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TI-74 Basicalc
06-19-2019, 02:58 PM
Post: #15
RE: TI-74 Basicalc
Another long running job(?) I’ve done, alongside an IT one that has paid the bills, is I’ve done a lot of paid session guitar slots at local recording studios. Fizzling Out now because all the kids Torrent ProTools, Logic Studio & Reason and do it all for free at home with their laptops and release their ‘albums’ via the Internet.
If I had a pound for every conversation I’ve been Party to about the so called reliability of using Macs in the recording studio. Up until about 2009 I would say 95% of the studios I’ve recorded in used ProTools TDM Systems. These run PT on an in-house Mac (usually a top end G5 at that time) BUT these TDM PT Systems came with a bank of external processors/audio interfaces plus hardware modules running both computer plugins (things like auto-pitch (sorry Cher), different amp/Mike software emulators etc) with hardware compression, reverb & delay units. All the recording ‘grunt’ is done on these hardware units and NOT on the Mac, which just ran the pretty GUI PT screens. If you fetched up Task Manager on the G5 it wouldn’t be using more than 5% of System Resources in a typical 24-32 channel live session. Unless you’ve bought a real duff Mac (or PC) it’s never going to fall over or lockup (unlike when you use PT on your home system where it does have to do all of the processing, recording running RTAS plugins etc. and you’ll see it running flat out at 100% a lot of the time).
So every musician (and digital artists) think it’s the G5 Mac that’s doing all the work and bringing stability to the session, leading to the often quoted ‘we use Macs because of the stability it brings and they never let us down!’. You could probably use a Raspberry Pi equivalent (I don’t think AVID/Degidesign would release a version of PT for it though!) with 2 19” monitors from Oxfam for a total spend of about £80 to just run the PT graphics as you’ll have paid thousands for the external PT hardware that’s needed to run AVID systems, although they did make PT ASIÓ compliant a few years back meaning you cold now use other OEM audio interfaces at last (the hardware used to act like dongle as well so PT wouldn’t load if it detected non Digidesign hardware). I’ve never been interested in the Windows/Mac debate/riot flares I’ve seen online - I have a 2007 iMac (still running fine but limited on recent OS upgrades), a 2009 MacBook Pro (the one that had to go in the oven) but my home studio runs on an i7 Windows 10 PC with 32GB memory (that I built myself) and SSD Drives - the bottle necks are/were the amount of memory, cpu and reading/writing to disk on home systems. I don’t really care which manufacturers (nowadays) I use - horses for courses, and if I can build it to my own spec even better. I’ll finish with a little story - I had to buy an iMac in 2007 as a number of clients who wanted their recordings mastered were using Logic Studio (which only ran on Window initially but then Apple bought the software, ditched the stable Windows version and had it rewritten to run only on OSX). I bought my iMac (reduced with a 17.5% discount) from an Apple Store in 2007 for £725. It came with just 1GB memory when it could take up to 4GB. I asked how much it would cost extra to take the 1GB out (for them to keep) and put 2 x 2GB Ram modules instead. After a long conversation at The Genius(?) Bar they came back with ‘an extra £550!’. I took it home with just the 1GB of Ram, went online to Kingston and bought 4GB (2 x 2GB) for just £32 and put them in myself 2 days later in 3 minutes. I thought to myself a lot of Apple Customers, without enough technical knowledge, would have thought ‘Well it’s Apple and I know you have to pay extra for quality and reliability, so an extra £550 sounds reasonable (remember these are 2007 prices!)’.

Denny Tuckerman
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Messages In This Thread
TI-74 Basicalc - grsbanks - 06-16-2019, 11:52 AM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Didier Lachieze - 06-16-2019, 12:04 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - grsbanks - 06-16-2019, 12:15 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Dave Britten - 06-17-2019, 04:13 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Nigel (UK) - 06-18-2019, 10:17 AM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Dave Britten - 06-18-2019, 11:18 AM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - grsbanks - 06-18-2019, 11:23 AM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Dave Britten - 06-18-2019, 12:07 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Leviset - 06-18-2019, 04:55 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Maximilian Hohmann - 06-18-2019, 06:07 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Dave Britten - 06-18-2019, 08:15 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Maximilian Hohmann - 06-18-2019, 08:32 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - KeithB - 06-18-2019, 09:48 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Dave Britten - 06-18-2019, 10:04 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Leviset - 06-19-2019 02:58 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - klesl - 07-14-2019, 12:04 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - Dave Britten - 07-14-2019, 01:13 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - klesl - 07-14-2019, 04:23 PM
RE: TI-74 Basicalc - toml_12953 - 07-14-2019, 05:22 PM



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