase SE support PDC?

Any other "budget" host that you suggest?

Not sure about Cubase SE but Cakewalk HomeStudio does(full PDC) which is a somewhat stripped down version of Sonar and much cheaper.

[EnzymeX]

_pix_,

I'm in exactly the same situation - In love with Live 4, running a decent centrino laptop, and needing moooooooooooooooooooooooore power!

I do believe Ableton will address Automatic Delay Compensation sooner or later. In the meantime, something I just thought of (but have not tested yet) is using FX-Teleport to run CPU hungry bus and master FX remotely on an older desktop PC networked with my main laptop.

In theory this could work for Reverb on a bus (since the latency could be compensated for by turning down the Reverb's pre delay setting), and for Mastering EQ / Compression / Warming / Limiting on the Master Outs (where latency is not an issue).

I know others are more aggressive and use FX Teleport in "real time" with soft synths, but the workflow technicalities involved in making that happen sound just like what I was looking to avoid when I moved from composing in Sonar to Live in the first place.

[_pix_]

I´ll check homestudio. Thanks.

FX-teleport seems too messy for me. I´m avoiding technicalities too! And I won´t have a chance to get a desktop in the near future either.

Problem is I can´t truly test any of these solutions because I don´t have the powercore, and on the other side I´d only consider buying if I knew beforehand that id´d work flawlessly....

and it´s a not-so-cheap shot in the dark...