ORIGINAL: Viktor

ORIGINAL: dan le

Hi Big Reg:
It is amazing that when people ask about what the diifference between PT, even PT HD and Sonar, so many people jump in, but everytime with SAW, not too many people want to argue about it.
.LATENCY:
Since SAW is written in Assembly language, the execution sometimes can be faster by a hundred times as compared to a normal app, which is compiled, which means that for every instruction, it has to go thru an interpreter, thus slower.
For instance, in a compiled app, if you want to print something, you use the command Print and let the compiler do the rest. In Assembly language, you will call up an exact numeric address in Hexadecimal, let's say numeric 64000 for example to do a Print command. And the number is what Windows has for a Print function.
In the old days of Pentium II and III, this direct address command type was very useful, since the speed of those computers was slow, compared to today standards. When you have a few tracks played in a non SAW app, then it will not make any difference, but when you try to stack up about between 30 and 50 tracks, boy, the sounds coming out start to degrade quiclky. With a slow computer, like a PIII, I used to have to use the WDM method to slide the latency bar all the way up to like 64, to be able to play. HOWEVER, at 64, your sounds are not played at the original bit rate intended, so 24 bit for instance is no longer 24 bit. The sounds get smeared. With SAW, and with a slow computer like a PIII, 30 to 50 tracks at very low latency like 5.2 ms is no problem. Therefore the original bit rate is preserved. LOW latency is key to good sound.
A couple weeks ago, I think that was someone asking about the difference in sounds between Pentium and Athlon, and boy, the poor guy got jolted with like 40 threads making jokes about him. I think he was moving from a slow Pentium to a fast Athlon, and therefore he heard better sounds out of the new machine, but he did not realize that was due to low latency, and thus he asked the question. You guys were mean, BTW.
However, with faster computers nowaday, and especially with quad core and octo core coming out from AMD beginning next year, all of this FAST speed from SAW and Assembly language will, not might, but will be a thing of the past. Hell, with octo core, even PT HD will be not a major force any more. Why do you think that Digi is letting PT HD users use RTAS plug ins, which are native instead, besides TDM, which is a major shift in their marketing strategy, especially when RTAS prices are way lower than TDM. In fact, over at Digidesign, they call people using PT HD with RTAS plug ins, the poor man's PT HD rig.
.GUI:
If you complain about SAW with the lack of GUI, it is precisely because of the use of Assembly language. It is hell to do GUI and graphical interface with Assembly language. With Apple and Windows OS, the graphics are handled by the interpreter, so that it is very simple to design fancy GUI, since all the tools are there. You want to draw a box, you will call up a box, in Assembly, you will have to tell the computer exactly where to draw the box. And hell, if you want to move the box around, then forget it.
I think that things are changing rapidly with multi core machines in the near future, so if anyone is still using SAW, let's be aware.
Sincerely, my 2 cents.
Dan Le

beeing a software developer myself, i can tell you, that you have no ideea what are you talking about. You are simply wrong. No executable ever needs an interpreter. All executables are plain machine code. True that it might be compiled, but todays compilers are so good that most of the code run just as fast as asm code. Note that i wrote "just as". You said something about hundred times faster! Definitely not. Maybe some complicated math algorythms will not run fast in compiled code, but guess what: most of the developers of DAW software, code these critical parts in asm, just to be as fast as the cpu can...

Another thing: 24 bit will allways stay 24 bit, regardless of the latency. If the cpu is not fast enough for low latency then it will drop out. But definitely it will not be, as you say, "no longer 24 bit".

My advice, refresh you knoledge about software developement, before giving your wothless "2 cents".

ORIGINAL: Bill OConnell

Deleted. Forget it. Round and round we go...

ORIGINAL: SteveJL

I REALLY need to look at the farking dates on these threads it wasn't until near the bottom of page 1 that I realised it is from 2/2005, arrrgggg

Since SAW is written in Assembly language, the execution sometimes can be faster by a hundred times as compared to a normal app, which is compiled,

which means that for every instruction, it has to go thru an interpreter, thus slower.

For instance, in a compiled app, if you want to print something, you use the command Print and let the compiler do the rest. In Assembly language, you will call up an exact numeric address in Hexadecimal, let's say numeric 64000 for example to do a Print command. And the number is what Windows has for a Print function.