[geeks] Garageband w/guitar

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 10:08:42AM -0500, Thomas Gallaway wrote:

> I used to do a 8 track hard disk recording on a Pentium 166 years ago  
> with cubase vst and still had cpu time for effects. It even was an IDE  
> system and not scsi and worked fairly well. It was the best machine I
> ever had.  

> Cubase ran smooth as hell. Then I upgraded and nothing worked any
> more. 

I used to use Saw+ on a 486 doing 8 tracks.  I was only doing 16bit
44.1khz, to it wasn't stretching it too much.  Their benching utility
said I should be able to do 12 tracks, and indicated it was the harddrive
that was the problem (IDE as well.  While it had a modern disk, it was
using the primitive localbus IDE controller that wasn't UltraATA
anything, but it did support DMA).  I was doing nothing more than mixing
though.  If you think about it, it really isn't hard to do multiple
tracks.  It's doing sophisticated effects that is hard.  12 tracks at
16bitsX44100hz is only a little over a meg a second.  That people are
astonished at being able to do things like that on older machines is a
testimate to how bad software generally is.

BTW, Lightwave also ran nicely on 486s, I thought.  We are talking circa
version 5.

Then I upgraded to the 32bit version (which one would have thought would
have gotten higher performance), and performance went through the
floor.  I couldn't do more than 2 tracks in realtime anymore.