PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I did it.

I went on ahead and did it.

I purchased a Scope Card.

No its not the Pro Card.

No its not the Project card.

Its the "Home" card.


Now before y'all start throwing things at me, ill explain my decision.


1. I felt it was better to at least find out first hand if Scope is truly the answer to my dreams.(Ive been sleep in xp daw land too long)

2. I'm impatient.

3. The card is located in Texas(I'm in Georgia, 1 day shipping)

4. I'm impatient(Its been a year already)

5. If it isn't my dream come true, its still extra gear for my studio...win win

and

Drum roll please.......





6. I got it for 150 bucks usd

Cant beat that.

Besides, if this thing is right...I will be making more money. Enough to buy the Pro card. Then the SDK fun will begin.

Also I can stop asking if/can questions and start asking how to questions

If its the latest scope home you should get Modular 2 (a killer) . I think you'll get poison and SB404 wich is nice, and a sampler and a drumsynth plus a good soundcard. With 3 dsp's power you can run one synth and mixer/route as well as a effect or two but don't count on many voices and you still be heavily dependend on Native or dividing the process up into many steps, but for the above reasons your better off then Native alone for The SCOPE soundquality is tops to me and you can enjoy it to some extent with the Home cards. You can always expand dsp power at a low price and with your feet in the door your now able to get a sense of wether SCOPE sound and workflow is right for you. And if you decide you love SCOPE you now can be using it will you save for more dsp power and plugins, and i'm sure you can always sell the home card and get back most if not all your money to help pay for larger card. Congradulations, Enjoy!

Its shipping with v4.0 sadly.

But i mainly want to hear the sampler in action and the mixers as those two issues are what I'm up against at the moment.


man, i cant wait till it gets here

yish313 wrote:Its shipping with v4.0 sadly.

But i mainly want to hear the sampler in action and the mixers as those two issues are what I'm up against at the moment.


man, i cant wait till it gets here

scope home is fine. you can always ad a 6/14dsp SRB. its also strange that scope is out of US market!

i'm in the US!

Let me see if I got this straight...

You waited a year to decide whether or not to buy a used $150 soundcard? Dood... you gotta work on your gear acquisition skills.

Seriously - have fun learning it. I started out with TripleDAT and then Luna (which was what the Home card was originally called).

Here's what I predict will happen...

In about a month or so, you'll realize that 4 DSP chips ain't enough and you'll want more. Which means either a used Pulsar or Scope or SRB or XTC or whatever. Then you'll eventually realize that ain't enough either and buy a full-blown Scope Pro and A16 Ultra.

You might as well just buy all that stuff now and get it over with. Use George's economic stimulus check. You'll be doing your part to help the economy get back on track.

PS - GaryB will set ya up - give him a holla ASAP

krizrox wrote: In about a month or so, you'll realize that 4 DSP chips ain't enough and you'll want more. Which means either a used Pulsar or Scope or SRB or XTC or whatever. Then you'll eventually realize that ain't enough either and buy a full-blown Scope Pro and A16 Ultra.

Dejavu...

krizrox wrote:In about a month or so, you'll realize that 4 DSP chips ain't enough and you'll want more. Which means either a used Pulsar or Scope or SRB or XTC or whatever. Then you'll eventually realize that ain't enough either and buy a full-blown Scope Pro and A16 Ultra.

I just landed in the SCOPE community a couple of days ago and must say this is a bit of overwhelming as there is so much to catch up with.

What are the main distinctions between a Pulsar, a Scope, SRB, XTC and a full-blown Scope Pro?
Also, does the Scope platform work with any audio interface or is it restricted to Creamware/Scope cards and/or A16 Ultra devices?

Thanks.

This is only the beginning for me.

If all is well, I'm going to max out three boxes, all with Scope Pro and 2 SRBs.

Then I'm going to put on my spacesuit and shoot for Jupiter....never too be found again.

Only those who have my ftp, and email address will be able to work with me.

the Scope software including the DSP devices works only on the afforementioned cards, originally developed by Creamware, now continued by SonicCore after Creamware went out of business.

the cards are basically a 'variation of one theme' but optimized for specific processing or IO requirements - and of course for different budgets.
Pulsar, Powerpulsar, Luna, XTC, SRB, Scope xyz and a couple of name extensions were mostly marketing branding over the years.

due to a different implementation of the PCI slot IO-system there are so-called generation 1 and 2 cards.
This is reflected by the minimum Asio latency that can be achieved: generation 1 is limited to 13ms at 44.1k, while generation 2 can go below that up to 2ms.

generation 1
all 4 DSP cards (Pulsar) and some of the 15 DSP boards (Powerpulsar)
all 4 and some 15 DSP cards without IO called SRB (Sonic Rocket Booster)
the latter cards extended the processing power and were cheaper because they lacked the physical IO and the software(!)

all other cards (with either 3, 6 or 14 DSP chips) are generation 2 and can have Asio latency below 13 ms at a 44.1k sampling rate.

Most of the 15 DSP cards are also generation 2, but a small number has the slower generation one IO system, and the only way to tell for sure is to check the Asio latency.
As those cards were very expensive and have been sold as Powerpulsars or 15 DSP SRBs only for a short period of time.

With the introduction of the faster IO system the 6 DSP Pulsar II was released and the 15 DSP cards accordingly were labeled Powerpulsar II
These cards have been renamed Scope Project and Scope Professional later

for budget purpose the 3 DSP cards Luna, Powersampler, Elektra (different bundle software) were introduced, later rebranded as Scope Home

another budget product were the 6 DSP XTC cards which were intended as a kind of hardware plugin for sequencer applications.

all of the card's functionality depends on software (some of which has been bundled) and this software has changed in content and functionality over the years - reflected in different brand names.

Today with version 4.5 of the Scope platform software it's more or less identical for all cards.
you can choose your favourite IO system
the number of DSPs
a software bundle optimized for your applications

cheers, Tom
(I hope this doesn't confuse more than it clears things up...)

That clears things up Tom, well done!

very well
back it up Tom, and throw it in when needed

Thanks a lot Tom. That clears things up a lot to me.
However, I won't say I get it all yet. But I surely get most of it

So if I run Cubase on a PC, I could use audio or instrument plug-ins that take ressources from the SCOPE boards straight within Cubase? Would that work with any card or exclusively with XTC cards? Would that also work within ProTools and other DAWs?

Anything which supports ASIO for the internal audio connection (between Scope and sequencer through PCI) and Midi for midi will work.
ASIO is universal and overall.
In Scope you load the soft module 'ASIO IN and OUT, these ports will be detected by the sequencer or whatever audio program which supports ASIO.
You just have to confirm the port(s).

SPOTS wrote:...So if I run Cubase on a PC, I could use audio or instrument plug-ins that take ressources from the SCOPE boards straight within Cubase? Would that work with any card or exclusively with XTC cards? Would that also work within ProTools and other DAWs?

as Hubird already wrote you can use the Asio system to feed anything from Scope to Cubase (or any other Asio based host) or read it into Scope from Cubase.

In other words it's pretty easy to setup an FX-bus between the two.
Send via channel (say) 7 return via 8 and 9 (or whatever you choose)
it's identical to how you'd do it with external gear, send via analog out - return via analog in, or some Adat or Z-Link channels.
You just draw a virtual cable and that's about it - the datapath...
But of course you have to be absolutely aware about what happens on your timeline then...

Scope is strictly realtime, so you may have to compensate for latency of external processing and for Asio buffer latency.
Imho it's not a big deal and it's good to be aware anyway... instead of having a piece of software 'do everything' for you

The XTC card product (which is just a 6 DSP SRB card) was offered as a budget solutions to 'Sequencer-only' producers.
A similiar approach were the original 3 DSP cards (Luna, Powersampler, Elektra) - reduced software for a reduced price.
And in those days the software really was reduced...
What would you expect ?
of course almost all such budget buyers later bitterly complained of not having access to the full set of tools
btw there was no hidden catch - the reason for the reduced price was fully adressed in ads, but sometimes people only read what they want to read...

anyway, you can use the so-called XTC mode with every Scope card, but you loose (part of) the flexibility of the routing window.

Different approaches are possible, but many users prefer to let Scope do the mix and monitor stuff completely - the sequencer is simply a mutitrack tape connected via a few dozen Asio channels.
The stock channel fx of Scope are unquestionably better than stock sequencer plugins.
Scope stock processing starts in the league of Waves and such stuff

If you use the physical connections, let's assume 16 Adat channels, then this Scope system can of course be an 8 stereo-bus FX and Synth processing unit communicating with ProTools, or whatever you want.
It's the typical way to use Scope in Logic under MacOSX

cheers, Tom

Dont forget to look in the devices section of Z . There are some truly great freebees in there
Paul

Today is the day...(vigorously rubs hands together).!!!!

Yes I will.

Fellow brethren, I am found wanting....Where the hell is the "Brown"?!

ROSWELL,
GA, US 02/21/2008 8:00 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY
ROSWELL,
GA, US 02/20/2008 9:50 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
ATLANTA,
GA, US 02/20/2008 9:01 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
02/20/2008 1:18 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
JACKSON,
MS, US 02/20/2008 4:10 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
JACKSON,
MS, US 02/19/2008 10:33 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
SAN ANTONIO,
TX, US 02/19/2008 12:05 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
02/19/2008 12:01 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
AUSTIN,
TX, US 02/18/2008 10:33 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
02/18/2008 9:03 P.M. ORIGIN SCAN
02/18/2008 1:30 P.M. PICKUP SCAN
US 02/18/2008 7:51 P.M. BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED




Somebody tell me why there's a guy with a brown hat that keeps walking by my apartment. And Somebody tell me why I keep jumping up at the sight of him. Knowing its not the "Brown".

I have caught a case of the windowitis.