No doubt, times have become difficult in this current economic downturn. We may find more time on our hands than we are comfortable with. Winter being here reinforces that yearly cycle of studio cave dwelling, with a chance to refocus towards the coming seasons. Many of us here in the Northwest choose to utilize those spaces as our creative juices are compressed to quartz for the coming sun. From some other time...

<object height="81" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fmorphed-productions%2Fpassion-of-the-tribe"> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"> <embed allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fmorphed-productions%2Fpassion-of-the-tribe" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="81" width="100%"></embed> </object> Passion of the Tribe by Morphed Productions

My recent winter/recession tech project was to install XP x64 on the studio tower machine. Knowing there was all this available power not being used by my old 32 bit OS always had me wondering what I could really be capable of on this machine. It was well worth the effort.

Currently I am running 2 dual Opteron processors on an Asus k8n-dl board, for quad processing. I moved my streaming audio library onto a SATA drive and record drive on it's own IDE (I'll go SATA for this later). The performance and stability is quite noticeable. Running an Ableton session the other day, had the CPU meter in Ableton running smooth at 93-97%...!!! I kept waiting for hiccup or crash, but solid as a rock. Latency is dirt low.

XP took the install of Pro Tools 8 without a hitch. Once I got up an running, I set all preference settings to the most demanding, low latency, high CPU hit I could. The hardware buffer ended up comfortable at 512 for recording and over-dubbing and the monitor latency is ALMOST INEXISTENT!

I got to tooling around with the above audio project and in hardly any time rapped up the "Passion" track . Mixdown was smooth considering I was able to do all the pre-production at 96k 24 bit. Mastering was such a blast, it just came right out....certainly good enough for the few hours I put into it. The hardest part was learning the instrument parts...which is exactly what I like to hear in a computer based music production environment.

Here's the tribal bellydance piece I promised from my last post.

<object height="81" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fsynchronicity-frequency%2Ftempel"> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"> <embed allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fsynchronicity-frequency%2Ftempel" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="81" width="100%"></embed> </object> Tempel by Synchronicity Frequency

Also, Morphed Productions is now on Soundcloud. Please 'friend/subscribe'.