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Anyone attend Frankfurt Musikmesse? AND:What is HW's future?

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sonar11

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Re: Anyone attend Frankfurt Musikmesse? AND:What is HW's fut

PostTue May 01, 2018 8:18 pm

dhm wrote:Please correct me if I'm wrong , but my understanding is that:
- Many Macs nowadays don't have a CD/DVD drive, and very few USB ports.
- That obviously makes it difficult to load new sample-sets, and save or move diagnostic and backup files (since an internet connection is highly unlikely in a church organ installation).
- Many Hauptwerkians have had trouble with touchscreen drivers on recent-model Macs.
- Yes, the on-board sound in a Mac may be better for HW than that on a Windows PC motherboard, but since a church installation will almost certainly need more than one stereo output channel, an extra (multi-channel) audio interface would be necessary in any case, irrespective of which OS is being used.
- A Mac will cost much more (perhaps twice as much) than a PC of similar specification.
- Mac OS restricts the amount of on-board RAM that can be used for any one program (e.g. HW) at a time.
(It used to be about two-thirds, now improved to c.80% in HW4.) No such restriction in Windows.

Am I missing something?


How many USB ports do you need? You just need 1. You can buy hub and connect that and get all the extra ports you need.

I can't speak for the touch screen issues. I didn't notice any of that myself.

I'm not referring to the "onboard sound card"; I'm referring to the audio layer inside OS/X, how it processes audio. It's a better designed system than anything available on windows (including ASIO).

A mac only costs a lot more than a cheap windows PC. If you purchase a similar quality workstation class computer that runs windows, from HP/Dell, it will cost you the same. You shouldn't use a cheap computer in a church, so the hardware costs are more or less equivalent.

I'm quite sure I've seen members on this forum with 64+ gigs of ram on OS/X. But in the public installation I was involved with, we had more than enough RAM to load whatever sample we wanted. You shouldn't need more than 16 gigs for most samples in a church; you don't need more than 2 channels (no need for surround or the second front perspective), and you don't need > 1.5 seconds max of (truncated) reverb, so the ram requirements are a lot less than for a home (in my experience). You also don't need more than 16 bit; you sit far from the speakers so will never notice whatever tiny minuscule difference there might be by loading higher bit depth. The lower bit depth also speeds up organ loading, so it's a double win. I would do all this on windows too, btw, if windows was a requirement for the project.
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