Ok, so if the uad-1 is a dongle, how about this???

[Spacey]

How about giving us the option to offload some of the dsp to our native cpu's.

Maybe charge for this feature to make up for loss of sales, or make it available to those with 4 cards?

Before you say anything Tony about Uad's awsome power... it's still a 150mhz dsp chip, which whilst fast at doing dsp audio related stuff, is no match for 2 x x2cpu... i.e 4 cores running nativ cpu.

This would be a great help to those needing a lot more power for 88.2/96khz projects. I know I run out of plug in power at 96khz and although I only have 2 cards, I'm running out of slots fast. So being able to run say 1176's on uad-1 and Roland space echo on native cpu would be great.

Piracy would not be a problem as you would have to have the Uad-1 to be able to use it.

 

[Ten]

Piracy would not be a problem as you would have to have the Uad-1 to be able to use it.

Like you need the usb dongle to run Cubase and Nuendo?

ten

 

[Spacey]

Uad is updated a lot more than Cubase/Nuendo. Anyhow the team that cracked that are no more.

It took them a shit load of man hours to do it. so I dont think they would be up for cracking it everytime an update came along.

 

[mersisblue]

the reason UAD has never been crack is it doesnt run on the native CPU

its code is different and most crackers ( I believe ) are lazy people

I think It might be a good I dead to let the 1176 SE on the native CPU and

maybe some little stuff But keep the money plugins on the card plz .

 

[A Gruesome Discovery]

The UAD-1 is not a dongle, how about that???

The plugins run on UA's DSP chip, which is for all intents and purposes a specialized multimedia processor. This chip performs what is known as \"vector processing\"; it handles numerous amounts of data at a time. Your computer's CPU is essentially a scalar processor, which handles one datum at a time (albeit rather quickly). A program coded for a vector processor will not run on a scalar processor; it will need to be fully rewritten, and some of the functionality will be impossible, or at least impractical, to reproduce.
Now to be completely accurate, almost all modern processors do perform some degree of vector processing via extended instruction sets (like the original MMX, AltiVec, etc), but it is nowhere near as comprehensive as a full-on multimedia chip like the Mpact2, which has a proprietary instruction set, making native processing even more unlikely.
Example: A vector processor can be told to take a bunch of values at once- let's say ten- and add them all, and this can be done in a small number of steps. A scalar processor requires each value to be grabbed one-at-a-time, added, and stored, and then move on to the next value, by means of something like a for/while loop. This means there's almost ten times as much code for the scalar processor's little routine (and that's just a simple example I stole from some website; it gets really hairy when you start talking about advanced loop functions, and utilizing the pipeline architecture of the DSP). So this program will be ten times as large when written for a native platform, assuming all the functions can even be translated to native code.
Believe it or not, a typical UAD plug will bring your CPU to its knees.
It's no coincidence that the best-sounding plugins aren't native; UAD and to a lesser extent TC's Powercore are fairly untouchable sound-wise, and it's not because their coders are geniuses; it's because they run on advanced multimedia chips with their own custom instruction sets.
So the tagline to this diatribe: The UAD-1 is to your UAD plugins as a 3D graphics accelerator is to Half-Life 2; you can sort of code the software to work without the hardware, but it's going to be crappy.

 

[Tony Ostinato]

as ive said before, extending that line of reasoning you can call the entire computer an expensive dongle.

look at the neve plugs they upsample to 192k, you can see the hit even a simple plugin at 192k gives. pultec likewise.


its sad theres no benchmark program for dsp functions because people are literally making up their own results out of thin air.

 

[Cubaselizer]

I think it was back in 2002 or 2003 at the Musikmesse Frankfurt at the uAudio booth. They were running a 1176LN on their PC, it hasn't been released at this time yet.
I'm not 100% sure but I think it was running on the PC-CPU - I'm pretty sure that a guy from the uAudio team told me that one LN1176 would eat up a whole PIII 700MHz.

One UAD can run 7 1176LNs, a full-blown sytsem can run 28 1176LNs - aprox. equivalent to a 19,6GHz CPU - seems pretty fast for a dongle
Okay I admit, the plugin was certainly not optimized for CPU-usage :roll:

 

[polygen]

it might have been running on the PC's graphics card

 

[Spacey]

I'm sorry but the Uad-1 (and I love mine) does not equal a 19.6ghz native cpu.

I would be very suprised if the hit is as huge as people think. Look at all the urs and waves ssl emu's, they are pretty intense, sound great but don't use a stupid amount of cpu.

If you put the Uad-1 up against the latest agp/pci-e graphics cards it looks pretty slow in comparison. this isn't a dig at uad as I'm a huge fan, but I think they should look into upgrading to a more powerfull card. The mpact is not going to last forever.

 

[Agent Cooper]

Does anybody remember that the Realverb Pro used to be available as a native Mac plugin ?
A friend of mine was proud to be able to run several instances in Logic besides some other plugins, and that was on a pathetic G3 with 300 or 400 MHz.
Go figure !
Cheers, Cooper

 

[Dan Duskin]

better solution...
a 4 or 8 processor firewire unit!

 

[Tony Ostinato]

When you ran that 1176 native it didnt have the ultradither and parameter smoothing that are done in the uad-1's hardware.


URS is a bad comparison, they outsource their programming and the plugins are NOT physics models of the actual units so they may sound superficially similar in some ways but they are not accurate models and youll see a lot of behvior differences.

To a lot of people that doesnt matter, to a lot it does.


none of them upsample to 192k, so that sure makes things easier too.


Its like the space echo, some people were saying this freebie one is just as good, for the people who believe that i guess it is. Sounded like crap to me.


but i am so amazed at quotes like \"the mpact isnt gonna last forever\" and comparisons to GRAPHICS CARDS.

mpact wasnt just a graphics card, and making a graphics card into an audio dsp isnt easy like noobs think it is, look at bionicfx after all.

the mpact is as much an audio dsp as a graphics one, it was designed as an all in one dsp solution, id suggest going back and researching mpact.


that said the much older and inferior motorola dsps are again returning in the latest gear like liquid mix and duende. I have yet to see anyone complain about that so how can they complain about the younger more powerful mpact?


I'd sure like people to go research facts before this \"uad-1 dongle\" theory of the illiterates returns again.

 

[Giles117 DP]

Thanks tony. I love my \"Dongle\"

I remember realverb pro. I had both versions, the UAD and the Native. The UAD one sounded better to my ears. Richer reverb tails....

 

[billybk1]

...that said the much older and inferior motorola dsps are again returning in the latest gear like liquid mix and duende. I have yet to see anyone complain about that so how can they complain about the younger more powerful mpact?

Yes, when it comes to Motorola DSP, it seems what was old is now new again! :lol:

 

[Ten]

You seem to forget its not the age of the mpact thats the issue, its that UA (unlike TC and all the others still using the older motorola chips) havent managed to put multiple chips onto a single card yet to increase the power.

I couldnt give a crap if they use the same old chip for years to come, just do like the others have and put several on the same card/box so we can run a bunch of all these lovely new plugs at decent sample rates. Im totally fed up filling all my mb slots and ext chassis with technology that can easily be put onto a single instance today and STILL running out of room for plugs.....I would happily pay 4x the amount for a 4x powerful card.

ten

 

[secretworld]

Yup, the sensible thing would be a 4 chip pci-e card, but if I were UA i would leave the 4 chip limit intact so only 1 card per system (or maybe 2 :lol: ?)

 

[Trebor Flow 2]

I'm not 100% sure but I think it was running on the PC-CPU - I'm pretty sure that a guy from the uAudio team told me that one LN1176 would eat up a whole PIII 700MHz.

Isn't that called a nem - a rumour, like that classic Apple put 'round for years that OS9 was way better than Windows. Then when OSX was out they admitted it was shit all along.

Well if UA stick with the current UAD-1 card for much longer it will be a dongle even if it didn't start life that way.

Trebor

 

[Spacey]

Tony... Geez man you're starting to sound like a \"UAD Cult Leader\" lol

I'm sorry but the URS eq's eat the cambridge. And the only upsampling uad plugin is the Pulteq and Pulteq pro.

I think Native dsp is coming along in strides now, and I have a real hard time believing that a modern day graphics card would not kick the mpact all over the town. Some of the new graphics cards do more calculations per second than the latest cpu's.

Uad-1's are great cards, but the time has come to put 2 or 4 of the cpu's on 1 card. I feel sorry for the guys with 4 cards running out of pci or pcie slots. Future motherboards are not going to cater for this.

The only real solutions are either an uber 4 cpu uad card, or a firewire rack mount with up to 8 slots for the pci cards.

Or..... how about this. A rack mount with a cable and interface that slots into a pci/pcie slot. A bit like the magma but made by uad.

 

[bulls hit]

You seem to forget its not the age of the mpact thats the issue, its that UA (unlike TC and all the others still using the older motorola chips) havent managed to put multiple chips onto a single card yet to increase the power.

I couldnt give a crap if they use the same old chip for years to come, just do like the others have and put several on the same card/box so we can run a bunch of all these lovely new plugs at decent sample rates. Im totally fed up filling all my mb slots and ext chassis with technology that can easily be put onto a single instance today and STILL running out of room for plugs.....I would happily pay 4x the amount for a 4x powerful card.

ten

I couldn't agree more. The TC cards even look cooler with all those chips arranged in tidy rows of raw power

 

[pipelineaudio73]

I'd love the plugs to run native if only I could get more stability. In the apps I use the UAD-1 is so riddled with buffer issues and problems that in the three or four years I have owned one, it has yet to make it to a final mix. Just stick them on the PC and let the card be a dongle, or both.