Ok, i've been saving up some money and next week i'll have about £1500, but i'm in two minds about what to get. It's down to either a new iMac or a Virus TI desktop.
My setup at the moment is a Mac mini (core2duo) as my desktop computer and a more powerful (dual core i7) Macbook pro as my laptop. Ideally i would like to keep my laptop for live stuff and have it permanently hooked up to my Traktor gear and have my desktop for production. This avoids the hassle of constantly having to disconnect and reconnect my laptop from my Traktor setup and my studio setup. But a Mac mini isn't really designed for heavy production work so a new (quad core) iMac would mean i have more power at my fingertips for general production (and from other forums people have said that you can do everything a Virus can do with a powerful computer and a bunch of pluggins such as NI Komplete, which i have already)
Alternatively, i could get a Virus TI, which would take some of the strain off of the Mac mini's CPU as the majority of the synth work can be done with the TI. And i can wait till next year (when it is rumored the next generation of Intel chips will be released) to upgrade my desktop computer. I also could just use my laptop and just get over the "moving it around" issues that i have. And of course i'll have a TI, which is the "Rolls Royce" of softsynths (VA).
So any advice anyone has about this situation will be greatly appreciated.
I also have some specific questions about how the TI behaves when you use it as a pluggin. It's a 16 part multitimbral device. So does that mean i can open 16 instances of it in separate "instrument" channels in my DAW? Or does it work like Kontakt? Where i have one instance in an "instrument" channel and then route the virtual outs to separate audio channels and have separate midi channels for each of the parts (or 16 "External instruments" in Ableton)? Does the audio routing even work that way? With all the audio coming though the USB into virtual outputs? Or do i have to plug the physical outputs into my audio interface and run them through "armed" audio tracks in my DAW? Same question with bouncing. Can i just bounce a track down like with soft synths, or do i have to record the audio form the TI into my DAW first? Also, how does automation work? Can i pull up a menu in my automation lane and see all the parameters named (like a soft synth), or will i see a list of Midi CC numbers (like a hardware synth)?
In summary, will the TI behave just like a soft synth (but with all the processing done in the hardware instead of by the computer), or will it behave like a hardware synth (with better integration with my DAW)?
Like i say, i have a week until i have the money to spend. I'm really in two minds as to what to do, so any answers to my queries and general advice (what would you do etc..) during this next week will be more than welcome.
Cheers
Gareth