# OLD Retired Xeon Chip Performance for Slave Systems



## Piano Pete (May 4, 2018)

I have currently been requested to slap together a small budget slave build for a friend, and since money is extremely tight for him, I have been perusing ebay for some old xeon chips. Now, I am always one to try and future proof builds, but I am still amazed at the prices on some of these retired chips. Now, I get that they are not really overclockable, but even the newest xeons do not like being touched. Even after going on Ark to compare specs, a $380-$1,200 price different for 2MB difference of L3 Cache says it all. The fact that the bulk of the "sweet priced" chips use DDR3 is a bonus from a cost saving viewpoint. 

Clock speed may vary on what generation you pickup, but still. With the budget he gave me, I can build 3 slaves for him and spread all of his samples across them with enough money to buy plenty of backup cpus should any fail--and most of this gear I have purchased in the past is still kicking--although I have never used any of it to host samples.

Has anyone else gone this route with their own setup? If so, how has it performed?


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## Bear Market (May 5, 2018)

I have never built a slave machine but I did purchase a retired Xeon E5-2667 v2 8 core 3.30GHz processor on eBay and put it in my Mac Pro (trash can) instead of the stock 4 core it came with. I've never had any issues at all and have experienced a significant improvement in performance.


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## DAW PLUS (May 7, 2018)

Xeon E5 V1 & V2 are dirt chap on eBay now. Even the 2687W is affordable and that is a chip which offers a lot of power even on a single socket board.


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## Piano Pete (May 7, 2018)

I could see sata 3 support on these old chips potentially causing a plug-and-play issue; however, even with the older architecture, there are plenty of ways to resolve that with expansion.


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## DAW PLUS (May 7, 2018)

Plug and play issue? In what setup?


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## Piano Pete (May 7, 2018)

Some of the boards I was checking out only had sata 2 natively, but that gets resolved pretty easily with a pci-e card.


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## Piano Pete (May 7, 2018)

Piano Pete said:


> Some of the boards I was checking out only had sata 2 natively, but that gets resolved pretty easily with a pci-e card.



-For sample drives.


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## DAW PLUS (May 8, 2018)

I doubt you would notice a real world difference when attaching drives to SATA2. An old SATA 2 C300 SSD still handles over 1200 voices.


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## procreative (May 18, 2018)

Piano Pete said:


> -For sample drives.



Pretty sure the Angelbird Wings ones allow OS Boot (as did the now defunct Apricorn Velocity). Also I have a Kingston NVME PCIE card and have my Win10 Slave booting on it.


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## shomynik (Jun 19, 2018)

I'm going this route for my self, building a vep slave. Did you build that machine? What's your expirience Pete?

My build would be this:

-2 x E5 2697v2 (740e - 369 a pop)
-Supermicro X9DRI xx or similar (300-400e)
-128GB Samsung ecc reg 8x16GB 1333 or 1600 (around 400e)

Total: around 1500eur


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## Michael Antrum (Jun 19, 2018)

*I have an old Mac Pro 2009, that I have had from new. I picked up some ridiculously cheap HP server Ram from eBay (£190 for 64gb !) and upgraded to 2 x 6 core Xeons.

As a VEPro slave it’s terrific.*


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## shomynik (Jun 19, 2018)

mikeybabes said:


> *I have an old Mac Pro 2009, that I have had from new. I picked up some ridiculously cheap HP server Ram from eBay (£190 for 64gb !) and upgraded to 2 x 6 core Xeons.
> 
> As a VEPro slave it’s terrific.*


Although I'm building a PC, great to hear that!


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## Piano Pete (Jun 19, 2018)

Ya, a quick memtest to make sure your dimms are good, and if you build a system with the right generation of parts, the savings are pretty great.


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## shomynik (Jun 19, 2018)

Piano Pete said:


> Ya, a quick memtest to make sure your dimms are good, and if you build a system with the right generation of parts, the savings are pretty great.



Yes, I did a fine research and matched the parts well, but the thing is... I am looking at some CPU benchmarks.

Namely V-Ray (you can enter any CPU model and get timings for it - less time it takes to do the job=better):

https://benchmark.chaosgroup.com/cpu?search_string=

I checked how it's results translates to DAW benches, namely these:

http://www.scanproaudio.info/tag/dawbench/

Two from the top are recent ones, first for dsp and second for voice count, and it appears that these vray benchmarks translate fairly well to DAW benchmarks. And by the V-Ray results, dual e5 2697 v2 system performance is roughly the SAME as the performance of single 7820x CPU. 

So finally, to me, doesn't make any sense to buy 5yo hardware to get the same performance as new one for the same money (and that's for 128gb system, if you go with 64gb 7820x system is much cheaper actually).

Maybe my conclusion is totally off, maybe i'am looking at too expensive parts on ebay, but then again i'm aiming at high performance system.


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## Piano Pete (Jun 19, 2018)

It all depends on what you want, how you want to get it, and how long do you want to be spending sourcing parts. These are the important things.

If you are going to pursue this a profession, then I would always suggest getting a computer system that is going to last several years and will get the job done. You want your setup to work. Most of the time, this would be getting fairly recent kit and setting aside a decent budget for it; however, not everyone can afford to set aside that chunk of change to get into the game. 

For the deal seekers, there are some generations of gear where the cpus are cheap but the boards are ungodly expensive--and vice versa. Depending on the generation of gear you look at purchasing, getting replacement parts may be next to impossible. This is something to heavily consider. 

In this situation, my friend was willing to take these negatives for a competently performing system that was purchased for roughly 60-70% off. I spent a lot time sourcing parts and haggling, but he is now off to the races. Unless an act of God happens, the system should last him long past the time he should need to upgrade. Hopefully by then, he can afford newer gear. Additionally, he got exceedingly lucky that I found a replacement board for him, so he has a spare in case something gets fried. 

Side note: I would always go with 2x64gb systems than a single one at 128gb. You get two cpus to spread the load across.

The two main things to take away here are:

1) Depending on the situation, this may be a perfectly viable way to get audio computer up and running. (A lot of people do not even know these options are available to them).

2) It is important to figure out your price to performance ratio in any build. There is a definite point in performance where you might as well go with newer equipment. Not everyone needs or uses this, but this is when you consider how long do you want your system to last.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 19, 2018)

DAW PLUS said:


> I doubt you would notice a real world difference when attaching drives to SATA2. An old SATA 2 C300 SSD still handles over 1200 voices.



Hey, what's the formula for figuring out the number of voices a drive (or bus) can handle? I'd like to be more specific when advising people not to waste their money.


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## JohnG (Jun 19, 2018)

Piano Pete said:


> Side note: I would always go with 2x64gb systems than a single one at 128gb. You get two cpus to spread the load across.



I agree; I've always preferred this approach. But I recognize that some don't like it and I'm not as sure today that it's the best way to go.

But overall good advice. We need "real good" to future-proof our purchases but it does NOT make economic sense to get the absolute latest tech for music. Recent is good enough.


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## JohnG (Jun 19, 2018)

Piano Pete said:


> I could see sata 3 support on these old chips potentially causing a plug-and-play issue; however, even with the older architecture, there are plenty of ways to resolve that with expansion.



If there's room, you could always add a PCIe card that has SATA III ports.


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## Piano Pete (Jun 19, 2018)

JohnG said:


> If there's room, you could always add a PCIe card that has SATA III ports.


That's what I ended up doing for him.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 19, 2018)

I forget whether it was this thread or another one, but I added an OWC SATA 3 card as a $40 experiment.

It makes absolutely no difference from the internal SATA 2 bus.


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## JohnG (Jun 19, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> I forget whether it was this thread or another one, but I added an OWC SATA 3 card as a $40 experiment.
> 
> It makes absolutely no difference from the internal SATA 2 bus.



did you test with one of the monster string libraries like HS?


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## Piano Pete (Jun 19, 2018)

Regardless of the speed, although I am curious about working out max number of voices per your question Nick, he needed some extra space for the number of drives.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 19, 2018)

JohnG said:


> did you test with one of the monster string libraries like HS?



Yes, although I didn't and don't load all 29 mic positions.

But if DAW PLUS is right about SATA 2 handling over 1200 voices, it's hard to see how you can run out of bandwidth.


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## Piano Pete (Jun 19, 2018)

Now I am even more curious revisiting the real world performance expectations between there different SATA, USB, and Thunderbolt revisions. :\

Is there a juicy spreadsheet posted somewhere?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 19, 2018)

There are people who know how to figure out voices per Gbps.

I've actually met them.


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## shomynik (Jun 19, 2018)

Piano Pete said:


> It all depends on what you want, how you want to get it, and how long do you want to be spending sourcing parts. These are the important things.
> 
> If you are going to pursue this a profession, then I would always suggest getting a computer system that is going to last several years and will get the job done. You want your setup to work. Most of the time, this would be getting fairly recent kit and setting aside a decent budget for it; however, not everyone can afford to set aside that chunk of change to get into the game.
> 
> ...




Absolutely, I fully conquer, I just wasn't aware of it before.

I am a full time game composer, and I am looking for a capable system that will last. I was always building new systems and was planning to build one soon, but a few days ago, as I have never been aware of xeon used market, I was side tracked by the idea that I could maybe get more performance for my money going that route. That hardware's built to last, so that was comforting, but above all I was really wanting to go "more cores" route to test it first hand versus my 5820k system. New xeon systems are out of my reach for now so this was the alternative. Going DDR3 is a great saver as you said, and I was going for the best possible xeon that uses DDR3 ram, and that's v2 serie 26xx CPUs of which the 2697 is the highest point.

The apparent value drop of these CPUs (2600$ at launch, 400$ now, value of i7 CPUs drops much less) fooled me into naively thinking that i could potentially get much more performance for the money comparing the new system (i was kind of bumped by the lack of performance jump when I built 5820k 64GB system after my aging 2600k 32GB, nevertheless, this master+slave system rocks very well). But as i explained in my previous post, that's not the case, it would be roughly the same (at least in the case of aging xeon system that would be in ballpark of the performance of atm popular 8700k and 7820x).

Actually as it turns out these xeons hold very high value on German ebay, probably as very viable upgrade route for aging mac systems, so in a case of building a PC from scratch it's not very cost effective (and i am speaking of "buy it now" parts from the it companies, i don't really have time for auctions and hunting the most special deals, in time of my research i haven't found anything "special", i wouldn't be surprised if in the usa the situation is different).

BUT, in the end, every research and experience has it's value and I learned something new, all of this is probably very well known to you guys but not to me ...and I came to the conclusion that new xeon systems have very much sense, which i was kind of missing earlier because of the trend on VIC about the i7's being the best systems for DAWs (which, taking everything into consideration, it might very well be). But if one wants the ABSOLUTE BEST system at any given moment, the dual xeon systems with the high end xeon CPUs would provide just that. It's definitely not the best bang for the buck, performance to cost relation is worse (how worse?), but if you really want the best and the system that will last 5+years, it seems to me this would be the way to go - hence the high end products of the pro daw builders. For example, in case of 2697v2 dual xeon system, it's performance matches the todays popular 7820x - after 5 YEARS from it's launch and still going strong, you could in any moment easily upgrade your amount of ram, it was never capped like with i7's. I can just imagine how is it to work on something like 2x 2690v4 today. Of course it depends on the software you use, but in the cases of the code that uses cores well, it simply covers you much longer and it replaces at least 3 i7's systems that one going i7 route would need along the way. I'm not saying that it's a smart choice, and there are special cases where it might not work (like PLAY engine), i'm just saying that it makes sense (all-in-one system, master or vep/kontakt slave), it's simply very very capable system, and nevermind the use, video, audio, you name it, it whoops i7's ass all day long 

Sorry for the lengthy rant with probably not much value to you. Now going off building an i7 pc ...just not yet sure whether to go 2x64gb slaves or 1x128 route.


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## shomynik (Jun 20, 2018)

JohnG said:


> I agree; I've always preferred this approach. But I recognize that some don't like it and I'm not as sure today that it's the best way to go.
> 
> But overall good advice. We need "real good" to future-proof our purchases but it does NOT make economic sense to get the absolute latest tech for music. Recent is good enough.



John, are you finding your 64gb slave enough for running HW Strings Diamond while using all the mics? 

If yes, are you left with some headroom in terms of CPU and RAM for some other strings as well for layering maybe?


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## JohnG (Jun 20, 2018)

shomynik said:


> John, are you finding your 64gb slave enough for running HW Strings Diamond while using all the mics?
> 
> If yes, are you left with some headroom in terms of CPU and RAM for some other strings as well for layering maybe?




I use that machine to run all my strings, not just HS. Despite my efforts, I can't say I've found the holy grail, as I am still operating with a 512 buffer, but *the short answer to your question is "yes."*

On top of all the RAM I bought one of those Intel PCIe SSDs -- Optane 900p. Even so, as I wrote above, I still have to use a buffer of 512 for dense orchestrations, but often I do write pretty "thick" material, with a ton of divisi at times, and often two or more mic positions. The mic thing is inconsistent, but for Spitfire normally two.

In order to put so many libraries on one machine and not have to constantly load / unload, I've been taking advantage of the VE Pro function that allows you to turn off instruments and recover capacity.

I think of, overall, two main setups, large and small. If I'm going for "small experimental" I don't need large sections, so I turn on all the smaller libraries and turn off the big-sounding ones (like HZ Strings, for example). But of course it's not that consistent. Some of the HZ Strings sound very faint and atmospheric, and can work with even a light / delicate orchestration. When I go "big" I will sometimes use chamber / small section strings / first chair stuff to supplement a large section.

I'm sure what I do is not too inconsistent with what others are doing, except maybe the Optane drive -- a departure from my normal practice of avoiding the "latest" tech.

Pro Tools

As a measure of my commitment to "good enough" tech, I'm only now replacing my Pro Tools machine, a venerable "Early 2008" Mac Pro. And even then, I'm buying a "second best" option for the computer, an iMac, rather than the iMac Pro. The latter is much more powerful and has an incredible screen, but it is overkill for the recording / mixing function. And costs a bomb.

Shiny, though...very chrome...


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## shomynik (Jun 20, 2018)

JohnG said:


> I use that machine to run all my strings, not just HS. Despite my efforts, I can't say I've found the holy grail, as I am still operating with a 512 buffer, but *the short answer to your question is "yes."*
> 
> On top of all the RAM I bought one of those Intel PCIe SSDs -- Optane 900p. Even so, as I wrote above, I still have to use a buffer of 512 for dense orchestrations, but often I do write pretty "thick" material, with a ton of divisi at times, and often two or more mic positions. The mic thing is inconsistent, but for Spitfire normally two.
> 
> ...



Thans for the valuable info John. I also use that VEP feature, my whole template is saved with all the channels turned off in VEP and I power them up as I go, depending whether I go, same as you, big or small.

It sounds like you're topping your CPU rather than RAM. I think I'll go 2 x 64GB slave route, but will make sure they are upgradable to 128GB. 

Thank you!


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## JohnG (Jun 20, 2018)

shomynik said:


> I think I'll go 2 x 64GB slave route, but will make sure they are upgradable to 128GB



Sounds smart to me. But please consider what @chimuelo says in response to the question about i7 chips. He plays live and can't tolerate the amount of buffer that I can while composing. And consider

I haven't experimented with using "lower" level chips for processors (but lots of them).

Also, check out this post from a different thread:



Ruffian Price said:


> Yup. I have a 2012 four-core i5 with 16GB of RAM and no problems with HS Diamond... except the library is running off a PCIe x8 SSD drive, with RAM cache level set to 0. There's always _some_ factor.


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## JohnG (Jun 20, 2018)

here's the other thread, well worth considering: https://vi-control.net/community/th...hollywood-strings-diamond.61712/#post-4246204


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## chimuelo (Jun 20, 2018)

shomynik said:


> Thans for the valuable info John. I also use that VEP feature, my whole template is saved with all the channels turned off in VEP and I power them up as I go, depending whether I go, same as you, big or small.
> 
> It sounds like you're topping your CPU rather than RAM. I think I'll go 2 x 64GB slave route, but will make sure they are upgradable to 128GB.
> 
> Thank you!



There’s some really good Xeon W 2066 options that go mostly unknown.
You can use a cheap fast Xeon Quad W and 256GBs Of DRAM 4 on the C422 Chipset.
What I like about the W and a Quad or Six Core is the Quad Channel RAM.


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## JohnG (Jun 20, 2018)

Great -- thanks @chimuelo

Hopefully that's helpful for all these guys. 

Please take my own suggestions with a healthy dose of salt; I have to reiterate, I have generally over-bought on technology, reasoning that I don't know that much, I don't want to know that much, and I'd rather spend my time writing music than researching or discovering (after a half-baked research effort) that I've made a mistake and "should have bough the i7 after all."

If I were building a new computer today I'd take seriously the advice of these other guys.


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## shomynik (Jun 20, 2018)

@JohnG Yes, I totally get what you're saying John. I'm half baked with technology as well, that's why I am looking some expert's advice as well as real world experiences. I know your music (love your stuff btw) and your workflow is very valuable to know. So thank you again! 

Thank you @chimuelo I already came across one of your very recent posts about those chips where you also mentioned that 2400 ecc dimms are cheap these days. What do you mean by DRAM 4 btw? Do you mean ecc reg ram like this:

https://www.mindfactory.de/product_...4-2400-regECC-DIMM-CL17-Quad-Kit_1245660.html

I searched for both here in Germany and found that those ecc ram dimms are even more expensive than the regular, and also couldn't find xeon w-2125 anywhere. Not very popular or obtainable here it seems.

I would totally go 8700k route right now but choosing to go 7820 just for the case I find needing more ram later on those slaves, so upgradable to 128GB.

But in terms of voice count, these chips are roughly the same going by this bench:

http://www.scanproaudio.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/DawBench-vi-2018-Q2-1.jpg

EDIT:

Also, I'm going for 2 slaves max as they are sitting in the room with me (for now) so I wouldn't want unnecessary sources of heat/noise. (until that machine closet comes )


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## JohnG (Jun 20, 2018)

shomynik said:


> I'm going for 2 slaves max



Two should be enough if they are powerful.


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## chimuelo (Jun 20, 2018)

Stay with i7 8700k unless there’s an advantage for Quad Channel DRAM.
I like the more expensive motherboards where you can keep them for years and add DRAM or in the case of CPU, extra Cores.
For my live rigs I like server boards with durable PCB (thick motherboard) less featured chipsets, less trace lines, less pipes I’ll never use anyway.

I ran an ASRock Server board with the H97 Chipset, and i7 4790k CPU for years.
I got nervous because it was old so I built another and keep it as a spare.
Performance differences weren’t noticeable, but I love those 5 second boot ups.
Then the apps loaded up w/ 21GBs Of DRAM in less than a minute.
Same load using FLS 20 on his i7 7700k took 3 times as long.

No biggie in a recording environment, but sound checks, reboots in a live venue is really comforting.
Using the same template back in the i7 920 Days was much longer.
I would just go make coffee.


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## DAW PLUS (Jun 22, 2018)

chimuelo said:


> Stay with i7 8700k unless there’s an advantage for Quad Channel DRAM.


There is no advantage to quad channel or faster RAM. RAM speed/bandwidth has not been a bottleneck for audio since at least 10 years.


chimuelo said:


> I like the more expensive motherboards where you can keep them for years and add DRAM or in the case of CPU, extra Cores.
> For my live rigs I like server boards with durable PCB (thick motherboard) less featured chipsets, less trace lines, less pipes I’ll never use anyway.


Industry board are absolutely more robust and have much less risk of dying. They also are more transparent regaridng resources. Many fully loaded gaming/desktop board have resource sharing everywhere which may cause issues when lots of PCIe cards and/or drives are connected.


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## DAW PLUS (Jun 22, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Yes, although I didn't and don't load all 29 mic positions.
> 
> But if DAW PLUS is right about SATA 2 handling over 1200 voices, it's hard to see how you can run out of bandwidth.


I am right because I tested it. 
Note that SATA2 offers more, theoretically it should be able to handle 2909 tracks @ 44k/24 bit.
However, full bandwidth is rarely reach due to 
a) the realtime nature of audio streams. 
b) the multiple file accesses occuring. 
c) the interplay between RAM cached samples and streaming from disk.

Note that this was not a fast SSD, the small C300 had poor specs. So:
-current SSDs handle much higher values
-SATA3 handles even more (double, theoretically, 550MB/s as a fact in ideal situations)
-PCIe/NVMe has as much bandwidth as PCIe lanes are used (typically 4, which is 3940MB/s, but we currently have SSDs which handle 6500MB/s)

Are these newer drives much faster for loading? No, as the queue depth with sample loading stays low, which means that the full bandwidth of the SSD is not being used. This is where the ultra expensive Optane drives excel, but at this moment due to price and relatively small drives I do not even bother to test them. Even Optane struggles a bit with lowest queue depths, so as long as sample loading is not optimized in the software, the benefit stays marginal.

Streaming samples should be better on PCIe/NVMe drives, but as any decent modern SATA 6G (SATA3) SSD already handles over 2000 voices, only being very excessive with Synchron samples and similar might get close to taxing such drives. For professionals on a tight schedule and with a decent budget, getting large NVMe drives is the best way to get rid of any doubt for a long while.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 22, 2018)

DAW PLUS, what is the algorithm to figure out it's 2909 tracks @ 44.1/24?


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