I've gone back to using a 20 year old computer and DSP solution

Danny1969

Just recently I've been doing a fair bit of recording and editing and as I sold off most of the studio stuff when I left the studio I've been doing it either on a QU desk or via Reaper and a laptop. As good as Reaper is though I missed the simplicity and quickness of Protools plus the latency was pissing me off and I started to think about buying another audio interface that supported very low latency ....but then I had another idea. 

Almost nothing has changed still I started recording bands 20 years ago. I'm still getting the same drums, bass, 2 guitars and vocal jobs I was back then. Why not use the same system then ? So I go digging in the shed and there sulking at the bottom of a pile of stuff is my old G4 which is stuffed full of Digidesign cards. A bit of digging around and I located the cable and an 882 in \ out interface and powered the thing up. Well it made a bit of a din as things were living in the fans and PSU but it booted into OSX and all was fine except the date \ time . Once I was satisfied it was a good to go I stripped it down and cleaned the fans and checked the caps in the PSU and cleaned out the internal fan in there.

It's hard to believe now but in the nineties these cards were about 10K each ... I didn't pay that as I brought them second hand but even then it was a few thousand for the cards and interfaces



So I fired up the 882 interface and started Protools and boom, back to the good old days of zero latency and TDM plugins. There are a couple of things that are a pain .... a G4 Mac is only USB 1.1 so moving filed via USB is painfully slow but a quick trip to Ebay and I scored a firewire 250Gb external drive for £15.00 ... so I can import files using the firewire 400 now
It won't run the latest plugins or virtual instruments but I don't actually need any of that and I won't Beat detective anyones  drums or autotune anyone these days if they paid me too. I just want to record real bands that only need a bit of EQ and verb \ delay to spice up the tracking and this does it perfectly. 

A quick look on Ebay shows you can score something like this for about £250 these days. It's a system that won't suit everybody but if you like a full DSP based recording solution rather than dickin around with buffer settings and such then you could do a lot worse than pick something like this up

CarpeDiem

This sounds like a great result. It will be interesting to know if you end up with better results as you've less parameters/options available.

DrBob

My first job after Uni was working in the tech support department at TSC (The Synthesiser Company) in the old Spitfire Works off of Edgeware Road.
Spent days at a time pulling apart Nubus Macs, stuffing them full of Digidesign Cards and then building massive Seagate RAID towers to go with them...
Ahhhhh, happy days.. ish....

JezWynd

Those G4 were great machines - made a lot of money freelancing multimedia and video using my G4 400. Inspired bit of design with the carrying handles, ideal for freelancing where you move into an office for a few weeks on a project. Think I had 128mb RAM which could run FCP, After Effects and Photoshop. Happy daze.

guitarfishbay

If it ain't broke...

Listened to Offspring Americana today and it made me think - no way that album would sound the same if tracked today. The vocals are out of tune in loads of places (mains and harmonies), doubled vocal notes aren't the same length, some of the lead guitar lines are a bit out of tune with the rhythms... still one of my favourite albums for the energy of it.

I'm not anti edit but some stuff works better rawer. Also tuning and timing properly takes ages... there's no good alternative to doing it by hand one note at a time... quantise kills the feel of the delivery instantly.

Jalapeno

Would a newer MacMini P/T setup not give you the same, but with P/T 12 and a tad more reliability ?

cruxiform

I bought a 2001 G4 Powermac from a chap on the Intermusic forum back in 2006. I upgraded it until it couldn't take no more...but it lasted as my main computer until 2012. If it was able to take more upgrades then I would've kept it. Fantastic computer.

Winny_Pooh

Jalapeno said:

Would a newer MacMini P/T setup not give you the same, but with P/T 12 and a tad more reliability ?

Yes but not for free

mellowsun

That's generally why people are loyal to Macs, because they tend to last forever.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro that is still going strong, with a new SSD and Ram upgrade it's pretty zippy now. For me it's worth keeping because it has so many ports (FireWire 800, USB, SD, Thunderbolt, Ethernet) and DVD-RW

The new machines are cool but just don't have the connectivity 

Danny1969

Jalapeno said:

Would a newer MacMini P/T setup not give you the same, but with P/T 12 and a tad more reliability ?

No because it's not the Mac that's doing the work it's the cards. All the Mac does is run the operating system, all the audio stream and plugin processing is done by the cards. With that amount of cards the old G4 can run 48 tracks of audio all with plugins without asking the G4 processor to do anything and because of that there is no latency ... you can let the drummer monitor through Pro tools and there's not even the 128 samples of latency your get with a good native interface with well written drivers. I could get the same with a Macmini  \ Thunderbolt and PT HDX but that would be £8699 for the PT system 

@guitarfishbay I suppose after 5 years in 2020 studios polishing bad performances in terms of moving drum hits and tuning vocals I'm sick of it. All you end up with is something that can sound impressive immediately but has no lasting soul for repeated listens because your not really hearing anything human. I've kind of gone the other direction now and I don't care if the timing drifts or the singers a bit pitchy ... as long as they play as a band I can capture something real that's worth hearing. 

ToneControl

I'm still using my 2002 Protools HD2 system - started with Pentiums, Before that I had a Mixplus with an 882, started on a 486DX2 I think, worked fine in 97 or 98?

The HD2 only started to suffer when I started using virtual instruments

After a few attempts with buying new systems, I only now have got a system that competes with it:
a 6900k with Pt12
quite laggy for monitoring of course, in comparison to the 15 year old DSP cards

Danny1969

ToneControl said:

I'm still using my 2002 Protools HD2 system - started with Pentiums, Before that I had a Mixplus with an 882, started on a 486DX2 I think, worked fine in 97 or 98?

The HD2 only started to suffer when I started using virtual instruments

After a few attempts with buying new systems, I only now have got a system that competes with it:
a 6900k with Pt12
quite laggy for monitoring of course, in comparison 

I have an HD2 system in terms of cards in a Dell Precision Workstation but I sold the 192's when I left the studio so resurrecting that computer wasn't an option ..... essentially now what  I'm using a Mixplus with an additional Farm card
The monitoring is just unbeatable ...

ToneControl

Danny1969 said:

ToneControl said:

I'm still using my 2002 Protools HD2 system - started with Pentiums, Before that I had a Mixplus with an 882, started on a 486DX2 I think, worked fine in 97 or 98?

The HD2 only started to suffer when I started using virtual instruments

After a few attempts with buying new systems, I only now have got a system that competes with it:
a 6900k with Pt12
quite laggy for monitoring of course, in comparison 

I have an HD2 system in terms of cards in a Dell Precision Workstation but I sold the 192's when I left the studio so resurrecting that computer wasn't an option ..... essentially now what  I'm using a Mixplus with an additional Farm card
The monitoring is just unbeatable ...

I have a Dell T7400, uses a lot of power though!

My plan is to try to gradually move over to the newer pc with USB rack IO, but there is a price to pay. If I was recording more seriously, I would not be so happy with the latency

Jalapeno

Winny_Pooh said:

Jalapeno said:

Would a newer MacMini P/T setup not give you the same, but with P/T 12 and a tad more reliability ?

Yes but not for free

Well apart from the roads, the sewers ... etc    Wis'd

Jalapeno

Danny1969 said:

Jalapeno said:

Would a newer MacMini P/T setup not give you the same, but with P/T 12 and a tad more reliability ?

No because it's not the Mac that's doing the work it's the cards. All the Mac does is run the operating system, all the audio stream and plugin processing is done by the cards. With that amount of cards the old G4 can run 48 tracks of audio all with plugins without asking the G4 processor to do anything and because of that there is no latency ... you can let the drummer monitor through Pro tools and there's not even the 128 samples of latency your get with a good native interface with well written drivers. I could get the same with a Macmini  \ Thunderbolt and PT HDX but that would be £8699 for the PT system 

(I understood the DSP vs CPU argument) Did not realise the PT outboard stuff was still so pricey, yikes !

Jez6345789

I still miss my old G4 Mac they were amazing machines and still going strong when I finally let it go when I moved and regret it.

one of the reason it was so good was so many parts back in the day were hand coded to the metal no endless layers of api and  stuff to make programming easy and join the dots.

stuff like photoshop 6 had all its filters written directly in assembler and some of those routines are way faster than the modern versions.

almost now want to find an old one for recording 

Danny1969

Jalapeno said:

Danny1969 said:

Jalapeno said:

Would a newer MacMini P/T setup not give you the same, but with P/T 12 and a tad more reliability ?

No because it's not the Mac that's doing the work it's the cards. All the Mac does is run the operating system, all the audio stream and plugin processing is done by the cards. With that amount of cards the old G4 can run 48 tracks of audio all with plugins without asking the G4 processor to do anything and because of that there is no latency ... you can let the drummer monitor through Pro tools and there's not even the 128 samples of latency your get with a good native interface with well written drivers. I could get the same with a Macmini  \ Thunderbolt and PT HDX but that would be £8699 for the PT system 

(I understood the DSP vs CPU argument) Did not realise the PT outboard stuff was still so pricey, yikes !

In fairness to HDX the 2 cards in a HD2 system were £10K each when they came out. HDX is much more affordable but yeah, still pricey as hell really

Drew_TNBD

I really don't miss the G4 days. At all.

octatonic

I had a HD3, it cost me something like £20k used.
I wouldn't go back but there were some things about HD that was great, esp the latency or lack thereof.

impmann

Albeit its only a humble home studio set up, but I still have a MacBook that I bought off a guy on MusicRadar - apparently it had been to the Gulf War with a previous owner, hence the cracks in the case. I still use that with Ableton and the Line6 interfaces - it serves me well, although it grumps because the QuickTime is out of date (and due to age can't be updated) so I can't play the WAVs back on the machine, but I can within Ableton.

I've had that for nearly 10 years, now... one of my best buys.

stonevibe

We do the same with the old MacPro towers still, As you can make them 64bit and you can flash PC graphics cards to run on them. I loved my G4 Quicksilver, but bloody hell they were loud and ran hot!