"scratch" disks... are they relevant to DAWs?

[AudioBabble]

I'm wondering why scratch disks are considered important in programs like adobe photoshop and premier, but not in DAWs such as Cubase?

As far as I can see, there's no way to specify where temporary files go in Cubase...

On the other hand, Adobe Audition (which I would describe as an audio editing program rather than a DAW as such) does have a setting to specify scratch disk location.

Am I right in thinking that Cubase and other modern DAWs don't handle data in the same way as video/design programs, and everything is either streamed directly to/from disk or exclusively accessed via RAM?

Would love some de-mystification on this subject!

[antic604]

Couldn't find one in Bitwig and Studio One, but Live has scratch disk:

Zrzut ekranu (221).png

[AdvancedFollower]

I'd say audio isn't as demanding as video and graphics in terms of memory/storage. Uncompressed 48 KHz, 24-bit stereo audio is around 1 GB per hour of audio, so even a modest system with 16 GB of RAM has enough RAM for all the audio files of any reasonably sized project. Plus with a bit-rate of around 2300 kbps, even a low-end mechanical HDD is more than fast enough to stream many, many parallel audio tracks in realtime.

Also the way you work with audio vs graphics is different. A huge graphics file needs to be displayed all at once, and you probably perform operations on large chunks at a time. Audio plugins on the other hand work with buffers of just a few hundred samples at a time, at most.

[syntonica]

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and hard drives had mechanical spinning platters and were slower than a dead slug stuck in molasses in January, dedicated "scratch" drives were often necessary for speed, especially when recording audio and video. These days, with better tech--faster CPUs, more, faster RAM, SSDs, etc.--they aren't needed so much anymore.

I still remember the Hell known as ProTools + SCSI...

[Tj Shredder]

Scratch disks had been important for non-realtime editing of material that does not fit into memory. Its as easy as that. DAWs don’t want/need that. If you have huge sample packs, you could call their installation medium a scratch disk…

[BertKoor]

The OP mentioned Adobe Audition:

Adobe purchased Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium Software in May 2003 [...] Adobe then renamed Cool Edit Pro to "Adobe Audition"

Further back in time:

We reviewed Cool Edit 96 in our July 97 issue

How much memory did the average PC have back then? I found one resource stating it was about 64 MB.

So back then it was essential to preemptively allocate a big chunk on the harddisk for writing the data. Otherwise there was no way to safely record a session of an hour. Just one stereo track is indeed about 1 GB. Memory of the average PC could never hold that, perhaps a few minutes worth.

In short, Adobe Audition has the scratch disk config option because hystirically it was essential but they never removed it.

[EnochLight]

Reason uses a scratch disc, as does Akai's Force now that it has disc-streaming. But even streaming audio "direct from/to disc" requires a scratch disc in some capacity.

[Jafo]

Last time I used a scratch disk, it held 1.44 MB. But back in those days, we used Sneakernet and liked it!

Jokes aside, some software requires temp files and virtual RAM: it's still relevant, if kinda archaeological.