Hey all…
I’m a long time and happy user of Cubase, currently on 6.0.3 on my Snow Leopard Mac. The current set up sees me recording directly onto a Firewire hard drive and editing off that. All good.
Now, as our business expands I want to get my business partner involved in the editing so that once i’ve voiced a project, he can jump onto editing it.
What is the best setup for drives, and any potential issues ? Should I have a NAS/central drive to record to or will it be too slow in terms of reading/replaying ? If I keep the FW drive on the recording Mac, will it be easier to get the project available via the network, or might I face speed issues again ? I can only imagine I’d have to close the project on my computer first before the second one picks it up.
I value input 
I occasionally share projects with people, only remotely though, so this is mostly a bit of general discussion…
I do it by essentially copying my internal HD project dir to a USB disk which they take home and copy onto their internal HD. We agree who ‘owns’ the project so only one of us works on it at once. Sometimes we do it automatic syncing across the internet using Unison, but again, we still need to agree who ‘owns’ the project so we don’t both edit it.
In fact, working out who owns any file or project and stopping more than one people from editing it is a very big industry issue… Sometimes you can rely on Read-Only flags, some programs lock the files during use (like Word), others don’t or can’t. I don’t think Cubase locks anything, so opening the same project twice is possible but I’d say definitely not to be recommended, if you’re going to share using NAS then you’ll definitely have to manage that carefully!!
You may in the end find the best way is simply to pass the firewire drive over… It’s far faster than reading (or copying) over the network, and it’s got ‘ownership’ inbuilt. I suspect even gigabit network speeds would not be fast enough to run a NAS project, but then I’ve not tested it. My two studio PCs are linked with gigabit speed, but I’ve never tested running a remote project, I always copy (or move) the projects over first.
I’ve an idea that Nuendo includes some aspects of project management, so maybe you could look towards that?
Mike.
Hey Mike…
Thanks for the info - sounds about what I expected (well, for the first reply anyway !)…in regards to moving to Nuendo, I can’t really as Cubase Elements 6 is ideal for what I need and is the cheapest alternative - I do no music production, it is 99% voice editing (it’s the best program for it) and some audio production (with backing tracks).
Thanks for your input - anyone else have comments ?
I’d try it out… Personally I’m usually working with some biggish projects with say 100 studio tracks, or maybe 2hrs of live performance on 24 tracks so I need internal HD speed. But you might find with your modest track count that a networked drive works fine.
Essentially, Cubase doesn’t really care where the project dir is so the only issue is retrieval speed. The NAS speed is going to be limited by the networking speed. As a test you could try loading the project on one Mac across the network where it’s still stored remotely on the other to see how your network handles it. If that works well then it may be worth looking at a NAS style storage system.
Mike.