Intel Mac- Windows n PC Daws

[lebouche]

Just a wondering good folk. If I ran windows on my intel mac and Cubase as well as Logic pro on osx am I opening a whole big can of demented worms...are they going to fight and destroy their home. My (ex)biz partner once installed Ableton Live on a computer that had Cubase and it tottally skitzed out.

The boring reason for my question if you care
I was just wondering if this could be a solution to one of my engineer friends refusing to work with Logic. I can see his point but he wants to work at my studio and its a big pain in the ass when we record something on his pc then he takes it home and I'm stuck without files or can't make tweeks.

Thank you:)

[jord]

This all depends on how you are running Windows in your Mac. I don't believe that Parallels supports Core Audio in that nature, but I could be wrong on this. I can't see Windows on Boot Camp as having a problem as it doesn't really know that the Mac OS exists (it also has its own partition).

jord

[lebouche]

Thanks Jord.
Does anyone have any personal experience of this??
There must be some folk out there whom use bootcamp.:Confused:

[Brendo]

i use bootcamp. whadda ya wanna know?

its like having two computers, equal specs, one PC, one mac. you can access your PC partition from mac, you can write to it if its FAT formatted, you can read only if its NTFS. you cant access your mac partition from windows.

[lebouche]

I wanna know if I'll be able to run DAWS on both platforms without causing problems.
So I have to partition my harddrive. Not sure there ll be enough space for windows and another DAW.
hhhmmmmn.
Thanks

[Brendo]

well thats what bootcamp is. a multi boot, two partition system.

im telling you, that running windows under bootcamp, is just like having two PC's and should be treated as such... except for the disk access things i wrote about - NTFS read only in OSX, FAT read write in OSX, HFS+ unreadable in Win.

so will they fight? as much as daws on two separate computers would.

[lebouche]

Great. I didnt realise that when you made a partition you could have seperate formats on the same hard disk.
Is it the kind of thing I should get a specialist in to do or could I easily read up on it n do it myself.

Cheers

[Brendo]

its easy. just follow apples instructions, and choose FAT in the windows setup routine instead of NTFS, so you have read/write in OSX to the windows partition.

the partitioning is a piece of piss, because theres something like one slider and one button, in Boot Camp Assistant.

i assume you know how to set up windows?

an external FAT drive would help with file transfers between OS's - again, as if you had a PC daw and a Mac DAW set up in the same room, and you could only use one at a time.

[lebouche]

I just got a firewire 800 card with two ports and one 250 gig hard drive to record audio to. Dont know what format it is...just worked straight away.
Also have a 100 gig USB drive.
Guess I can parttition those as well.
:)
I think I could prob manage installing windows...cant be hard

[Brendo]

eugh your 250gig... if thats lacie, it was probably HFS+ format, wont be readable in windows.

100gig USB is probably already FAT32 if you never formatted it out of the box. you can use that one for transfers between OSes.

the way to check... mount the drive, then right/control click, get info.

if youre lucky enough to have a mac pro buy a new drive specifically for windows.

[lebouche]

eugh your 250gig... if thats lacie, it was probably HFS+ format, wont be readable in windows.

100gig USB is probably already FAT32 if you never formatted it out of the box. you can use that one for transfers between OSes.

the way to check... mount the drive, then right/control click, get info.

if youre lucky enough to have a mac pro buy a new drive specifically for windows.
Yes lucky enough....250 gig is westersomething book thingy drive.
So is the 100 gig usb..same make.
Hate computers...love what they CAN do...but hate em.:Cry:

[Brendo]

western digital.... yeah so if you used them straight out of the box they are either FAT or NTFS.

if theyre in one big partition, unfortunately they may be NTFS, as FAT doesnt support large partitions.

check them.

[Chris Lambrechts]

I wanna know if I'll be able to run DAWS on both platforms without causing problems.


I'm running quite a big PT rig (HD6 Accel) on a Mac Pro 2.66 and more out of pure interest then anything else I installed bootcamp and XP Pro on it as well and ran some interesting tests.

1. both XP and OSX have the same versions of PT installed and virtually all of the same plugins.

2. I can create a session on whatever OS and without any effort open it up in the other OS ... no problem at all. I even tried to open and work in some 'real life' sessions under XP ... you know ... the heavy track count devided over 4 SCSI's with a betacam SP machinecontrolled to the sync I/O blah blah etc ... ... without a glitch.

3. I ran some 'native' tests ... to see how many RTAS plugins I could open up under either OS. Well ... exactly the same number : 43,256 EQ3 7 band EQ's in a 48k session. (well that number is a slight exagouration but I can't remember the exact number ... just that it was ridicoulously high)

4. 'feel' : I have to admit that I'm a bit of a Mac biassed person and I really kinda don't like XP as a OS but ... honesty prevails ... I have to admit also that the system performs stunningly well. The controller works as snappy under XP as it does under OS X and in fact ... if you would switch off the screen and let me work on the controller without knowing wether the session is running in XP or OS X ... I doubt I would be able to tell.

I haven't really tried to run any other daws under both OS's ... but I'm pretty sure that if it's a daw that runs stable under any XP PC ... it will run just as stable on the mac pro. Like others have said ... XP doesn't know it's running on a mac. And that's entirely how it feels ... good or bad being subjective ...


Chris

[Brendo]

i have the opposite experience.

protools runs like a fucking DOG under xp for me. cant even open a session without it hanging.

YMMV

[Zoesch]

In my case, because I still haven't decided if to update to SX4 or to wait until Nuendo gets a proper Universal Binary update I've been using Bootcamp heavily for my recording needs.

So far so good, the only thing that I have noticed is a slight increase in ASIO latencies compared against a Core2Duo PC Laptop (The increase has been between 1 and .4 msec, nothing to complain about really) when running buffers of 128 samples or less. I think this is attributable to EFI and the Firewire and USB controllers.

Windows XP still blows in terms of Firewire transfer speeds but that is to be expected.

Otherwise I can load very heavy projects with instances of NI Massive, URS EQ, Guitar Rig and other CPU heavy plugins with no problems.

[Brendo]

Zoesch, how far away is a UB update of Nuendo?

[Charles Dye]

I luv Chris' posts. Thanks, dood, 4 sharing such detailed info.

Very helpful stuff. :Thumbsup:


:idusecooleremoticonsifwehadthem: :idusecooleremoticonsifwehadthem:

[Barish]

I'm running quite a big PT rig

...HD6 Accel...

....43,256 EQ3 7 band EQ's in a 48k session.

Holy cow! :icon_eek: :icon_eek: :icon_eek:

Did you check if the streetlights dimmed outside while you were running that?


I haven't touched a Mac since 1997 but I'm telling you, my next DAW will be a Mac Pro.


B.

[Zoesch]

Zoesch, how far away is a UB update of Nuendo?

Far... and if you see the feature list for Cubase 4 you start to get the feeling that there might not be a Nuendo 4 :(

One thing... on the Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pro I've managed to load 3 instances of Massive and still not get the CPU indicator to go beyond 60% with very complex sounds... there's definitely power on the Core 2 Duo for sure.

[Tonzauber]

HFS+ unreadable in Win.

just buy yourself the macdrive application, it makes hfs+ drives readable to winxp. And its cheap, fast and small so does not take up lot of cpu power. I am recording with mac+protools, and simply plug the hfs+ drive via firewire on my win+sadie workstation for editing. 32+ tracks at 24/44.1 at no problem so far, even 24tracks 24/441 + 2 avis at the same time no problem on an old PIV 2,6ghz /1gig ram....
And it makes life much better than dealing with the outdated fat32 format which sometimes gives you the blues in OSX

[malice]

And it makes life much better than dealing with the outdated fat32 format which sometimes gives you the blues in OSX

After a long winded serie of difficult experience about having a hard drive dedicated to transfer between PC and Mac, I came up with this result. You have two way of dealing with this.

1) you can make two partitions on the same HD, one in HFS one in NTFS, I haven't tried, but it's possible.

2) you use FAT32 BUT :

- you should format the FAT32 from the mac, not the PC, even USB keys.
- you can't use files greater than 4 gigs
- you don't WORK on the drive, only transfer

Macdrive works, but sometimes does not read HFS at all, I don't know why.

malice

[Chris Lambrechts]

Holy cow! :icon_eek: :icon_eek: :icon_eek:

Did you check if the streetlights dimmed outside while you were running that?


I haven't touched a Mac since 1997 but I'm telling you, my next DAW will be a Mac Pro.


B.

The number of plugins it could hold in a test session and still perform playback WAS absurd. 600+ EQII 7b if memory serves me.

Now what I also should add of course is that when you max out the processors like that (4 .. as in 2 x dual core), you hardly can do anything else. In fact the mouse will hardly move and if then in chunks so you have to do it really slooooooow ad pressing play will take 15 seconds before it actually starts.

Which brings me to one of the reasons why I still LOVE TDM or any dedicated hardware dsp system so much. It doesn't CARE wether you run 1 or a bizillion plugins or wether you are running 85 tracks @ 96k with a 2 hour video of a live concert in the same session. In a native environment everything you can do is nearly allways a compromise to something else you can't do. The more you charge the CPU's the slower things get / the more latency issues you have to take into account etc etc ...

But .... processors have become so powerfull that in many situations , like in a session where you don't actually NEED 600 7 band EQ's native works very well.

Chris