Anyone using Duende with PowerMac G5 and liking it?

curtisb · Post by **curtisb** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 10:20 am

Wondering what you think of Duende?

Thanks for the information.
Peace..
Curtis

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 10:25 am

Wonderful on this end-- G5 2.5 Dual PPC.

I still can't have anything else on the FW bus, otherwise Dunede won't mount, but I've removed all of my FW drives and went eSATA.

I didn't get Duende's 32 mono instances as advertised, but I did get 12 stereo (24 mono) loaded before things started to crawl. I also had 6 instances of UAD-1 CS1 loaded, plus 4 Altiverbs. This was enough of a stress test for my projects-- way more than I tend to use presently. Without UAD-1 and Altiverb, I suspect that 32 mono Duende's would indeed be possible.

I'm close to getting an Intel, so I suspect that such numbers will increase with headroom to spare.

Because Liquid Mix seems to have overcome the same FW hurdle recently, I also suspect that Duende is not far behind.

FWI-- there is a free SSL plugin from SSL:
http://www.solid-state-logic.com/resour ... lugin.html

curtisb · Post by **curtisb** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:49 pm

Thanks for your input. That is the same system I am running, but I do have a Motu 828mk11 hooked to my FW.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:53 pm

curtisb wrote:Thanks for your input. That is the same system I am running, but I do have a Motu 828mk11 hooked to my FW.

Ah, I'm not sure about audio interfaces sharing the FW with Duende, at least at this time.

There are some interesting notes, however:

Duende doesn't "require" the included power supply and can take power right from the FW port. SSL suggests first making sure that everything plugged into the FW ports uses its own external power supply.

Another suggestion they make is to try a PCI host card for FW.

Here is another bit of advice from them regarding running the Mackie Onyx and Duende on Firewire-- some of the same wisdom could also apply to the 828:

SSL wrote:If Duende and Mackie are used on the same firewire bus (i.e. if a PCI firewire adapter is not used) then certain conditions apply for their mutual correct operation.
We have found through testing that the pair behave well when the whole system is booted from cold in the following order;
1: power up Duende
2: power up Mackie Onyx [ie: any firewire audio interface]
3: power up Mac

If the Onyx is power cycled whilst the system is running then Duende will probably not be recognised on the firewire bus until a system reboot.
If Duende is power cycled whilst the system is on then the Onyx may well malfunction until a system reboot.

Our tests have been unsuccessful at 88.2/96kHz. If you wish to work at high sample rates with these two units we advise the purchase of a PCI firewire adapter to create a separate firewire bus.

This gave me a choice of getting either a FW host card or an eSATA host card. Since my hard drive situation needed help, I chose the eSATA route and added a 1.25TB RAID plus a pair of Raptor 10k drives. FW port was wide open for Duende.