Hello,
Ultimately the hard drive will need to feed the ram or pull from the ram so there will be a time limit to how long ram buffering will work
I use the term “buffering” because it’s something everyone understands (and it’s a feature PT touts) - the ram doesn’t actually fill up. Every workstation buffers data on the way to the drive, some do it more efficiently than others. When recording multiple tracks most workstations write a part of Track 1, then write a part of Track 2, etc. up to in our case Track 192, then go back around to writing some more of Track 1. Our drive testing showed that Toshiba drives performed very badly at this and other mechanisms had varying levels of performance despite all these drives benchmarking well. Additionally PT does this much better than Nuendo without filling up the ram. This indicates two things - the drive write access is different between the two programs and is more efficient in PT, and that some drives do not deal well with the particular type of write access Nuendo is doing with large track counts.
Perhaps you should look at Nuendo Live.
Thanks for the recommendation. We’ve looked at Nuendo Live, I was one of the beta testers. There are several reasons why the product doesn’t work for us the most obvious is we need an actual daw. However in those situations where we’re just acquiring it does not work as advertised. If you read the NLive forum posts you’ll see several issues that make it not usable for us - inaccurate and variable timestamps, dropped samples on long recordings, varying file starts with prerecord on, “flexible” timeline making AAF imports not accurate, etc.
I hope Steinberg takes a look at the write performance in Nuendo, it is not efficient and I’m still amazed that PT 10/11 has improved write performance as much as they have; they used to be the worst at it.
Hugh