Cakewalk Home Studio; Cubase VST

This month, Martin Walker has some chips and a little sauce, as well as investigating some mysteriously disappearing features in Cubase.

No doubt legions of loyal PC owners are waiting for me to respond to Paul White's hilarious PC snub in last month's SOS (TSC Nashville Mac clone review). Unfortunately they'll all be disappointed, as with me it's all water off a duck's back. Yes, I could rabbit on that Macs had SCSI sockets as standard from an early date because they forgot to leave enough space for a hard drive inside the case, and that the reason Mac prices are now rather more competitive is that most people refuse to pay through the nose any more when PCs are much better value, but I won't. The reason? At the risk of offending PC owners, I must admit that I have great sympathy for Paul (he is a Mac owner after all), and allowing a huge pinch of salt with his comments, he's right. Let me explain...

The so‑called PC clone's 'compatibility' is at once both its strength and its downfall. Its strength lies in creating intense competition in the marketplace, which drives prices down for the consumer, creating a huge user base that further drives software manufacturers to launch ever‑more exciting applications to tempt us to part with our money. This is one of the main reasons that the PC is so widespread today. However, when you send in the clones, the inevitable happens. No‑one can test every possible combination of hardware and software, and almost every PC suffers from clashes at some stage — there is no such thing as a standard PC, as there is with a Mac. When you buy your next mainstream PC peripheral at an almost give‑away price, bear this in mind. Oh, and by the way, Paul was totally wrong about tapping the processor chip three times with a skull on a stick for reliable operation — the correct technique is to create a sympathetic environment by burning essential oils nearby, lighting candles, and making sure your PC is correctly aligned with local ley lines.

Farming It Out

DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chips are becoming vitally important for audio, and are entering our PCs in larger and larger numbers. In essence, every time we need to carry out any manipulation to audio data inside the computer, it must first be converted into digital data using an analogue to digital (A/D) converter. Once in the digital domain, any processing carried out on this data is DSP. One of the main confusions is that hardware chip DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) use exactly the same acronym, so that many people are left with the impression that 'DSP' is always a completely separate and powerful add‑on chip, used in the likes of the Mac DSP farm.

In fact, every time the main PC processor makes any change to the digital data derived from our audio signal, it is using DS Processing. So Sound Forge and WaveLab, the audio versions of Cubase, Cakewalk and Logic, and indeed any other audio application that accesses WAV files, is actually using DSP. Microsoft's DirectX is also a type of DSP (the term Native Signal Processing has been bandied about for this, since it uses the PC's normal processor), and this provides more efficient ways to run a wider variety of soundcards, by saving developers from having to write specific routines to suit each model of soundcard (see July's PC Notes).

The more advanced digital audio processing works by analysing the digital data into its constituent frequencies — this is known as Fourier Analysis, after a French mathematician who died in 1830, and who first formulated the method. The algorithm used is known as a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and this transforms the digital data from the time to the frequency domain using differential equations. It actually takes far more processing power to start changing EQs, creating filters, noise‑shaped dither and so on, than it does to produce amplitude‑based effects such as delays and echoes, which simply play back the same data at a different time.

You may now be wondering where the 'real' DSP chips come in. Well, inside every modern digital synthesizer and effects unit is at least one specialised DSP chip, to enable it to produce such wonderful sounds. Indeed, soundcards have them on board as well, to provide reverb, chorus, and surround sound functions, as well as handling the basic Input/Output functions. Since it takes so much processing power to perform the more interesting audio manipulations, special microprocessors have been developed which have been optimised for fundamental operations such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication, as needed by the FFT process. They don't need to perform the same range of general‑purpose activities required of the workhorse PC processor, and, much more important, that leaves them free to concentrate on a specific task — the manipulation of digital audio data. No nipping off to update the screen, shuffle a bit of data around on the hard disk, or check the MIDI ports to see if any more notes have arrived.

This is why using your Pentium processor to run an application like Cubase VST is so clever — it's doing absolutely everything, from shifting multiple tracks of data to and from the hard disk, moving it to and from the frequency domain to add filtering and effects, and mixing it down to a single stereo signal, to shunting it off to the soundcard, to be converted back into an analogue signal ready for your loudspeakers. Well, there has to be a limit to the processing power in any PC. Pentium Pro machines can already use multiple processors on the same motherboard, to provide more power, but there has to come a time when our expectations of more and yet more real‑time features mean that it is not feasible to ask the main PC processor to do it all. The only way to go is to take some of the processing load away from the main processor, and farm it out elsewhere.

You may now have guessed where I'm heading. The DSP 'farm', so beloved of Mac musicians using Digidesign products, is slowly but surely arriving on the PC. The V8 system from Digital Audio Labs already has two Motorola 56002 processors onboard, and to provide additional real‑time power, up to three DSP 'superchargers' can be added, which will run V8‑specific versions of the Waves Native Power Pack. Each features two more 56002s, running at 80MHz, making a possible total of eight industry‑standard DSP chips plugged into a single V8 soundcard. Exactly the same sort of power is harnessed inside the PC Soundscape system reviewed last month.

There is, however, great potential for confusion here, since the acronym DSP can stand for both the Processing (running the program) and the Processor (the actual hardware chip). If you see a 'DSP Module' advertised as part of a multitrack audio recording system, it might be a program or a chip — it pays to look closely at the specification. The industry‑standard chips are those from Motorola, and these use completely different programming code from PC processors, which evolved from Intel's 8086 range. Unfortunately, this means that standard DMSS plug‑ins (which appear in your MIDI + Audio sequencer) cannot access the extra processing power provided by Motorola DSP 'farms' — they need a different version of the program.

Despite the inevitable initial confusion, the moral is clear: if you want more and more real‑time processing, no longer can you expect to use a general‑purpose PC — a Pentium 200MHz MMX is starting to look decidedly puny. Cubase VST and its competitors demand extremely powerful processors to achieve their ultimate performance. If you want to run state‑of‑the‑art software, you either need an extremely powerful machine, or a soundcard which can give your PC a helping hand — expect to see the general‑purpose DSP chip appearing far more often inside PCs in the future.

Walking The Cake

Cakewalk must have been doing a lot of overtime lately. Both Cakewalk Home Studio (shown here) and Cakewalk Professional have just been upgraded to version 6, with prices of £99 and £199 respectively. Both add audio effects to their arsenals, and the Professional version has increased its number of audio tracks from four to eight. Contact Et Cetera on 01706 228039 for further details, or take a look at the Cakewalk web site (www.cakewalk.com).