CosmicDolphin

The ID4 is £99 whereas the M2 is £159 here

Doesn't really make a huge heap of difference to me as I rarely record that much live, it's most VI stuff. I may put down a guide guitar track but the mic is not right next to the PC so it doesn't really pick it up anyway. Either that or it's a DI. The ambient temperature is fairly cool as the studio is in my garage and I don't plan to overclock so usually the stock cooling is sufficient for my needs but I do have a Coolermaster Silent PSU and a passively cooled GPU in this machine . I only really need 1 XLR input with phantom power and a DI input..I have I/O on this Focuswrite that I've never used so the MOTU M4 is probably overkill. I have been looking at the Audient ID4 as it is sufficient for my needs, decent quality and low cost. Also I write a lot of automation and it has a feature to help with this.

Sadly I checked the Focusrite support site and they don't support Win 10 for the Saffire series after the latest update ! Seems they changed the way the Firewire drivers work and rendered it obsolete

I may well get this as a cheap base and do some upgrades https://www.awd-it.co.uk/elite-amd-ryzen-9-3900x-4.6ghz-twelve-core-ddr4-business-and-home-pc-system.html This is where I had the 3200g system from for the kids gaming and it's only about a half hour drive away if I need to go as well

It's a Focusrite Pro 24 DSP - Firewire on a TI chpset Belkin card as recomended This processor was good when I had it but the Synths and the Plugins and the Kontakt instruments have all got more CPU intensive in the decade I have had it.

Thanks , I'm up at around 300 tracks now in varous music Libraries, it's a slow business but royalties are starting to trickle in hence the new PC Yes I guess my projects would be similar, apologies I just assumed you were using Cakewalk as we are on their forum. Fro my brief time with it Reaper does feel like a more efficent DAW, it was snappier on my system, very fast to load etc. I tried various options when I thought Cakewalk had gone the way of the Dodo but in the end was happy that Cakewalk was saved and I figure similar results will be seen across all the main DAWs. My CPU is definitley the worst bottleneck, it craps out at low latency when I've still got plenty of ram and HDD use is low- I try to run everything at 256ms which is where it still feels responsive ( roundtrip latency of 13ms )..any more than that and it's only good for mixing not playing anything. Also my Mobo has a fault so only one stick of ram is working now. My Kontakt and Sample drive total of 1TB so I guess I will have to get a large SSD for those. Interesting, I can probably save some budget there then as I was thinking I should go for 3600mhz...3000 or 3200mhz will probably do the trick then. More budget saving then, the main reason I would have gone for the X570 board would have been the PCIE4 support - otherwise I would probably be happy with the B450 chipset which means I can get a pre-built machine at a sensible price and like you say put the budget towards more storage & ram. I don't own anything Thunderblt related as I don't even think it was around when I bought this current machine. All my previous DAWs have been budget friendly pre-built machines off Amazon or Dell and I've never spent more than around £600 initially and then done my own tweaks & upgrades. There's a PC building company that is not too far from me where I bought my kids Ryzen 3200g system off last Christmas and it's been great. It was something like £320 and I provided my own O/s licence. They are advertising a basic Ryzen 3900x tower for £750 which is tempting although it needs about another £150 to add the NVME 512gb and up the ram to 32Gb 3200mhz which I think will probably do me to start with. So it's a toss up between something like that or I have seen a 3700x system from a well know PC seller on Amazon for £659..again it would need another £150 throwing at it to get the extra drive and ram. Or building my own which I've also done in the past and maybe ending up with a better PSU and Mobo. Sounds very good, but yes Christmas music is banned until next December at our house ! It would be nice if I could still run my finished tracks at 256 samples. I don't know whether stretching to the 3900x would make enough difference although it would appear to according to the DAWbench reports as there's quite a big jump up on both tests. I need to keep it under £1k though..preferably less to keep the wife happy. She's a Mac user so if I was in her world I'd proibbaly be looking at twice as much for something half as powerful that I can't upgrade because it's soldered in !

Hi Patrick I myself am leaning toward the 3700x for my next DAW build. I do a mixture of styles for Library music so some is EDM - Future Bass - etc where I might use Serum / Massive/ Nexus but others are more Hybrid Trailer styles with some orchestral Kontakt Libraries like Albion One, Symphobia, Keepforest etc. I was just interested to know what sort of stuff you have been using it for and how it performed ? I would say most of my tracks have up to 100 VST plugins and somewhere between 10 - 20 VSTi's either Kontatk based or virtual synths and a handful of audio tracks if I record anything live or import refernce tracks. Currently I have an i5 2500 which must be coming up to 10yrs old with 16gb ram , a 240gb SSD for Win7 and Cakewalk and couple of 2TB spinners one that holds my Kontakt Libraries and samples and another for backup / archive stuff. It's been good but I can't run enough Kontakt instruments at one time with low latency to write with the proper sounds so I end up using TTS1 to sketch it out and then change all the sounds later on the highest latency setting to preserve CPU and I almost always have to track freeze a bunch of stuff halfway through the mix. Can I ask which speed of DDR4 you went for ? And did you get an NVME SSD and was it PCIE gen 4 as that's and advantage of the X570 chipset as I understand it ? Also did you go with the stock wraith cooler or have you upgraded it and also how many watts is you PSU rated at ? Sorry for so many questions ! Mark ( PS - You can hear some of my tracks here to get an idea of what I am using it for ) _

I would request the abilty to set this on a per VSTi basis, as it's often needed on Kontakt but having a Global setting can mess up other instruments that aren't Kontakt. I can't recall exactly which comination it is but it's happened several times.

Yes me too

Yes I know that but how does that affect the DAW if you can do it from the hardware ?

What does the DAW NKS integration do ? I use Kontakt but I have my own controller keyboard

https://www.soundbrenner.com/

Hi Would it be possible to add a " Render All" to the Region FX Menu ? Maybe next to the "Bypass All" It's good housekeeping practice to bounce/render everything before archiving a project and this would help speed things up Cheers

Never used them...Let it go ..plenty of other plugins around as listed above

You must be using pretty basic automation then Bob ? Volume - panning..not a whole lot else you can automate after it's been bounced ? I see you have Kontakt so do you not use CC automation to control articulations etc in certain instruments ?