WHO HAS NETWORKED THEIR PC'S?

[diminished]

i am in heaven with the networking idea that i have at the moment.it makes your life easier as it should be.wihtout the wiring hassles.You can for example,send and recieve data from your desktops to your laptops or vice o versa with wi-fi at 11 mbps.and it was unexpactedly fast.
HOWEVER,i do have a one question.
IS there a way to transfer data while the other computers are off?this feature is not working with me,unless the other intended computer is turned on phisicaly.
anyone in to this networking?i would like to know the answer.other than that,this is great,you wont know how valuable is it if you have more than one computer.its like p2p of you own network world.

[diminished]

ANYONE with an answer?

[TimOBrien]

No, of course you can't transfer data to a computer that's off. It's off. It's not on.

You COULD however have a separate file server that both computers could log into and pull the files from there, tho.... This would, of course, mean setting up a third computer to your network.

[diminished]

I have 4 computers networked by microsoft wi-fi wireless.The base is connected to a desktop as the router(the base).And the rest with wireless adapters.
TIMOBRIEN,Can you please elaborate a little more in details?AND,would it do(or is there a way?)to accomplish what i am after if,whatever it is that you are,or were sudjesting please?server etc?

[This message has been edited by diminished (edited 12-14-2002).]

[Chris_N]

You can't transfer data to or from a computer that is powered off. The operating system needs to be running, and the hard drive needs power in order to access the data.

I'm not familiar with the specific networking system you're using. Are all four computers connected to a separate router, or are three of the computers connected to the fourth? If three of the computers are connected to the fourth, then the fourth computer is acting as a router, sever, whatever you want to call it. But basically it's the central computer that all others are connected to. Tim was saying that you could store your files on this server (provided it has enough hard drive space). Then as long as the server remains on, the other computers have access to the files stored on it.

This solution is simpler in that you only have to transfer files to the server, rather than all of the computers. But it requires you to have the server running all the time (or at least any time you want to use one of the linked computers).

Hope I haven't confused things.

-Chris

[raoulduke]

Here I am replying to another post by you:

I have a wireless network as well. It's pretty cool sitting on the couch surfing the web on the laptop. But you have to chill on the idea of "instant" file transfers. Everyone is right about the computers needing to be on. Just leave the pertinent computers on (turn the monitors off -- they use 90% of the electricity).

Here's a wicked thought though: you could use the Windows backup utility to backup a whole directory of your important files across the network to ALL the computers whenever they are on. So you turn it on and the computer updates that directory automatically. It's all in the Windows backup utility help.

[ALBERTPIKE]

I have three computers networked in my home with an inexpensive netgear router. It is very simple if you have the wiring in place. I just remodeled my house and wired it up. Without the wiring, you will need the wireless setup. I transfer audio and midi files back and forth from my study to my music studio. Another advantage is that you can share peripherals like printers and scanners. Truthfully, a network is amazingly easy to set up.

[This message has been edited by ALBERTPIKE (edited 12-30-2002).]

[xtern]

I also have networked between two computers and am hoping to add another soon. I can attest to its simplicity (at least with winXP machines).

I was wondering if anyone has played with such progs like midi2lan in which one pc can send midi to another. And if so, what are the advantages here? I just can't find a use for it although it sounds useful http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif. just curious.

[SarkaPRO]

We link 2-4 PCs to eachother because of few reasons; sharing power between the computers, streaming .wav audiofiles in realtime and or in a situation where you would like to use Gigastudio and VST plugins inside Pro Tools.

Streaming audiofiles in realtime between two WIN PCs is not reliable because of slow WIN explorer. Because of this we use stripdown WIN<=>UNIX setup.

This is what we call real pro audioworking in tandem mode.

Happy New Year!

[brzilian]

Originally posted by SarkaPRO:
We link 2-4 PCs to eachother because of few reasons; sharing power between the computers, streaming .wav audiofiles in realtime and or in a situation where you would like to use Gigastudio and VST plugins inside Pro Tools.

Streaming audiofiles in realtime between two WIN PCs is not reliable because of slow WIN explorer. Because of this we use stripdown WIN<=>UNIX setup.

This is what we call real pro audioworking in tandem mode.

Happy New Year!


Tell us how you REALLY feel about Windows...Geez...

Getting back to diminshed's original post, do get too excited about streaming audio over Ethernet, especially if you're using 10baseT and not 100baseT.

10baseT only operates at 10-11Mbits/sec which is slower than USB (12Mbits/sec)!

[SarkaPRO]

Streaming audiofiles in realtime between two PCs (Master<=>Slave) through ethernet both having non-stripdown WIN OS is actually not working very good because of slow Explorer.

To solve this problem we used UNIX OS, unix drivers and a propper program in the Slave PC file server. Streaming in realtime from a UNIX PC is a totally diffrent story!

Why? UNIX is using the processors and the memorys in complitely diffrent way than WIN are. Unix is even using LOG STRUCTURED FILE SYSTEM technology which is not used in WIN. In test setup the Unix file server used a
266MHz AMD processor!

The success was because we used Unix with
Unix drivers which are free of any MC based bugs. And this drivers achives mouch - mouch stable bandwith than any kind of WIN drivers. In this setup the Master PC used a stripdown WINlite OS (free of IE) and used basic TCP/I protocol.

Measurings. In WINlite<=>UNIX realtime file serving with a 100baseT card we measured a
bandwith of 1.5mb/s (15mbits/s) in playing back and recording 24 mono tracks with resolution 32bit/48kHz.

As we know average 100baseT networking cards should be able to provide you about 7mb/s. So we actually have a lot of bandwith left.
Offcourse it would be really hard to speculate about real amount of tracks when you will achive bandwith limits. But lets say that anyway we are able to run full sized studio projects through ordinary 100baseT networking card. Having in mind that Gigabit is comming cheaper and this is a point when we are switching to resolution 32bit/96kHz audio.

Why should you use networking? In some cases it might not be necessary, but when you have huge projects the streaming of audio will also take some amount of cpu usage. In this case you will save some power to youre plugins.

UNIX is also cheaper because it can be built up on any old PC. Think about it, we used 266MHz AMD when tested!

Combining this things is the best what is available when you want to use in the Master PC a WIN OS. Anyway the WIN needs to be a stripdown lite verson to maximize the recourses there.

[diminished]

FYI.
I transfered 23 tracks of samp project from the daw to my laptop wireless ofcourse at 11mbps.around 700 mega bytes lets say with 5% of tolarance what have you.and i am on eitherbase wireless not usb at all.
I think real time streaming will be a totaly different senario,and if achievable reasonably,it will be great for plug ins and other apps too.but,with massive .wav, we need massive bandwith for real streaming. Anything comes up reasonable in that senario,you'll see me lined up first.
BTW,I transfered the project to test the new samp v7 demo.obviously it was a copy of the original from the daw.

sorry forgot.it took about 10 to 12 minutes more or less .

[This message has been edited by diminished (edited 01-01-2003).]

[diminished]

DONT ask me why....i use dsl for the net,when i networked 4 computers i thought i am gone slow down.Again,dont ask me why.The net is a lot faster with the wireless networking now.even with 2 computers on line at the same time.

[SarkaPRO]

Originally posted by diminished:
I think real time streaming will be a totaly different senario...

You ment that you haven't even try and stream .wav tracks in realtime. Actually it would be very intresting to learn how many .wav files youre wireless could stream.

[SarkaPRO]

Those who are intrested to complitely replace a laptop for networking or live on stage to a mouch faster solution.
Question concerns the small Cube PCs (20x20cm). This small cubes uses exactly the same components than used in towers/racks. The cubes even uses a normal full sized PCI audiocard. AMD XP and or P4 can be shoosed. No VIA shippset. In same performance category the cube is mouch cheaper than any PC/MAC laptop.

We even have this product in our line - fully tested!

[diminished]

SARKA,i think those little cubes have one pci slot right?if that is so?then as desktop replacement would be hard to do,or am i talking of a different cube over here?some laptops nowdays are including actual desktop cpus.but the problem is,they dont have fast bandwith and are limited comparing to desktops,specialy on the pci bus area.
another misinformation that the industry likes to advertise is,the firewire and usb 2.0 dont give whats promised.like supposedly 480mbps of data transfer.the most that they do from what i've been reading in the sekd group,is around 40 mbps.otherwise up to the full potential of 480mbps would be graet.

[johnportrash]

I heard something very disturbing last night from a friend of mine who works for a local university. He told me that he discovered a flaw in XP networking that will corrupt files sometimes when transferring them over a network. This is super bad for me because this is exactly what I use for backing up all of my files. I have two machines, each with two drives that I constantly mirror through a lan. Has anyone heard of such a problem? He recommended that I check all transfers. Yeah...ok, for one, I have registered apps that I can't install on both machines to check the files. Plus this would be very time consuming. Not as consuming as losing all files though. Does anyone out there run thier systems like this? Heard of this problem? Practical suggestions? Yeah, CDR is fine, but I hardly have time to burn 10 cd's every night. Once every couple weeks maybe.

Thanks,
John

[SarkaPRO]

I defenitly pointed out replacement of Laptops. Offcourse you would only need one PCI slot if you had a break-out-boxed lets say 8-16i/o soundcard. In this case it even could be used in Studio as stand alone replacing even towers/desktops/racks. Our Cube have 2 PCI slots. 1 for audiocard and 1 of graphic card. Cube mostly replacing laptops because of mouch smaller powersupply.

" some laptops nowdays are including actual desktop cpus.but the problem is,they dont have fast bandwith and are limited comparing to desktops,specialy on the pci bus area."
- You are absolutely right. One good reason why this Cube is replacing Laptops. This cube uses exactly the same processors, memory, hard-drives than in towers/racks. This is the reason it is faster than laptops.

" another misinformation that the industry likes to advertise is,the firewire and usb 2.0 dont give whats promised..."
- You ment the integrated firewire and the USB2 on our Cube. We would support firewire in some cases ex. if video or MOTU is involved. USB we support only for mouse&keyboards - thats it!

[SarkaPRO]

Originally posted by johnportrash:
...flaw in XP networking that will corrupt files sometimes when transferring them over a network...

Hmmm strange. We haven't encounter this yet. Offcourse ours is not directly comparable because we use a mouch lighter bug free XP
(500Mb).

[anakinskye]

I have both of my systems networked, which DAW people tell you not to do, and I have not had a crash or anything adverse. I am using Cubase SX on one and Cubase SL on 2 with the best plugs around, Waves. Everything shares very nicely! I run all my Ren verbs on the SL slave and SX keeps shop. Even with ram hogs, which Waves are not, there is perfect sync across both machines.