How much GB Ram is needed?

[Plautus]

I noticed the Music program uses quite much ram, depending on the vst you are using.
Some Vst can be 2,3 Gb big.
I had 4Gb ram for many years. I always thought it is enough. But because of the crackling I thought it might not be sufficient. So I bought 2x4Gb sticks. Now I have 12Gb.
And in task manager once I saw it was 6Gb used (Cubase over 3Gb). I used a cinematic string that was mainly responsible for this huge memory occupation.
Now I wonder if I should buy 2x8Gb sticks more.

I just wonder how much ram is used in your systems when you are using music programs.

 

[happyrat1]

A fully loaded Studioblade Workstation sells for over $11,000 with two 6 core Xeon CPUs and 192 GB of ECC RAM and twin terabyte solid state drives.

http://musiccomputing.com/studioblade-5-88-key-windows/

Basically VSTs are RAM hungry and CPU hungry monsters. The more you can throw at them the better they run.

Gary

 

[bill5]

Good Lord. Do VSTs really need such a silly amount of memory?

Side note, none of their sites seem to even address this...under "system requirements," all they say is what OS you need. Hello McFly.

 

[happyrat1]

That's because technically many will run with a few hundred megs and swap out the rest to hard disk, but let's face it, they will stutter and lurch and sound like crap.

Basically it's always this way in the computer world. If you need something accomplished in real time, then you have to throw gobs of RAM at it.

In the case of the studioblade, these things are used for scoring major motion pictures, often layering the same number of instruments as in a small orchestra.

To be honest though, if programmers still worked with ASM language instead of bloated compilers they could quite easily write some amazing VSTis that ran well with a piddly 4 Gigs of RAM.

A fully loaded Korg Kronos, for instance, runs with about 4 Gigs of RAM and a piddly Intel Atom CPU. From a computing standpoint, it's not much better than your typical netbook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korg_Kronos

But because it runs a dedicated OS and software and doesn't piss away a ton of memory and CPU on the interface and fancy 3D graphics and compiler bloat, it represents one of the top musical workstations available today.

The sad fact of the matter is that 99% of the dedicated keyboards and synths out there these days are still using 2005 computer technology and given the fact that keyboard development teams tend to be small groups of programmers and engineers it's not likely to change anytime soon.

Right now the most RAM I've seen in a production workstation is in the new Kurzweil Forte using something around 16 GB of RAM and even that is mostly dedicated to their new German Piano sound.

As to what you or I would consider necessary and what a $100 Million Dollar moving picture would consider as necessary, those are two different things.

Gary

 

[bill5]

That's because technically many will run with a few hundred megs and swap out the rest to hard disk, but let's face it, they will stutter and lurch and sound like crap.

Basically it's always this way in the computer world. If you need something accomplished in real time, then you have to throw gobs of RAM at it.

No offense hr, and you probably have more serious tech knowledge than me, but I'm in I.T. and it's not always that way in the computer world. I use a wide variety of apps including graphic-based ones, and for most even a "mere" 4GB is enough. It seems to me that the music world in this case at least is far more demanding.....

To be honest though, if programmers still worked with ASM language instead of bloated compilers they could quite easily write some amazing VSTis that ran well with a piddly 4 Gigs of RAM.

ha - I programmed in Assembly way back in the Ice Age and I can tell you this for sure: that's like saying "if only people all rode horses instead of cars our pollution problems would be dramatically reduced." ie it's technically true but totally unrealistic and ignores other factors.

But because it runs a dedicated OS and software and doesn't piss away a ton of memory and CPU on the interface and fancy 3D graphics and compiler bloat, it represents one of the top musical workstations available today.

...generally perhaps, but it sounds like it's interface sucks as well, which if I'm spending a lot of money, is to me ridiculous. I'd rather they simply add more memory and a better CPU. Again in this day and age that should be a modest change in terms of both effort and cost.

The sad fact of the matter is that 99% of the dedicated keyboards and synths out there these days are still using 2005 computer technology and given the fact that keyboard development teams tend to be small groups of programmers and engineers it's not likely to change anytime soon.

Really, wow that's odd...esp if the people on the computing end are programmers. They love having the newest and best computing stuff. IMO it's more likely that mgt, marketing/etc people are going "use the old stuff it keeps costs down." ugh.

As to what you or I would consider necessary and what a $100 Million Dollar moving picture would consider as necessary, those are two different things.

No argument there. My needs are far more modest though. Just seems there should be a middle ground.

 

[happyrat1]

The main reason why music keyboards lag so far behind desktop computing technology is a simple one.

When it comes to desktop computers companies like Acer and HP and Lenovo design and build millions of them for an overall market adding up to billions of machines worldwide.

When it comes to high end music workstations though, if a Company like Yamaha or Korg or Roland sells 100,000 units that's considered to be a record breaking success.

The fact of the matter is that while your typical PC market includes pretty much everyone between the ages of 8 and 80 only 1 in a thousand people or so are proficient enough at a keyboard to even consider investing in a serious synth.

Sure you have the low end consumer grade PSRs and CTKs and WKs from Yamaha and Casio, but when it comes to actually spending over $500 on a synth your market shrinks to almost nobody.

Maybe 1 in 10,000 or maybe 1 in 100,000 buys a Kronos or a high end Motif or a PC3K or a Dave Smith Prophet.

If you look at the history of electronic musical instruments over the past 50 years it's a who's who of who's gone into bankruptcy or come back under another owner.

It's a business that caters to starving artist types and the industry simply cannot afford to hire top talented teams of engineers and shift their product lines on the turn of a dime with each latest and greatest advancement.

If I were to coin a phrase to describe the electronic music instrument industry over the past 30 years I'd have to say it was "Evolutionary, not Revolutionary,,,"

Gary

 

[bill5]

No offense but I question if that's it. Not saying you're wrong, but I'm skeptical...any time you're selling a product, even if it's "only" 100K of them, you want to sell as many as possible, and I can't believe they're so stupid to not get that putting in (for example) a better display would likely do that, esp when it wouldn't cost much extra to do so, and doubly esp when it would make you stand out from the crowd in no small way. It sounds like they went cheap on management, not techies.