Multiple PCs or Not?

[cobra7]

I am in the process of putting together my home studio based around Cubase VST32 running on a 733MHz PIII PC with 256MB RAM and Ultra SCSI hard drives for audio and Giga instruments. The computer is dedicated and optimized for audio work. My audio interface is the M-Audio Delta66 with the Omni I/O breakout box and my MIDI interface is a Midiman MidiSport 4X4.

I intend to use Gigasampler mostly for sequencing drums and bass from Cubase. My question is, can I expect this to work smoothly running both Cubase and GS on the same PC, or will I need to buy a second PC to support GS separate from my Cubase machine? Again, I\'m mostly using GS for drums and bass, so I can\'t see exceeding 20 simultanious voices or so in GS. However, I will be also tracking and processing audio tracks in Cubase for guitar, vocals, etc. as well.

Will I likely need to dedicate a separate computer to GS given the preceeding to get reasonable performance or will I be able to do this on my one computer?

Any sharing of experiences or insight into this is greatly appreciated. I want to investigate this further before investing in more hardware and software (and, consequently, giving my wife a heart attack!). Thank you.

[This message has been edited by cobra7 (edited 09-05-2001).]

[Alan]

With Cubase you can expect problems if it shares the same card in the same machine.If your just going to use giga in the way that you describe you can easily get away with a second audio card in the same machine dedicated to Giga as I do,but for heavy use a second machine is recommended.Asio and GSIF seem to have buffer conflicts.I would try M-Audios new Multiclient drivers and if you start getting clicks and pop\'s you\'ll know why.