Comparison of HD, LE and M-Powered?

[TOM@METRO]

Originally Posted by Keybeeetsss

Oh my, Tom, how on this Blue Earth did you find these

Burning the midnight oil, calling in favors from Organized crime bosses, searching through old FBI files I found while snooping around in Washington after being tipped off by drunken Pentagon officials.

I felt by the way the first question was asked, it may be better to start fresh.

[Keybeeetsss]

Originally Posted by TOM@METRO

Burning the midnight oil, calling in favors from Organized crime bosses, searching through old FBI files I found while snooping around in Washington after being tipped off by drunken Pentagon officials.

I felt by the way the first question was asked, it may be better to start fresh.

Nicse...

[jojo99]

Tom's helpful, I've read his replies.

KayBeet is "Eweless". I've rEd HiS RePliEz, 2 of his's was "enufffff".
Enuff from the land of "teen angst, radical dude, street forum speak".

But...are those pages supposed to be this? http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/acidpro/compare

I believe this is what the question was. Dareen mentioned seeing the digi pages listed, but not a comparative list. The closest was the link to the pdf.

Winner: Richards 901

Oh and...we forgot the perverbial (it's not self serving untill we add these).
Nighssssss!

[Tricky Sam]

Bro...the program is the same for all Pro Tools....the difference is the hardware! I'm far from an expert but i beleive m-powered and LE run entirely within the host computer...i think with HD the DSP (plug in processing etc) is all in the digi hardware as opposed to your computer....i think the GUI is only in the computer for HD therefore the performance of HD can be gauranteed.....i'm mostly a sonar guy who owns m-powered 7/8 so my info could be right, wrong or half way LOL....

[peppertree]

I don't know why this is so hard to answer. Here:

Track counts:

http://www.protoolsblog.com/faq/pro-...8-feature.html

PTLE and PTMP are both limited to 18 simultaneous i/o. (dis)M-powered cannot have the CPTK or DV toolkits, but can have the MPTK with the 64 tracks.

Here's some of the software feature differences for v.7 I think are still present in v.8

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=...tmp7_features2

M-powered also bizzarely and regrettably does not offer pow-R dither, but that's relatively minor for most people.

The 2626 is the best interface for Pro Tools period so you're already well ahead of the game. HD offers a limited and klunky PDC implementation but Mellowmuse ATA is available for PTMP which, though very poorly designed and documented, will compensate for even more situations than HD will once you figure it out.

HD is in its death throes and there are so many 3rd party sales on ebay that it isn't making much money for digidesign either anymore. I feel awful for people getting sucked into it when it's almost never necessary and is about 1000% overpriced even on ebay.

[Keybeeetsss]

Well we didn't have a "graph" for them Pepper so we're of no help, as well as assuming that we didn't/don't have no clue of PT in any way...

[jojo99]

aNd 1s UhGen, a lOaN KayBee sitZ



You're like...so totally radical DUDE!

[darrena]

peppertree, this was very helpful thanks!

I have a few follow-up questions now that I've found some helpful souls that I believe asked above but haven't been covered:

1) Multicore utilization: in LE and M-powered, all of the processing is done "native" on the CPU (as opposed to an HD system). A worry I have is that because the main digi bet is HD, they might not be spending a lot of time making the native versions super efficient on the latest crop of PCs.

When those of you running LE or MP on projects with a bunch of virtual instruments and FX on tracks and busses, have you pulled up task manager's performance tab to look at how your CPU cores are being utilized? Is all the load going on 1? Or is it evenly distributed across all 4-8 cores?

2) Plugin delay compensation: I've been told that digi simply doesn't do this. Plugs that require look-ahead or introduce latency require you to manually regigger the other tracks with deays to compensate. Is this true in the real world or is this all theoretical?

3) Recording latency compensation: I also heard that this is something that isn't in Pro Tools LE/MP. Do those of you with M-Audio interfaces see any issues with monitoring tracks as you record them (with effects plugs, etc.)? Are there unacceptable delays introduced? Do you ever record tracks and then play them back to discover that they aren't exactly where you sang/played them?

From the digi vids, PT8 looks pretty sweet, but I want to make sure I'm making the right choice here... (Cubase 5 is the alternative option.)

[peppertree]

You can control how many cores/CPUs are used for RTAS processing in the Playback Engine dialog. In practice, you have at least one core for everything else and the remainder can be and is used for RTAS.

Delay Compensation can be done semi-automatically with Mellowmuse ATA...but digi has promised to add it to the native pro tools shortly. We'll see.

During tracking, the 2626 cue mixer solves your monitoring problems and yes pro tools puts the tracks in sync unless you are doing something odd such as monitoring through latency-inducing plugins on the master bus.

The Delay Comp implementation should resolve all of those issues, but Digi knows that it is effectively kissing HD and its vast gross margins bye bye when it decripples the native systems. They are going to--they are just trying to time it--and I believe they are too late.

Cubase and Nuendo to my knowledge aren't intentionally crippled in any way but there may be unintentional misery from design gaffes and support issues. I wouldn't use Pro Tools unless I was confident it's the best overall thing to use and once decrippled it will be hard to argue that. Of course once Digi decripples the other DAW vendors might have to get their skates on and fix their outstanding issues.

We're in a somewhat screwed up time where all the choices are a bit regrettable but there are plenty of them. Good luck.

[darrena]

The fact that you can control the # of cores are used for RTAS sounds like a good sign! Have you ever watched it when you put RTAS effects on virtual synths, busses or the master buss? It would be interesting to know if they still are able to multi-core balance.

I will look up Mellowmuse ATA, thanks.