ManOtunes wrote:Frodo,
thanks so much for all those specs. it looks quite juicy.
I have a few questions... hopefully you or someone here knows the answers.
1/ you mentioned that v2 will be able to time stretch, but
what about pitch shifting? i often have the need to pitch a small chunk of a sample.
2/ also, i'm guessing they don't want to talk about it too much, but what about the many bugs? Has there been any talk of bug repairs? i'm going to get a mac pro soon, so do you know if they made it able to run more stably on the intel macs? I'd trade in all those fancy new features if i'm simply able to run the damn thing without too many crashes.
3/ do you know what the deal is with people who own v1, payment-wise? I remember reading ages ago that all v1 owners would get the upgrade for free. is this true?
4/ When i get the mac pro, i'm planning to get 8 gigs of RAM. Do you happen to know if there's any limit to the amount of ram Machfive (or Logic) can use? I don't want to spend that extra cash if logic and m5 can't take advantage.
5/ Regarding direct disk streaming, do you know if it will be possible for us to put different sample banks onto different disks, all accesible by the same instance of M5? As i'm sure you know, the new mac pros allow you to install up to 4 internal hard drives. Will it be possible to spread the banks out amongst the 4 drives?
If so, we'd be able to stream 4 times as many samples simultaneously.
Sorry to bombard you with all that... you just seem to be so knowledgable about this stuff.
thanx
ManOtunes--
Thanks for the kind words, but I pasted that in from an old document from last year. That's as much info as I've located on v2 at once.
All of your questions are excellent!!
To answer them all in a nutshell: I don't know!
1) and 2) I would hope that pitch shifting is part of it. That's a major tool for customizing samples. As with many things from MOTU or any other developer, so many things promised are sometimes set aside to be included at another time. In the case of v2, the entire plugin was detained!! I have heard and read a bit more about current bugs being fixed, some of which were addressed with v 1.2.3, but there are numerous other mission-critical features that need serious attention.
3) Last I heard was that v2 would indeed be free to v1 users, but we also heard that v2 would be out over a year ago. Because v2 wasn't delivered when it was promised, I wonder if MOTU will now do a deal that if you bought v1 between x-date and x-date it will be free, but if you bought it between y-date and y-date there will be nominal upgrade fee?
This, of course, doesn't make sense either way. Recent purchasers of M5 won't want to pay again, and early purchasers would in effect be penalized after a long wait. There's really no telling how this will turn out.
4) RAM limit? Good question. Currently, host apps themselves have RAM limits of less than 4GB anyway. It's going to be really hard to tell if MOTU or Apple will expand host app limits beyond that, but according to the blurb-- the Standalone version will receive unlimited MIDI channels and can support unlimited parts
per instance. This would imply that the limitations would be restricted to the hardware, meaning what remained of unused RAM outside of the host app. The limits remain on the plugin version, but the plugin supports 128 MIDI channels per instance.... to the extent that what samples are loaded fit within the host apps limitations of 4GB or less.
One other thing to keep in mind is that we are closer to Leopard than ever before. In addition to host RAM limits, waiting for true 64-bit addressing will offer tremendous improvements in performance. Again, there's no telling what the totality of the benefits Leopard will bring.
5) Disk streaming from different drives into the same instance? I should think that this would not only be entirely possible within the standalone version, but absolutely necessary. What good would it do to have unlimited tracks and yet force the user to put the totality of their samples on one drive? I hope this is not a pragmatic oversight on the part of the developers.
As mentioned, I can't confirm anything as official, but now that the summer is over, we enter our 21st month of waiting since the original anouncement. There has been so little official word since then that it's even hard to tell which of these features have made the cut-- or which have been cut altogether.
I only hope that v2 doesn't promise more than it can deliver-- and that it's stable and usable. Otherwise, it will be a royal disaster for those who have been patient for so long.
)
(I'm actually making music with Kontakt 2 though)
