Why We Need HDX

[tomhartman]

I have a rather large pop song to mix. Not King Kong mind you, but still, pretty large and involved.

It was done mainly in Logic but I hate mixing in Logic, so I exported the tracks and brought them into PT9.

On my lowly 2008 Mac Pro with 8g ram, and a Duet 2, with Playback engine set at 1000 buffer size, PT dutifully played back a little over 100 tracks. A couple of times I got the infamous "Could Not Get Audio From The Disk Fast Enough, What Are You THINKING of?" dialog, but clicking elsewhere in the song and playing back seemed to make it go away.

It now plays through the song just fine. Of course not all tracks are playing at one time, but it's pretty busy throughout.

The bad news is, I haven't started adding plugs yet, as I'm still organizing, cleaning things up, etc. But I did feel like it was pretty impressive to see PT do this on a firewire interface like the Duet 2.

But this is exactly why I think systems like HDX are still necessary in the real world. I would have just pressed play and been done with it with even one HDX card. And heaven help me when I start to add FX, etc. Have no idea whether I'll be able to get it done or not.

Will keep you posted, but the point is I'm glad Avid still believes in DSP. Gives me hope that with a little more time I can get a system I can rely on.

Just a thought.

TH

[Firechild]

To me it seems your hd is not really fast enough. You dont need HDX to solve that problem...2 solutions are available.
1. Buy a new hd.
or
2. Buy Pro Tools HD 10 software and activate the disc cashe feature. Now your audio will play directly from RAM, no disc streaming is involved.

[cananball]

split the session onto multiple drives. Pro tools only recommends 25 simultaneous tracks on a single drive.

[tomhartman]

Originally Posted by cananball

split the session onto multiple drives. Pro tools only recommends 25 simultaneous tracks on a single drive.

Those recommendations were made back when drives and CPU's were much slower.... I don't think anyone does that anymore, one poster up here works in video post and had 400 tracks running off one drive....

[WernerF]

I'm running P Tools 10, with HD 6 in a Magma chassis, on a 2008 quad core Mac and running 100 tracks plus sessions doesn't even make the system begin to break a sweat. The bonus is that I have tons of DSP that I can actually use DSP plugins with and they are the ones that I like and have been using for years. That, combined with Native, makes for a pretty dang amazing system. Until that is the case with HDX I will not be in the market to take a step backwards.

[Kasper]

Sure, DSP + native will always give you more juice.

But what you describe should not be an issue.
Firechild has the answer ... it's your hard drive. Get a faster drive or an SSD, you will have no problems with 100+ tracks.

kasper

[vudoo]

I've been doing post and music sessions with well beyond 100 tracks on a single drive for years now. No problem whatsoever.

[tomhartman]

SSD drive would be nice, but I've got about 150gigs of projects always in production, so the price would be silly.

Any particular drive recommendations? This is a Western Digital SATA in my Mac Pro, about two years old. Maybe it's slowin' down...

TH

[WernerF]

Unless your drive is less than a 7200 rpm drive you should be having no problem playing back 100 plus tracks with whatever plugins you want instantiated on them. If that is the case, which it's my guess that you have at least a 7200 rpm drive running your audio, it looks like it is probably another issue at work here. Drives don't get tired. They just stop working.

[tomhartman]

No the drive is 7200....and like I said, after awhile the song played fine. But it was just something I never encountered when I used to have a TDM system. I just worked. I don't know what other issue it could be, it just said it "couldn't get audio fast enough." Will be working with the song more this week and see if I get more hassles or it just....goes away......

TH