Mac Pro 8-core Westmere, RME HDSPe MADI, PMX8

[Gaston69]

Hi to all of you,

I just got registrated here on the forum in order to learn more about Pyramix. My name is Gaston and I am a free lance recording engineer (classical music, 101 big orchestra, with about 60 concerts per season) who uses now Pro Tools X native however I discover limitations within Avid etc.
Also I do work together from time to time with Producers who prefer PMX.

However I invested a whole lot of money into my Mac Pro 8-core Westmere fully equipped with 7Tb hard disks , 27" Cinem display and RME HDSPe MADI card. I hAve been reading that it is possible over Boot camp, Windows 7 Ultimate to run PMX, however would like to know the downfalls etc etc i.e. what are the things I need to take care off, is the Mac a Decent computer in order to record to run PMX 8.


Would like to get your experience, thoughts, suggestions, advice

[Gaston69]

43 views however no reply, is my question/demand something that hasn't been tested yet?

[klaukholm]

I think a lot of us use the recommended systems.
If you look around on the forum, you can see a few threads where macboks are mentioned.
Native is a lot less fussy than masscore/mykerinos combos and our native system is running great on a non approved motherboard that was terrible for our mykerinos system

[mpdonahue]

I suspect that it will run native fine. The only downside is that you will have to spend a little time tweaking the OS and services to get the DPC latency optimized. (Same as you would have to do with any new motherboard in a native situation).
The other thing to be aware of are the storage requirements. Protools requires HFS+ volumes to work from and PMX is optimized for NTFS with 64k block size. In your storage scenario, going back and forth between PMX and Protools will mean that some storage will have to be allotted for each system. Not a big deal, just be aware. Also, do not get Win7 ultimate. You'll spend a bunch of time weeding out a bunch of services and applications. Get Win7 Pro.
Finally, what you will find is that with a single MADI I/O the stock Native Music Pack will have all the I/O you will need, but, if you get the new RME MADI HDSPe FX, you'll need to add the "Extended native Audio Support" key to get more than 48 I/O at 2fs.
All the best,
-mark

[tas]

Gaston,

I use a macbook pro 1.1, not 8-core. I use it daily so it works fine. I do have my share of issues which I report on this forum, but I do no think they are related to the MBP. Overall, I ve been working I ve been running my little studio fine for five years. 32 channel projects are quite common and when mixing, the CPU often works at 70%

In fact I am planning to move to MADI this month. I already purchased the RME MADIFX and will install soon. If you wanna hold on for a bit I can report how the transition went.

[phaseboy]

I can't speak for your specific set-up but I run pyramix under windows 8 (pyramix 7 - have not been able to get 8 running under win8 yet) and windows 7 on both a mac mini and mbp and switch back and forth between osX and Win using both pyramix and pro-tools. Pyramix native runs well on both machines - no differently than on any windows machines I've used in the past.

I format all my audio drives (except mac osx system volume) as NTFS and use Paragon's NTFS for mac software in osX which works great without issues. Pro-Tools run fine using the ntfs drives in osX - have not had any problems. I also have their HFS+ for win on the windows side for when people give me hfs formatted drives.

My work is pretty varied although I don't do much very high track count high sample rate. Still on the mac mini system which is much less than what you have I regularly do up to 32 tracks of 96kHz, and 60+ tracks at 48kHz with picture.

Best Regards,

Mark

[Perfect Record]

Gaston,
...
In fact I am planning to move to MADI this month. I already purchased the RME MADIFX and will install soon. If you wanna hold on for a bit I can report how the transition went.

Are you going to use a Magma rack or similar for the RME card?

[tas]

To be honest no idea what that is? I thought just the card and a madi cable are sufficient?

[tas]

ok I found out... way too expensive, will spend that on converters. I should have enough slots on the motherboard

[Paulo M]

To be honest no idea what that is? I thought just the card and a madi cable are sufficient?

Basically an external box that allows you to install PCIe or PCI cards that do not fit inside the main computer.

[Perfect Record]

ok I found out... way too expensive, will spend that on converters. I should have enough slots on the motherboard

From your earlier post it sounded like you intended to use the RME MADI FX with your Macbook Pro.

[tas]

sorry I meant Mac Pro. interesting device indeed, the price tag I find hard to understand, but that is usual. Unless I looked at the wrong model or sth.

[Gaston69]

First of all I want to thank all of you for your input and sharing your experiences.

I am in the middle of the season, will be recording all the Beethoven Symphonies, Mahler's 2nd and another piece from a local composer. What I believe is that it take a while to master PMX and also I need to reconfigure my Mac Pro etc which I find a bit to risky. All my recordings are live recordings with a dress rehearsal so cannot effort to get stuck in the middle of the heat.

I am considering to start using PMX on my Macbook Pro in order to discover PMX, if I am confident enough with it's interface I will install it on the Mac Pro.
Does anybody know for how long you can use a demo, and is this demo period long enough to get familiar with PMX. I like a user friendly interface

[Perfect Record]

...Does anybody know for how long you can use a demo, and is this demo period long enough to get familiar with PMX. I like a user friendly interface

Pyramix is a much different mindset than Pro Tools, but Pyramix is so much better suited to the work you're going to do.

Some of the Pyramix documentation is not as transparent as it should be. You'll find many cases where they tell you what the system can do, but rarely do they tell you why you want to use a particular feature. Once you understand source/destination editing and their fade editor, you'll be in great shape.

One big help is to have a friend who uses Pyramix that you can call with questions. But once you see how the editing model works in Pyramix, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

I don't run Parallels or Boot Camp on my Macs, but I doubt that you will mess anything up by installing Pyramix and trying it. Both the Marks have given you some great advice about storage options.

Just don't get frustrated when trying to learn. Remember that there are many Pyramix users turning out beautiful and very complicated classical music recordings on this system every day.

[johndsadams]

Hi,

I'm constantly flipping back and forth between ProTools and PMX native both on a MBP and a MacPro. Everything works well and is stable.

PMX is really good for editing. The editing model allows one to make very many edits in a fraction of the time it might take you on ProTools. I prefer PTs for mixing, though. There have been a few projects where I completed the editing with PMX then mixed in ProTools!

-John