Domini Canes - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Great, but it is not... (Score 1) 364

by Domini Canes on Sunday August 03, 2008 @09:39AM (#24455631) Attached to: Chinese Restaurant Suffers Large Translation Error

I am not an expert linguist but I would doubt that English could be considered Latin derivative :). More of a germanic language group ancestry (with admixture/influence of frank and latin). Of course all these languages are of indoeuropean origin.....

Submission + - Pro Tools with iSCSI?

Submitted by

Kyle

on Friday March 23, 2007 @02:51AM

Kyle writes: "I'm the student IT guy for my college's on-campus radio station. Over the summer we converted the entire station from PC to Mac, and purchased Digidesign Mboxes for each workstation, so that we have the flexibility to use our recording facilities only for recording, and take our work elsewhere if need be. All of this was planned before my arrival, and I was brought in to help out with the installation as my first task. Since my boss had also ordered an Xserve for use as a simple NAS, I figured we would spare ourselves a lot of future trouble if we did The Right Thing(TM) and actually set up the machines as workstations, complete with network home directories.

Well it turns out Pro Tools doesn't like recording to network drives, for obvious reasons that completely escaped me at the time. We configured each Intel iMac workstation (of which we have five) with external FireWire drives, except for our main production station which got three external drives. All of this works fine, except that the original goal of portability is kind of eliminated by the need to manually move files between machines by using the network home directory as a temporary copy point. Since we have only one production room, which is in constant demand by DJs, our staff, and the radio classes, this means that sessions that are recorded and need to be bounced to MP3 are often delayed. Tying up the production computer for the length of the session file while it bounces often just isn't an option. So now I'm investigating implementing a SAN as a summer project.

All of our machines have Gigabit Ethernet. I'd like to connect them all to an iSCSI target so that sessions are recorded to one central location, eliminating the file juggling. I'd hate to see our external drives go to waste, but then again they may become useful as Time Machine backups in a future Leopard upgrade if they can't be integrated into a SAN solution. Does anyone have any experience in running Pro Tools on a SAN, and could direct me towards some options that would fulfill our needs? I'm specifically looking to avoid costly solutions like EditShare (our TV station has one and it's left a bad taste in my mouth), and running fibre simply isn't an option because a) we have iMacs and b) all of our rooms are double-walled, so running fibre would necessitate literally tearing down the station and rebuilding it. iSCSI seems like my only option (and this free initiator for OS X seems like a good start on the client side), but is it too slow for real-time DAW work for potentially, though not realistically, five workstations simultaneously?"

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