waves apa-32 with ptle

[insta-fame]

does anyone own an apa unit and use ptle?. i got one with their software deal and have not had much luck getting it to work at all with pt-le 6.9.2, tiger. spent much time on phone with tech support and they can't figure it out so far. last conversation i had with them they said they may have a better netshell for ptle in a couple months.

[cwileyriser]

Sorry - can't help you with the question, but I'm glad I saw your post - I was wondering about the APA32 with PT LE. I am running Mac OS9 and PT 5.2, so pretty much anything new, including the APA32, doesn't work with my setup.

BTW, the reason I'm still running OS9 and PT5.2 is that I have a boatload of expensive plugins that won't work in PT6/OSX, and I'm pretty happy with things as they are, though I wouldn't mind just a little more processing power so I can run, e.g., a couple of different convolution reverbs, Channel Strip on several channels and an LA-2A or 1176 or two. Metric Halo's Channel Strip is my favorite plug-in. I rarely need or want to use other EQ, comps or gates, and it sounds great across the stereo buss for "pseudo-mastering" working copies of songs for burning to CD-R to listen to in the car or on the boombox.

Anyway, I digress.... The reason for my post is to see if anyone knows anything about using another computer networked to a PT computer, with the networked computer functioning as a hardware accelerator for running RTAS plug-ins. The hardware accelerators out there now, whether PCI cards like the UAD-1, or standalone hardware, like the Waves APS32 or TC Electronics Powercore, don't seem to be a fit for me because they only work with PT6 and OSX (though you can download UAD-1 software for OS9 still) and they only work with a limited set of proprietary plugins. Plus, the UAD-1 and Powercore require VST-to-RTAS adapter software, and the only one of those I know about is FXpansion's wrapper which requires OSX and PT6. Surely there's a market for a VST-to-RTAS wrapper for legacy operating systems and PT5 users like me, isn't there? I'd like to have one not just to have the ability to use these accelerators, but also just to be able to use VST plugins as RTAS plugins.

The Waves APA32 is basically a low-budget (AMD Sempron processor) PC with a Gigabit ethernet card in a rackmount box. A few hundred dollars (at retail) worth of hardware parts. So, obviously its the software that's unique in some way that's giving it value. Otherwise, it'd be pretty easy just to buy a cheap second computer and do the same thing. I understand that LogicPro v7 includes Logic Node software that provides for distributed audio processing using one Mac as the master and one or more nodes to do processing work over an Ethernet connection. That's pretty much the idea of what I'm hoping to find, but of course, that would require switching to Logic and OSX, and I don't need extra processing power that bad.

So, anyone know of any way that ProTools users can take advantage of distributed processing by networking two or more Macs together? Especially if it'd work for OS9 and PT5?

I'm kind of not expecting to get a "yes", but thought I'd ask anyway....

[insta-fame]

if anyone cares-i did eventually get it to work. i used the netshell installer/setup seperate from the plugin installer and suddenly everything works fine. the box will run 12-14 c4s at 48k. s'ok with me since i basically got it for free with my software upgrade.