Eastwest Vs. Apple, Disconcerting article Options

[hahaworld]

Hey, everybody!

HaHaWorld here. Sorry I've been out of touch.

Does anybody have any good news about the new PLAY products from EastWest and their compatibility with Leopard? I've been waiting for PLAY to come out so I can actually use my Symphonic Orchestra collection again from EastWest, but this article from Film Music Weekly makes me wonder. Here are some excerpts from this article:

"All of the new PLAY products, without exception, are designed for 64-bit systems. PLAY is ahead of many manufacturers of hardware and software in that PLAY is, indeed, 64-bit ready. This means that when you read the Minimum and Recommended specs on the Soundsonline.com website you should interpret
Recommended as meaning: designed for. Read Minimum as meaning: will run, but not up to full potential. 8GB or more of RAM is preferred since the number of samples being loaded into memory (RAM) is huge!
. . .some of the PLAY MIDI performances have over 3,000 samples in them. With so many samples, a large amount of RAM is needed.

Within the RAM, you must account for how much is needed by the operating system. According to Apple, the minimum needed for Leopard is 512MB of RAM. So if your system is only 2GB, roughly 25% is going to the OS.

EastWest is recommending the fastest drive possible for enhanced performance. I checked, and those are the Seagate Cheetah’s running at 15,000 RPM (Mac Pros have available 300GB 15,000 RPM drives). They’re now in two sizes: 300GB and 400GB. Street price varies, but for 300GB (what’s available from Apple) you’re looking at $725 and for 400GB, $775. However, you have to remember that for optimum performance you need to keep 20% of the drive open. So your effective space on a 300GB 15,000 RPM drive is 240GB and 320GB with a 400GB 15,000 RPM drive. By comparison, a 1 Terabyte (TB) drive is
running around $325 depending on the manufacturer.

One thing that would be very useful for customers is to see statistically how the performance specs change with PLAY when using 7,200 RPM drives for samples vs. 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah drives for samples. Again, EastWest recommends the faster drives. But I would like to know before creating such a system what exactly a 15,000 RPM drive is really providing. Since these 300GB Seagate drives’ street price is at around $725 apiece, what percentage gain is realistically being achieved? It would also be good to see a chart or brief paragraph showing with MIDI Performances, the improvement of using 8GB of RAM to 16GB to 32GB, as opposed to anecdotal comments.

Logic operates with only 2GB of RAM. That’s it. To get PLAY or any other External MIDI instrument to operate with Logic on the Mac, it has to run using a freeware program called Soundflower. Installing Soundflower is a snap. Implementing Soundflower, especially if you’re new to the Mac, is not a snap. People not comfortable in working with Utilities –> Audio MIDI are going to have problems with it.

It’s not that I’m opposed to learning it. I just believe that when you’re thinking about dropping $7K on an Apple system that you shouldn’t need freeware to get their flagship program to work to industry standards.