Anyone running a great windows/DP setup?

[Sergievsky]

Am thinking of skipping the next MacPro and going with the most powerful windows laptop I can afford. It's probably early, but it seems awfully quiet around here. Would be nice to read some great running setups.

[Danielo]

Hey Sergie;

I agree that activity seems to be fairly light on this forum...I can only hope that its because there are not so many problems with DP8

I have been a Windows user all my life (I build my own PC's)but I do use an iPad/iPhone (so I bear no hatred towards Apple). I currently run a Windows 7 64 bit desktop rig with a Core i7 920 Quad Processor, three HDs, an M-Audio 192 PCI and 12 Gb of RAM.

I was a Sonar user but switched awhile back to Ableton Live - wanting to also have "traditional" DAW with better flexibility for handling video, I now also use DP8 now that it is PC also.

I have been happy so far with DP8, but I would like it to be as stable as Ableton Live 9 is for me...having said that, the stability problems don't seem to be any worse than those outlined in the Mac forums (see the thread on how to Guarantee a crash-free DP8) and I can't say that they are the worse I have ever experienced with a "pro" piece of software. If you follow that Mac thread you will avoid most Windows crashes (i.e. don't change VSTs while the transport is running). I trust that most of these issues will be addressed in the short-run by MOTU (Windows and Mac).

So I would say that you should get pretty much the same experience should you choose to continue on the Mac or PC, though, I would argue, you would have a lot more "machine" selection if you choose Windows (IMHO and YMMV).

Anything more specific that you would like to know about?

[Sergievsky]

Hey thanks! Well, we're having a conversation on the mac side about VEPro and AU's limitation of 16midi channels per plug and how DP/Ve's way around it is the non-functioning event input plugs. Wondering how this would work on the PC side.
Also, I was looking at a desktop-replacement laptop, maybe something from ADK, probably a Haswell based one. I wonder if something like this would be sufficient. My old 8core MacPro really struggles when running a lot of VI's, along with a movie, hence the VEPro. But even with that, when pushed hard things gets weird and unstable.
Have you Rewired Live with DP? I was actually going to start experimenting with that.

[Danielo]

Hey Sergie;

I would say that there would be similar 16 channel limitations and workarounds on the PC - I haven't had to come up against this thus far (and probably never) as I am mostly synth based and never have to do full orchestral mock-ups. I think having a 2nd PC with the VEPro solution is probably the best thing for this...that's what I would do. One PC can only bear so much load for this sort of thing.

I can certainly comment on running Live 9 rewired to DP8 as I have been doing this (I prefer Live for rhythmic elements) - I have had no problems with this thus far (just remember to close Live first when shutting things down!). Live 9 seems to have some limitations which I am not fond of when running slaved, namely that Max 4 Live instruments/FX and VSTs cannot be loaded - anything that comes standard with Live (other than M4L) is fine. Not a showstopper for me, as Live 9 suite comes with lots, but I do like using M4L and my external instruments.