On my Asus / Athlon64 3200+ / 1Gig Ram / WD 120Gig HD - I've done up to 72 tracks with 6 subgroups each running 2 or 3 plugins without a problem @ 24/48 (mixing, not recording - I bypass most plugins when I record).

Most current computers can do a TON (yes, a TON) of audio tracks nowadays without a problem. I remember when all's I had was an AMD K6 / 32Meg RAM / El Cheap'o SB card... It still did enough tracks for what we needed at the time...

i've done 18 simultaneous inputs on a 2.0 g5 mac. i think it was at 16bit though.. but maybe 24???

hey Bent... you managed 72 tracks of the single hard drive???? i didnt know that this was possible. what was the maximum number of streams playing back simultaneously at any given time???

If i could get 30 tracks on 24/96 mixing. with 20 playing back at the same time i would be a happy man...

What can I say but 10,000 rpm??

Bigger isn't better but faster is.

Man on top get it over with quick kind of girl.
Ms. Remy Ann David

Total (a lot of the tracks I've mixed to stereo) playing back at 1 time is 25.
6 Submixes with gate and comp on one, flange on one, verb on another one.

This will also kill you: I'm playing them back from my system drive.

The only time I have a problem is if I zoom in or out too fast during playback.

CPU shows 21% usage with Vegas eating up 92Megs RAM - Playback only.
I wouldn't try to record at this point...
(These specific tracks are 16/44.1)

RC up the street has a G4 running PT 6.4 TDM - not sure how many farm cards, but it's common on that system to record at least 24 tracks simultaneously, and often overdub multiple parts at the same time on top of the 24+ playing back (at 24b/48k)

It's an old system comprised of (1) Apogee AD8000 and (3) Digi888/24's, all running simultaneously.

igotnosmoke wrote: hey guys,

i am purchasing an ASUS laptop featuring Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz with 4GB RAM for my onsite recordings.

I was wondering whether anyone with a similar spec'd machine can tell me how many tracks i would be able to playback at 24-bit 96 kHz recording with the one HDD. Using Nuendo... I am expecting to be mixing 25-30 tracks active simultaneously...all my tracks have plugins active approximately 2 per track. (15 tracks) approximately 3-4 for my vocal tracks (i love those big def leppard style vocal productions! featuring 10 vocal channels all running autotune aswell) Would my specs be able to handle that kind of demand??

I am currently using a P4 2.8Ghz (single core) with 1.5RAM and struggle after 15 tracks

If a single drive becomes a bottleneck.. i am happy to purchase a dual bay HDD with RAID 0. But may not be necessary..?

cheers,
spiro

good luck getting an Asus to work for Audio. they have the dreaded ricoh chipset.
while the older single cores used to work fairly well the newer ones suck.

read why if you want
http://recording.org/resources/recording-computers.300

the comparison would apply to any ricoh chipset laptop (not just who i called out) assuming you can actually get the interface to be recognized.

Scott
ADK

good luck getting an Asus to work for Audio.

As I stated earlier, I use an Asus.
No problem.

Oh, not a laptop though.

My Laptop has a Ricoh chipset and I have had no problems with it.... guess I got pretty lucky!

I can record 16 though I don't have any effects going and I do my editing on my desktop.

Firewire or USB interface?
USB works alot better with ricoh.
firewire interface is the issue.
and if you are just grabbing tracks @1024 buffer yeah you should be fine.

try editing @128 buffer.

Scott
ADK

ADK... your comments have persuaded me to go all out with the new 2.6Ghz MacBook Pro... cheers for ur advice... i almost made a big mistake. i will be purchasing an enclosure whch features an eSATA interface to assist in achieving my bandwidth requirements. cant wait to have everything up and running.

Spiro

HI,
well that may not work so hot either. right now they have Agere or lucent firewire chipset NOT TI.
so it may have issues depending on the interface or will not yield as low a latency
but definately better than the asus
Scott

BTW, one thing about using multiple drives.
My friend got Vegas and I was using it to make a video of a parody song we sang for our other friend's 18th (we also did another for our Minister's 40th)
(bearing in mind video is more intensive than audio)
The video files weren't on my system drive but another 7200rpm drive. What I found, was a slight improvement when I swapped the bus, so it was sharing the IDE cable with my system drive but was sharing it with an unused CD drive.

Swap your buses, you might be able to squeeze an extra track out of it. I got 1-2 more fps (doing some complex realtime processing).

Good point, swapping to the secondary IDE (or vice versa) is a good idea.

I have always put the OS drive and the CD burner on the same IDE ribbon...