Show Cue System

I am currently running a P4 1.8gHz machine, but want to move to a small form factor cpu cabinet to save space. I find that I can get a used Celeron considerably cheaper than a used P4.

Is anyone out there running with Celeron machines, and if so, does SCS run okay on them? (I searched the forum and couldn't find anything on this.)

Thanks. John

I use an old Gateway P3 900mhz with 256mg of ram running XP. I can run SCS, iTunes, Adobe Audition, and UltraVNC and it stays functional. I hope to soon upgrade it to something more powerful as the screen writing is slow, but it serves well.

John,

I've run SCS on various different boxes, but the one on which most production work has been done is a Celeron. I used that recently for a musical with backing tracks being played by SCS as well as sound effects, and it played perfectly. And that's on an old Celeron 2GHz with only 256Mb RAM, feeding an M-Audio Delta 44, and using MIDI control of cues. Operating under WinXP SP2.

Okay, I just realized I have other machines in the house. So I tried loading up one of my SCS programs on our old Sony Vaio laptop with a P3 600mHz/1.2gHz (plugged in or not) and 385mb ... and it jammed up when I fired off more than a few cues at once. Most of this may have been due to the [task mgr] commit charge over 500mb, and I've learned that when the commit is more than 20% above real memory, Windows seems to slow to a crawl.

Single cues is okay. Did you try running several cues simultaneously on your Celeron? (We regularly run up to 3 simultaneous cues).

Thanks. John

Allright -- I just pulled out the kids' laptop with a Celeron 2.6gHz and 768mb RAM, and loaded up SCS and the La Mancha sound tracks.

FIve simultaneous cues seems to run fine on the Celeron, although the UI is a bit jerky. The commit charge gets up to maybe 550mb, and the cpu is bumping around between 40 and 100%.

So maybe the memory is more important than the cpu?

I am running mp3 audio tracks exclusively, by the way.

John,

I've taken 5 of the audio files I used in the musical I mentioned. They are all stereo WAV fles, varying in length between 2:02 and 3:57. When I play all 5 simultaneously using SCS 9.4.5 the commit charge is about 291Kb and the CPU usage fluctuates between 8% and 18%, generally sitting on 12%. (This is on the Celeron running Windows XP SP2.)

I also converted all these files to MP3's, as 44.1KHz 128kbps stereo files. Playing all 5 simultaneously, the commit charge is the same as for the WAV files, and the CPU usage fluctuates between 15% and 25%, generally sitting on 18%.

The commit charge is also affected by how much else is running on the computer - I just had Windows Explorer and MailWasher running while I ran these tests (plus various background processes).

I varied several SCS options such as the playback buffer size, and requesting software mixing. The playback buffer size had a small effect on the size of the commit charge, but none of the options I modified seemed to affect the CPU usage.

UI performance is never good on this box, but that's not just SCS.

Ok, yes, I have other stuff loaded on these machines I was running the tests on.

Windows is a strange animal in that way -- it likes to suck up whatever resources you have. Just as an example, we just upgraded our work laptops to 4gb ram. And when I boot up Windows and shut off all programs that I know of, it shows a commit charge of somewhere between 800 and 1200mb! who knows ...

Okay, so it sounds like we're in pretty safe territory even with a number of files playing at once.

Thanks. John

I have two machines, one for editing (and other general purpose computing) and another dedicated to playback in the theatre.

The editing machine is a 3.0 GHz P4 with 2 GB of memory, and an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card. The playback machine is a 300 MHz P2 with 684 (??) MB of memory, an M-Audio Delta-44 sound card (4 channels), a generic PC sound card (2 channels), and the motherboard sound card (2 channels), for a total of 8 channels of playback. Both are running Windows XP Pro, SP2 (plus hotfixes).

The playback machine was created with a clean install of XP (following a re-format of the drive) and installation of only the needed applications: SCS and Audacity (for edits during rehearsals). It's not on the Internet, and I don't allow anyone to install software on it or download anything besides the cue files.

One of the potential problems with Windows machines is what applications you allow to be installed on them. The OS itself is very stable.

The playback machine takes the better part of a minute to boot, but it works like a champ once up and running. I haven't yet used more than 4 channels at one time, or written many overlapping cues. I always use 16 bit 44.1KHz .WAV files when possible. I've not yet found the relatively modest CPU power of this older machine to be a limitation.

YMMV. :-)