DNS Studios
01-12-1999, 08:44 AM
To: Digidesign Tech Support
Dear Sirs,
First of all hats off to you for the support displayed on this board. I have never ever seen ANY company on any message board responding to the customers the way you do here, namely delivering such fast, clearly stated and honest responses (sometimes 3 in a row!). Your effort in trying to answer almost each single post of your customers is truly remarkable.
This is particularly astonishing for somebody like me who works since years as a betatester for a German company (Creamware, makers of the "could be excellent" TripleDAT and CUT Master HDR systems) and who, even as a betatester, gets a response usually only after weeks, if at all, and whose bug lists have been practically ignored (or not addressed to) several times. Their message board is almost completely ignored by their Tech Support guys as well.
A few days ago I got seriously upset, because my TDAT system seriously scrambled up the audio stream for no reason whatsoever in doing something very simple, namely trying to playback a stereo stream over the digital out while recording with the analog in, which is supposed to be a very straightforward operation.
I would like to mention that I have a pretty fine PC system, that could effortlessly record and playback 64 or more 16bit tracks simultaneously. The fact is that TripleDAT is still a 16 bit program and the kernel of it sucks really badly. I have been pushing Creamware for NT support over the last four years (since the program was running under Win 3.11) with no result so far. I decided yesterday that this has gone too far.
You will probably ask then WHY did I work with TripleDAT for so long, and the answer is simple: it is relatively cheap (with all add-ons, 16 physical in/outs, extra plugins and external really good sounding 16/18bit AD/DA converters it costs about 3.800$), and it offers an extremely user friendly interface that allows me to perform up to 180 single cuts in a single day work (high precision, classical music with no timecode). In other words, it is the fastest way to edit audio data I know to date. The problem with TripleDAT is that it is not remotely as reliable as you would expect such a system to be.
On the other hand, I have worked with Pro Tools for quite some time, and I use it at the University "Mozarteum" where I teach (on a G3-300 with Audiomedia III), but there are some features that I really miss in the Mac version, most of all the context sensitive tools and context sensitive pop-up menus. I know that these issues are being slowly addressed, and I believe that the program will be optimized on NT, at least as far as the use of the second mouse button and the scroll wheel are concerned (I hope!).
It was with greatest pleasure that I followed the porting of Pro Tools under NT, which is IMHO, even in its current state, a far better system than the MacOS (true multitasking, far better stability, better memory management ... ). The reason why I do not want to switch completely to Mac is that I cannot get the performance in hi-end graphics and audio from any currently manufactured Apple machine. We all know that the Bytemark results posted on the Apple Website are showing only one side of the G3 performance. I could quote lots of Benchmarks where the Pentium II is up to double as fast as a G3. The 2 processors perform differently in different areas, but are roughly equivalent. The fact is, NT is already now a far better OS than the current MacOS versions, and it supports preempitive multitasking and multiprocessing. Apple doesn't currently manufacture any MP G3 machines. With MacOS X things might change, but until then it is a no-no for me.
OK, I'll try to finish this far too long post :-) .... my main workstation is a Dual Pentium II 504 (overclocked P2-450s, 112 MHz Busspeed, rock stable under NT and Win98) with 512 MB SD-RAM, 45 GB HD space (Ultra 2 Wide Seagate Cheetahs), a Matrox Millennium G200 AGP and 2x 3Dfx VoodooČ for 3D graphics.
What I would like to know is the following:
1.) Will the Pro Tools PCI cards still work reliably when overclocked from 33 to 37.3 MHz, which is the current speed of my PCI bus?
2.) Will the future Plug-Ins take advantage of the huge power reserves offered by a dual P2-504 system (native Plug-Ins)?
3.) Is the full functionality of the HUI already supported under NT?
4.) Do the Cheetahs U2W work fine in LVD mode (Low Voltage Differential) together with PT/NT (it shouldn't be an issue at all, but who knows ...)?
5.) Is full support for NTFS planned, and if so for when ? FAT16 partitions suck, with my 45 GB disk space I would get lost into 23 partitions!!! Besides, FAT16 is not, as opposed to NTFS, able to consistenly auto repare errors in case of a sudden power-off.
6.) Is a more powerful version of the PT24 DSP cards already in developement? For example with the really powerful SHARK DSPs from Analog Devices, that AFAIK should outperform anything in the Motorola class :-) ?
If I will become a PT/NT user, I will be very glad to share my knowledge in other HDR systems to further improve the "usability" of your already excellent system.
Thank you very much in advance, and kindest greetings to all the staff and the members of this board :-)
Michele "Xenomorph" Gaggia
DNS Studios
[This message has been edited by DNS Studios (edited 01-12-99).]
Dear Sirs,
First of all hats off to you for the support displayed on this board. I have never ever seen ANY company on any message board responding to the customers the way you do here, namely delivering such fast, clearly stated and honest responses (sometimes 3 in a row!). Your effort in trying to answer almost each single post of your customers is truly remarkable.
This is particularly astonishing for somebody like me who works since years as a betatester for a German company (Creamware, makers of the "could be excellent" TripleDAT and CUT Master HDR systems) and who, even as a betatester, gets a response usually only after weeks, if at all, and whose bug lists have been practically ignored (or not addressed to) several times. Their message board is almost completely ignored by their Tech Support guys as well.
A few days ago I got seriously upset, because my TDAT system seriously scrambled up the audio stream for no reason whatsoever in doing something very simple, namely trying to playback a stereo stream over the digital out while recording with the analog in, which is supposed to be a very straightforward operation.
I would like to mention that I have a pretty fine PC system, that could effortlessly record and playback 64 or more 16bit tracks simultaneously. The fact is that TripleDAT is still a 16 bit program and the kernel of it sucks really badly. I have been pushing Creamware for NT support over the last four years (since the program was running under Win 3.11) with no result so far. I decided yesterday that this has gone too far.
You will probably ask then WHY did I work with TripleDAT for so long, and the answer is simple: it is relatively cheap (with all add-ons, 16 physical in/outs, extra plugins and external really good sounding 16/18bit AD/DA converters it costs about 3.800$), and it offers an extremely user friendly interface that allows me to perform up to 180 single cuts in a single day work (high precision, classical music with no timecode). In other words, it is the fastest way to edit audio data I know to date. The problem with TripleDAT is that it is not remotely as reliable as you would expect such a system to be.
On the other hand, I have worked with Pro Tools for quite some time, and I use it at the University "Mozarteum" where I teach (on a G3-300 with Audiomedia III), but there are some features that I really miss in the Mac version, most of all the context sensitive tools and context sensitive pop-up menus. I know that these issues are being slowly addressed, and I believe that the program will be optimized on NT, at least as far as the use of the second mouse button and the scroll wheel are concerned (I hope!).
It was with greatest pleasure that I followed the porting of Pro Tools under NT, which is IMHO, even in its current state, a far better system than the MacOS (true multitasking, far better stability, better memory management ... ). The reason why I do not want to switch completely to Mac is that I cannot get the performance in hi-end graphics and audio from any currently manufactured Apple machine. We all know that the Bytemark results posted on the Apple Website are showing only one side of the G3 performance. I could quote lots of Benchmarks where the Pentium II is up to double as fast as a G3. The 2 processors perform differently in different areas, but are roughly equivalent. The fact is, NT is already now a far better OS than the current MacOS versions, and it supports preempitive multitasking and multiprocessing. Apple doesn't currently manufacture any MP G3 machines. With MacOS X things might change, but until then it is a no-no for me.
OK, I'll try to finish this far too long post :-) .... my main workstation is a Dual Pentium II 504 (overclocked P2-450s, 112 MHz Busspeed, rock stable under NT and Win98) with 512 MB SD-RAM, 45 GB HD space (Ultra 2 Wide Seagate Cheetahs), a Matrox Millennium G200 AGP and 2x 3Dfx VoodooČ for 3D graphics.
What I would like to know is the following:
1.) Will the Pro Tools PCI cards still work reliably when overclocked from 33 to 37.3 MHz, which is the current speed of my PCI bus?
2.) Will the future Plug-Ins take advantage of the huge power reserves offered by a dual P2-504 system (native Plug-Ins)?
3.) Is the full functionality of the HUI already supported under NT?
4.) Do the Cheetahs U2W work fine in LVD mode (Low Voltage Differential) together with PT/NT (it shouldn't be an issue at all, but who knows ...)?
5.) Is full support for NTFS planned, and if so for when ? FAT16 partitions suck, with my 45 GB disk space I would get lost into 23 partitions!!! Besides, FAT16 is not, as opposed to NTFS, able to consistenly auto repare errors in case of a sudden power-off.
6.) Is a more powerful version of the PT24 DSP cards already in developement? For example with the really powerful SHARK DSPs from Analog Devices, that AFAIK should outperform anything in the Motorola class :-) ?
If I will become a PT/NT user, I will be very glad to share my knowledge in other HDR systems to further improve the "usability" of your already excellent system.
Thank you very much in advance, and kindest greetings to all the staff and the members of this board :-)
Michele "Xenomorph" Gaggia
DNS Studios
[This message has been edited by DNS Studios (edited 01-12-99).]