How much RAM is good for a Full Mix?

[Sergievsky]

I currently have a dual 2Ghz G5 and 2Gb ram and am about to do an albums worth of songs, mix and all, so I'd like to beef up the computer. I also have a Mackie UAD card.

So I'm looking at an ext SATA RAID setup so I can get some high track counts without a hit on the cpu (is this correct ) as well as adding RAM. Not sure how much though. Would another 2 gig enough, as in any more than then we get into diminishing returns territory, or stuff as much as possible?
I also use Altiverb and Elemental Audio plugs.

[Astia]

I used to have just 1G on my old G4 and still managed to do mixes with almost 100 tracks and some plug-ins. Now on G5 dual 2.75GHz I have 4G of ram and that is definitely enough.. at least for a while
On both setups I‘ve mixed a lot of albums.

Are You mixing on DP alone or with a mixing desk?

[Sergievsky]

Hey thanks. Yeah, I have a Yamaha 4416 hooked up through lightpipe, so I can offload 16 channels to it and use its eq and comps if needed, though for simplicity's sake would rather not. I also have the option of using PTLE/002R, but the 32trk limit might be a problem. So RAID isn't needed?

[sdfalk]

Depending on the compexity of the mix, how high the sample rate is.
(say 100 tracks at 24/96khz..I know I'd want a raid)
how CPU intensive the plugins are.
I'd absolutley inverst in a raid.

[Astia]

I had SCSI HD‘s in G4 but now I try to manage with SATA Raptor on the new G5. So far so good but I haven‘t had any huge sessions trackwise yet. On moday I should start mixing a song with app. 80 tracks..
I‘ll be propably posting on monday how it went. Fun to do it without testing & the label guys are coming too

[Jim]

So I'm looking at an ext SATA RAID setup so I can get some high track counts without a hit on the cpu

You're talking about two different animals. Fast drives and arrays give you media throughput, which is what you need when you have a lot of tracks at high sample rates and bit depths. CPU doesn't affect throughput that radically... it just manages the traffic, and that's a low overhead operation.

What you want fast CPU and lots of RAM for is host-based effects; more is better. You need more of both when you up the sample rate, as you have more bits to process in real time and for bouncing and backgrounding. Your UAD card will free up CPU resources, but will have little or no effect on media throughput.

The way to tell if you need faster drives is if you get stalled playback or stuttering choppy audio (dropped bits because the drives can't keep up with the audio stream).

You're probably fine with what you have, unless you just go nuts with your Altiverb. Get the latest rev, because I've read that it's more efficient with the CPU.

[Astia]

In the beginning of this week I mixed a session(44.1kHz,24bit) which I had recorded 6 months ago on dual 500MHz G4 with 1G ram and now opened it with a dual 2.75GHz G5 with 4G ram. Total track count was more than 110. G4 could hardly keep up with just a few plugins. I have SCSI hd‘s but still both processor and playback were almost clipping. Now on the new G5 I added propably 15-20 plugins including 4 reverbs(2 of them waves renaissance)but still the load on both cpu and playback were propably 20%. I got occasional spikes on playback but I had the project on Macintosh HD. Yesterday I installed a Raptor 70G SATA drive and now there is no spiking at all. I‘m planning on testing out 96kHz as soon as I find a proper time for that.

Sergievsky: how many tracks are You planning to be having and which sample rate do You use?

[Sergievsky]

I don't see going over 60-70 tracks at the most, and I do all my stuff at 24/44.1. But most of the songs will be coming from different arrangers, so the sample rate will vary, expecting some at 96k.

Since my mother is flying in from Chicago, I went ahead and ordered some stuff so it'll get to her in time. Another 2gb for a total of 4Gb of RAM, as well as a Servitek external SATA RAID setup, with two 300Gb 7200rpm drives. Now I'm thinking maybe I should've just stuffed my machine with 8gigs and forgo the raid. But I do use Ivory, and Kontakt 2, as well as Atmosphere and Stylus RMX, so I would assume all of those will benefit from the added speed?

I must say though that I did experiment with a raid setup with my iBook, one Firewire drive and the other through USB2 (since that drives firewire port was crashing the laptop...not oxford911 you see). Anyway, I did that because I was experiencing sustain cutoffs with Ivory due to slow disk messages. It didn't help at all. The HD inside the firewire only had a 2mb cache, and again the other drive was hooked up through USB2 so it wasn't exactly optimal conditions, but still, it should have been an improvement over using the internal HD of the iBook (which I upped to 7200rpm).