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Hi, we have a computer at the practice space. Its a 2.4GHz Athlon (single core) We installed EZdrummer and it would not run until we dropped another 1gb of ram in there. I figure its because it loads drumkit sounds into the ram and drumkit takes about 450mb.
Mother board will support up to 4gb of ram. Is it worth adding?
We just did a demo recording to see how many tracks we will need for the album and it will be 6-8 guitar tracks (2xChugs, Octave, 5th, 4th, Some chord voicings, ocassional guitar harmonies and solos) 2 bass tracks(Dry and Sansamp) 8 for drums 3-4 for vocals and back vocals and 1-2 for sound fx.
So about 24 tracks. I am pretty sure every single track will have some eq. compression, some will have reverb, delay etc.

We run system on 250gb Sata and run Pro Tools on 500gb sata (also save projects there). Its XP sp3, with nothing else installed except for Pro Tools and plugins. Today it will have 3gb of ram in it. Is it worth adding 1 more?

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anonymous Thu, 07/30/2009 - 11:33

What about the amount of tracks and plugins. Or do plugins such as reverb delay compressor and eq use cpu rather than ram(i would guess so since its an instant processing).
On the other hand i would think that pro tools loads recorded tracks into ram... so So if each track is about 80mb(for 4-5 min song) than it will be.. 24x80=almost 2000mb. Which will leave a spare gig of ram for system and plugins...

djmukilteo Thu, 07/30/2009 - 11:44

WinXP will technically only recognize 3Gb of RAM but you can get some advantage with 4Gb because it will load most of your drivers into the upper 1Gb pageblock and then you still have 3Gb pageblock for the rest of your applications and plugin's etc....bottom line...It doesn't hurt to have it....in fact 2 matched sticks of 2Gb RAM is what I'm running in my system with an RME FF800/Cubase and I've never had any problems....

anonymous Thu, 07/30/2009 - 12:41

Well ok, i guess having 2 gigs in two sticks and 2 512 sticks can work for now and if we run into ram problems than we can always take advantage in 30 days besbuy refund policy 8-)

But how about a singlecore 2.4ghz athlon? should it be able to work with that many plugins?

PS. UAD card is out of question - expensive. We might just spend these money for real mixing with engineer.

Codemonkey Thu, 07/30/2009 - 15:18

"64 bit can utilize twice the ram that a 32 bit operating system can."

Twice? It's 2^32 as much, I believe. Considerably more than "twice".

Computers have a surprising amount of processing power, just so much of it goes to waste.
Long story short, I saw some code tonight that when optimised and written in assembler (over .NET) it went from 2.4 seconds to 0.1 seconds. Waste less, want less.

hueseph Thu, 07/30/2009 - 20:04

Which version of ProTools are you using? PT8 is a hog. I can run it but still get buffer errors with an Athlon x2 7750 BBE running at 3.2GHz.

RTAS plugins also tend to be a bit more demanding. Particularly the ones that emulate hardware. Namely, most of them. A UAD card would help but only with the plugins for that card. Incidentally, I bought a UAD-1e Express pack for $130. UAD is blowing out the older cards.

PT7.4 might run a bit smoother and if you're mainly doing audio that would be just fine. PT8 is great for composition and midi but it's a hog. I'm looking into a Phenom II now. Seems that's the only way I'll be able to maintain a reasonable track count.