first and foremost, thanks for the post. pt and mac is all a brand new world to me. ive been on steinberg for at least 6 years now, and this is all going to be new to me. im even ditching the pc platform and switching to mac.
i need high performance, scary high performance.
let me give you an idea of what one of my days can be like. i was recording a band who was working with a co-writer, and the co-writer couldnt write a melody to the song as is, so he recorded it in a different key, acoustic, and sung over that. when we got it back we loved the song acoustic, so i had to make that happen, in 32 hours. i hopped on my computer and went to work. in the end, the track came out real sweet, but i had to make several compromises to make it happen. first off, i had to switch back and forth from 3gb mode on xp so i could open up some higher end VST's (they need more ram than xp can deliver on standard boot settings)... i have 4 gb in my system, so i have to boot in 3gb mode so i gain an extra gig for program use (the vst). this bugs the shit out of me. you know what this does? this causes me to be lazy, and not want to add a string part or something of that nature to a song just because i have to do all of this shit to make it happen.
another thing i had to do was "hope" that something would work. for instance, i'd get an instrument track sounding great, but before i could go to the next instrument to play an accompany part, i had to bounce the prior. when i got a little further i discovered i need to change the old part. i had to bounce the new instrument, reload the instrument and make an edit to the midi and re run the bounce on the prior instrument. blah blah that goes on forever.
finally, i never got to hear the song fully finished until after i made all the bounces. im used to things being this way so it wasnt bad at all, i planned well. but it would be nice to experiment creatively instead of having to plan all of the time. this is music we're talking about. there's no guitar player that every time he picks up the instrument, plans exactley what his going to play note for note until he puts it down. audio production should not be like this either.
but anyways, i need zero latency. at this point in my career, i can hear the effects of 2 milliseconds off, and i am always struggling by muting and un muting takes for the musicians as they track, so they won't become slowed down by this slight natural delay compensation. is it fucking weird that i can hear a vocalist nailing the take during the tracking, then go back to hear it changed by a millisecond?? in addition to this, i can't rely on vari audio or time warp to be 100% precise. its about 85% precise. if i need to take 4 notes of a solo and time stretch them to quantize them to the grid, i expect that quantization change to STAY (when i've heard it correctly on play back) after i bounce. what happens? it does not stay, it changes. randomly. and i've done my research, its not supposed to. mpex 4 algorithm is bugged, and has been bugged from the start. its not sample accurate. neither is the realtime bounce of time warp. (i use cubase 5, so thats where this is coming from).
its pretty hard to dismiss pt when i watch a 60 second video on youtube of someone taking a song and changing the tempo of the whole thing in two steps, and it actually sounds fucking decent. WTF. i diserve that. with the amount of money im making, and the people im working with, i should be able to have this power, and i dont.
i really want pt to be the end all for me, and with its place in the industry being so firm, im finding it hard to believe there's anything else that's rivaling it when so many professionals turn to PT for the end all solution to executing their job.
i just want to make sure im getting what i need. and through my own personal research, that has turned out to be pt hd 2.
