Nice! :wink:

How much are they going for at present? :?:

I bought it for about 4000 NOK = 490 EURO, ordered 14. april :lol:

Ideal 8)

Hi.

I'm seriously thinking of selling my Virus B to get one of these and go for a completely computer based setup.

I just want to know a couple of things first.

How does the patch management work? Can Virus Powercore recognise entire SMF banks or just single patches? and are performances / patches stored upon saving your Logic / Cubase project?

Is each DSP limited to 16 voices? What if you want more voices for just one channel? will there be any way of getting round this with multi DSP license? and is this the same for both Powercore PCI and Firewire?

Ta.
:wink:
Tommo.

VPC will load banks from .mid files (I guess if you only have one preset in a bank you'd be covered for single patches). What you do is that you place the .mid files in a specific folder and after launch their available in VPC (you can also do a re-scan directory if you've added a .mid file while working with VPC loaded)

Patches are saved with the Cubase project (would think it works for Logic as well)

You'll get about 50% more voices out of a FireWire with the multi-DSP license (since it has about 50% more power). But as far as I know you'll only get 16 voices playing on each DSP, that is the limit. However, since the Multi DSP license isn't out yet, I can't say that as a definite.

As far as I know the voice count is the same on the Firewire as the PCI.

The patch management system is pretty sophisticated. Virus PowerCore reads .mid files of entire banks, sorts them automatically by Category, compiles a Recently Used folder as well as a Favourites folder.

ok, this all sounds great. Thanks. I think i'll be making the switch...

Be careful if you decide to go with the FireWire version. Check with your retailer that you can return it if needed. I only say this because I could not get it to work at all with my system (see below). Nothing but sync errors and timeouts all over the place. I wasn't the only one either! I ended up going for the much cheaper PCI Element which works great and which IMHO is much better value if you don't mind losing the MasterX3. Plus you can always add the mastering plugin later fairly cheap.

On another note, to the guy above who is having problems with drift on his Virus b, sounds like you need to upgrade your midi interface or otherwise debug this sync issue, as I have very tight audio to midi sync with my Virus b. This was not always the case. A few years back I had similiar problems when using a MidiMan USB interface.

[ DAW ]
P4 2.4GHz
Asus P4PE MoBo
2 x Seagate 80Gb 1200rpm
1GB PC2700
Soundscape Mixtreme
UAD-1
TC PoCo PCI
Steinberg Midex 8

Ben you're absolutely correct. :oops: :wink:

It was the PCI version i was going to get anyway but thanks for the tip.
You can get the PCI Powercore with Virus and Master X3 for ?699 at Digital Village which is only ?30 more than the Powercore + Virus bundle. Don't know if thats a mistake but ?30 for Master X3? Yes please!

One negative thing though, i think i might have to replace my M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard, from what i have heard, the Powercore and Delta series don't like each other.