Sync'ing two copies of Cubase running on different machines?

[Awake]

Is this possible? I'm drawing up the plans for my home studio, and what I;'d like to do is to have a system running that does NOTHING except record audio into Cubase SX (or possibly ProTools - anyone got a preference from experience?) via an M-Audio Delta 44. I'd then like to have a second machine running a sequencer (probably Cubase again, possibly something a bit less weighty), which will talk to a bunch of synths via the M-Audio MIDIsport 2x2. Is it possible to sync these two programs so that if I hit "go" on one it'll start the other as well, in sync?

My reasoning runs like this. I'm intending to have a studio that allows me to record guitar / bass / anything that's mic'd, directly into the dedicated recording box. But for the synth side of it, I'd like to be able to build up and edit all the synth tracks as just MIDI data, and then ultimately record all the synth parts in one go as a 2-track stereo source. To make this work, though, I obviously need the two sequencers to run in sync. I'm aware of the MIDI clock concept, and both machines will be connected via the network, so does anyone have any ideas whether this is possible, and roughly how to go about it?

TTIA

[Rexx]

You can have two sequencers synced (one is slave, one is master)
Personally I think it's overkill though because I'd rather have both on one computer.

From what you stated you don't need two computers to do this.

You can use multirecord which allows you to record audio and midi at the same time.
I've used this when I recorded singing while recording just midi of my keyboards

[Bakerman]

There's a whole sync setup menu in Cubase so that's all possible. But as Rexx said, unless you're worried about system resources maxing out, you can probably do it with less hassle on 1 system.

[Awake]

You can have two sequencers synced (one is slave, one is master)
Personally I think it's overkill though because I'd rather have both on one computer.

From what you stated you don't need two computers to do this.

You can use multirecord which allows you to record audio and midi at the same time.
I've used this when I recorded singing while recording just midi of my keyboards
I understand that I can do both at the same time, but that's not actually my concern. My concern is that I don't write on just keyboards or just guitar or just bass - I mix it up. But I'm a big fan of layering lots of tracks, particularly keyboards and vocals. The problem is, if I record all the keyboard data as MIDI - which I want to do, because it means that I can correct mistakes, edit tracks, duplicate tracks, mess around with sounds, and all the other myriad advantages of MIDI - if the sequencer is on the same machine as the recording machine, when it comes to recording the actual audio tracks, I'd have to run the sequencer playing out MIDI data and recording audio at the same time. That sounds to me like I'm asking too much from the box and the software.

This is also assuming that I'll be using Cubase to record, and I still consider Pro-Tools as an option at this stage. It that's the case, I'll have no option but to split them up.

So we're saying that Cubase wil sync to another copy of Cubase over a network? Okay, cool. :) Any idea which ports it uses, or am I going to have to pull out a packet sniffer? ;) I'm usually the first person to say "RTFM", but that doesn't apply in this case since I'm still at a stage of selecting a product rather than asking a question about a product I already own. :)

For the recording machine, I'm planning on a Win2k box with an 80gb RAID 0 array, an AMD Athalon 2200 processor and a nice healthy dose of DDR memory. Does this sound a good enough set up, and assuming the longest song I'm going to be recording is about 20 minutes, how many tracks of audio would I fit on an 80gb array? How large a file is 1 minute of audio?

Thanks for the advice. :)

[Spacehog]

It uses virtually *no* system resources to play back MIDI tracks to keyboards from a PC... so you really don't need worry about that. If you've mixed the audio down to stereo and you're recording a single stereo track, that the sequencer is playing MIDI tracks as well won't faze it even remotely. If it does, mute (or freeze) a couple of the other audio tracks, or take some plug-in effects offline while you're doing the recording, you'll have no problem at all.

You *can* however sync Cubase, yeah, search in the manual / help file for something called VST System Link or something along those lines... that's designed specifically to split processing overheads between machines.

As for your file space question, depends what you're going to be recording it at... 1 track minute (ie one mono track for a minute) at 44.1kHz, 16 bit, takes up approximately 5Mb. 1 track minute at 48kHz, 24 bit takes up approximately 9Mb. 1 track minute at 96kHz, 24 bit takes up approximately 18Mb (all figures are rough). So recording for 20 minutes, on an 80Gb drive, at, say, 44.1kHz 24bit would give you roughly 500 mono tracks... which should be plenty :D Recording at 192kHz 24bit (for DVD Audio, say) would give you just over 100. Disk space is *not* going to be your limitation with today's hard disks (I have a 230Gb RAID array set up, but then I work a lot with video).

Martin

[Awake]

It uses virtually *no* system resources to play back MIDI tracks to keyboards from a PC... so you really don't need worry about that. If you've mixed the audio down to stereo and you're recording a single stereo track, that the sequencer is playing MIDI tracks as well won't faze it even remotely. If it does, mute (or freeze) a couple of the other audio tracks, or take some plug-in effects offline while you're doing the recording, you'll have no problem at all.
Is it an option to work this way: once I've got scratch tracks down, mix the scratch tracks and a click to two mono channels, and then do each instrument in a separate project? Then, later on, once all the audio is actually recorded, combine all the tracks into one big project for mixing? So in other words, I'd have a drums.vst, a guitars.vst, a keyboards.vst and a vocals.vst, each with a mono scratch track, a click and however many tracks of audio I've recorded of that instrument, and then pull them all into one huge project, fullsong.vst? If that's possible and practical, it would also make macking up the audio files a lot easier than having one big monolithic project.



As for your file space question, depends what you're going to be recording it at... 1 track minute (ie one mono track for a minute) at 44.1kHz, 16 bit, takes up approximately 5Mb. 1 track minute at 48kHz, 24 bit takes up approximately 9Mb. 1 track minute at 96kHz, 24 bit takes up approximately 18Mb (all figures are rough). So recording for 20 minutes, on an 80Gb drive, at, say, 44.1kHz 24bit would give you roughly 500 mono tracks... which should be plenty :D Recording at 192kHz 24bit (for DVD Audio, say) would give you just over 100. Disk space is *not* going to be your limitation with today's hard disks.
I foresee that you're going to say that memory will be. ;) How much memory, and what kind, do you use in your video editing box?

My wife and I just bought a house, and so I'm planning out this studio, with a view towards putting it together in the fall so I can record my first album next spring.

Thanks again for your help, guys. :)

[Spacehog]

I don't know whether you could combine different projects or not, it's not something I've tried, and I do not use Cubase as a regular occurence (I run Sonar in my studio). Certainly submixing audio tracks and then combining them would be possible, although I'd hardly think it necessary unless you were really dealing with hundreds of tracks.

As for system limitations, yeah, memory and processor speed will be limitations, as will things like the number and choice of plugins you use, what other background programs you're running at the same time, and even things such as how streamlined your graphics card drivers etc are. I run an Athlon XP2400 with 1.5Gb of DDR memory, and I have a graphics card that I knew used very small and low-overhead drivers (it's a 64Mb Pine AGP card), I have *all* graphical tweaks disabled in Windows XP and I get seriously quick performance out of it.

I'm in a similar situation, what with building a new studio in a new house, I currently run 2 M-Audio Delta 1010LT soundcards although hope to add another couple, along with a big mixer, and a drum kit will be added to the list of gear at Christmas, in preparation for an Easter release of my new album. Good luck with your ventures anyway :D

Martin

[Awake]

I don't know whether you could combine different projects or not, it's not something I've tried, and I do not use Cubase as a regular occurence (I run Sonar in my studio). Certainly submixing audio tracks and then combining them would be possible

My concern would be that sometimes you don't just get a nice balance in each of the instruments you have - say, between 6 guitars, 8 keyboards, 4 vocals and 7 drums (2 overheads, kick, snare, hats, toms, ambient), and then balance each group of instruments relative to each other. Sometime you'll want to make the level of the snare higher in a certain section, while leaving the rest of the drums at a constant level, and you can't do that if you submix each group of instruments then mix the groups, surely?


As for system limitations, yeah, memory and processor speed will be limitations, as will things like the number and choice of plugins you use, what other background programs you're running at the same time, and even things such as how streamlined your graphics card drivers etc are. I run an Athlon XP2400 with 1.5Gb of DDR memory, and I have a graphics card that I knew used very small and low-overhead drivers (it's a 64Mb Pine AGP card), I have *all* graphical tweaks disabled in Windows XP and I get seriously quick performance out of it.

Okay - what motherboard and graphics card are you using, out of curiosity?

Yeah, I'm basically going to strip down 2k as much as possible - which is a lot more than XP can be stripped down. ;) Given the choice, I'd ideally be using a Red Hat 9 Linux box stripped down and with a stripped-down custom kernel, but the audio suites for Linux just really aren't good enough yet. Hurry up and port Cubase, Steinberg!


a drum kit will be added to the list of gear at Christmas, in preparation for an Easter release of my new album. Good luck with your ventures anyway :D

You'll post on the forum when it's out, right? ;)

At the moment, I'm building the studio in two phases. I'm going to get the "essentials" together, which is to say, the stuff I need to record demos. Once the demo process is done, and I move to recording the whole thing, it's going to need to be a whole new level, both in terms of the numbers of tracks I need, the physical space I need (I want to do live drums and real tubular bells on the real album, but I'll settle for synths on the demo), the number of mics, and the number of mic inserts on the desk. For the demo, I'll probably use a Folio Notepad, but for the real thing, I'll probably use a Mackie 1202 VLZ.

So you can actually use more than one of the M-Audio I/O cards to increase the number of simultaeneous tracks you can record? That's really cool, I had no idea. Will that work across different products? I mean, if I bu an Audiophile 2496 for the demo process, then buy a Delta 44 for the final recordings, I'll be able to use both as inputs? Or I'd need two Delta 44s?

Thanks again,
Simon

[Spacehog]

Right, last question first, with recent versions of M-Audio drivers, you can sync up to 4 PCI Delta cards (including the Audiophile 2496) in the same unified driver thingy. I'm not sure how the multiple card sync works without having common digital connections, I have the SPDIF input of one connected to the SPDIF output of another to use a common clock, although I hope to get a wordclock generator and sync them that way in the future to free up input channels.

I similarly am patching song demos together using things like click tracks, my E-MU PX-7 drum machine and Spectrasonics Stylus before adding a real kit sometime in the new year for the final recordings. Physical space won't be a major concern, I've got a big studio in the new house (about 3-4 times what I'm in now). Of course I'll let people on the forum know when it's done, I can't promise much virtuoso keyboard playing, but there should be some good sounds and arranging, hopefully!

My PC motherboard is a MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU with onbuilt RAID, and my graphics card is a Pine 64Mb, the chipset is a SiS 315E. That said, I may go back to my Matrox Millennium G400 for dual monitor stuff once I move and have room on my desk again :) As for stripping down OS's, you'd be surprised just how much XP *can* be stripped, I seem to be using less system resources than I ever did with Win2k, and the ability to use APIC resources (so no IRQ conflicts) is a real bonus.

Finally coming to your submixing question, yeah, I wouldn't want to submix groups either, but then I don't realistically see me needing more tracks than my system can manage, I intend to output 24 (or possibly even 32) tracks directly from the system, mix them with Midi-controlled synths and mix down to a secondary machine (using a Behringer MX9000 24-channel inline desk for main mixing, slaved to a DDX3216 digital desk). I can't realistically see me needing more inputs than that, somehow :D My comment was just that I've not tried combining projects, so I don't know if it is possible or not. It may well be, but I'd think that you would cope with just having all the tracks available in the one project.

Martin

[ChrisMcCoy]

If you're even remotely considering ProTools, you may want to give it a good consideration. I'm a fan of that product. I have used it to do band demo with. I was not the engineer, but I got a good cursory overview of what it can do, and I was blown away at the flexibility of using it as an editing tool for recording. It allowed my band to do both direct and midi recording, and provided the engineer a great deal of flexibilty in moving around parts.
I honestly don't have any cubase experience, but I wanted to say that I like working with ProTools and would recommend it as a consideration when choosing a recording tool.
Just my 2 cents ! :D
C.