Frost ACM: audio-optimized XP Pro, PCs aimed at audio production

[Tricklozen]

I thought this was an interesting read, if it isn't too good to be true:

http://www.frostacm.com/concept.pdf

Frost ACM (audio computing machines) is a company based in Sweden.

They produce computers running XP Pro optimized for audio.

They also seem to use their own memory modules.

Professional operating system

Windows Vista is not yet ready as a serious music-making operating system, and Windows XP home lacks functions for networking with servers and larger studio environments than just a single computer.

Therefore we only install Windows XP professional with multi-language support in all our systems. Together with hundreds of tweaks and optimizations, this is the only serious operating system for making music on a PC today -and it's a non-compromise standard in every Frost Audio Computer.

See "Inside a Frost" for more details:

http://www.frostacm.com/products.php

Front page:

http://www.frostacm.com/

Resellers seem to be present only in the nordic countries.

(Some links to larger pictures don't work.)

[Moseph]

It sounds ... like a lot of hype. How much do these things cost?

[zircon]

Whoa, $20,000 for one of their machines... hope that's a typo...

[Bunjiro]

I'd guess that's in Swedish SEK, not in USD... it's about 3,361.42$ according to xe.com

[Yoozer]

Noise level : obvious. Watercooling kit: costs say, 200 bucks. Problem solved.

Compatibility : obvious, but depends heavily on the manufacturers. For Firewire, the chipset, for USB, a separate PCI card.

Support: why do you need "lifetime" if the "lifetime" of a computer is 3 years max?

Stability: yeah, uh, duh. Badly written drivers still suck; I don't really see them writing their own.

Performance: disabling and "tweaking" stuff does actually more bad than good and there's an entire list of myths. This only requires them to make an image of a tweaked XP SP2 install.

Ease of use: it's called backing up your data and imaging your OS.

Fine - if you don't want to pick parts and do the work yourself, just get a Mac.

[Tricklozen]

I'd guess that's in Swedish SEK, not in USD... it's about 3,361.42$ according to xe.com

I think it's safe to assume that all of their prices are in the SEK (Swedish krona). Some pages include the currency code SEK, while others don't. This is also a Swedish company, and all of their resellers are currently nordic countries.

1 Swedish krona = 0.168925 U.S. Dollars

It's a shame they haven't been thorough with their web site in that regard.

[Tricklozen]

The Yoozer ACM?

Compatibility : obvious, but depends heavily on the manufacturers. For Firewire, the chipset, for USB, a separate PCI card.

In a short interview (Swedish) (2006), the CEO said they had checked many Firewire products, and found that most used the same chipset, and that's what they ended up using for compatibility reasons.

The (past) problems with on-board USB controllers were the moronic implementations that had the main CPU to do most of the work.

Stability: yeah, uh, duh. Badly written drivers still suck; I don't really see them writing their own.

Badly written drivers are, of course, common with the professional grade audio peripherals people buy, right?

To be fair, their "Plug and Play Extended" section mentions the inclusion of drivers for popular hardware products, so they've probably tested them as well, since that goes on their guarantee.

Performance: disabling and "tweaking" stuff does actually more bad than good and there's an entire list of myths. This only requires them to make an image of a tweaked XP SP2 install.

In the interview, he says there's not much hocus pocus about it, but at the same time, he doesn't want to go into the details, other than that they test their configurations thoroughly, and have been doing this with their own installation and test environment for five years. He also goes on to mention that they always install Windows from scratch (Windows PE and scripting) on all new models (instead of using imaging/ghosting) which may catch errors at an earlier stage.

They then make an image of the system, which is stored in a hidden 25 GB partition in a RAID 0 configuration (no fault tolerance, but high performance, backup is necessary anyway). The OS image and restore process is reachable from the BIOS, in case Windows won't start, so a restore is made simple for those who don't want to learn DriveImage XML etc. You would (obviously) do a data backup anyway.

Ease of use: it's called backing up your data and imaging your OS.

Yeah. That part suffered from misleading marketing babble. "Undo wrong button presses." Then again, I'm not familiar with the details of the "Recover Pro" product. It's from the BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies. The data sheet mentions "Quick Backup" in correlation with undo ("Automatically or manually create Quick Backups. These provide multiple “undo’s” for your customer’s PC hard drive").

http://www.phoenix.com/NR/rdonlyres/CD5BC401-A129-4424-9BC1-62E43CEAA7A9/0/RPVX_MfgD_ds.pdf

Fine - if you don't want to pick parts and do the work yourself, just get a Mac.

I'm not convinced about its qualifications for audio just because people tend to use them for audio. It's still a consumer product/generalized out of the box. (People tend to use C and C++ today mostly because of UNIX, and not because it was a very good idea to begin with. (Just an angle, not a comparison.))

[Yoozer]

Badly written drivers are, of course, common with the professional grade audio peripherals people buy, right?

You're invited to read the stories about certain Presonus stuff, the first generation of drivers for TC Electronic "Konnekt" gear, and the Access Virus TI which was rather unusable during its entire 1.x software, either not working, freezing, stuttering or crashing.

People who write these things are humans. Humans are fallible. Companies who want them written hire people, and companies who do "this kind of thing" for the first time do not have the experience. Yes, you can hire experienced developers, but usually this is a small team of veteran systems architects.

It stands or falls with exactly one thing, and that's until which extent a company is willing to go to support the product during its lifetime. A systems builder does not influence that kind of stuff, unless they're big enough.

I'm not convinced about its qualifications for audio just because people tend to use them for audio.

Of course, but from that POV, everything sucks. Hard. Really.

Electronic musicians get absolutely shafted on the computer side of things. We still have to suffer with MIDI (instead of switching to something better with a far bigger bandwidth, actual timestamping for sub-millisecond accuracy, and a single Ethernet cable) and the fact that you can only use a single ASIO device in Windows is absolutely ridiculous, and we get screwed in the ass with the most ridiculous pricing and dongles schemes. We're all criminals, even if we have dongles and serials and the receipt. Plus, if a softsynth is older than say, 3 years, you're kindly advised (read: forced) to upgrade. Product no longer supported? WHOOSH, it disappears. They don't even open up the codebase; it just stays locked in a single piece of legacy you can't tear apart. KVRAudio is littered with the skeletons of dead .dll and .hqx files.

It's still a consumer product/generalized out of the box.

Yes, but:

- it handles ASIO better (in the sense that you can use more than just one device simultaneously)

- it's got CoreAudio which is good

- it has a great MIDI routing/visualisation tool built right in

- Logic works nicely with hardware (downside: AMT8 and Unitor 8 no longer are sold new, but MOTU does just fine the Apple folks told me)

- it can deal with Firewire daisy-chaining

(People tend to use C and C++ today mostly because of UNIX, and not because it was a very good idea to begin with. (Just an angle, not a comparison.))

The programming language has little to nothing to do with the entire thing, except for the fact that you need low-level performance for near-realtime DSP tasks.

edit:

The Yoozer ACM?

I build my systems from the parts I pick myself. I don't want off-the-shelf complete stuff because usually corners have been cut at points I deem rather vital (coincidentally, much of the same ones as listed in the PDF). However, I also do my own support, and with computers (which are outdated every 3 years or so, thanks to Moore) you eventually run into something called "the law of diminishing returns".

Ergo, a custom-built PC that costs 2000 euros may be a lot better than one that costs 1000 euros, but one that costs 3000 euros isn't better -that- much, and one that costs more than that is getting to the point of ridiculousness.

[suzumebachi]

Badly written drivers are, of course, common with the professional grade audio peripherals people buy, right?

Yes. .

[Tricklozen]

You're invited to read the stories about certain Presonus stuff, the first generation of drivers for TC Electronic "Konnekt" gear, and the Access Virus TI which was rather unusable during its entire 1.x software, either not working, freezing, stuttering or crashing.

Some will fail miserably and screw their customers over, but I'm thinking that companies who have a running dependency on selling working professional products are more likely to spend more resources on development and testing. It's inevitable that there will be problems in either case, but if you're saying that it happens more often than not, then it's a different story, I think. We should then separate those fresh in that part of the market from those who have been there a while.

We still have to suffer with MIDI (instead of switching to something better with a far bigger bandwidth, actual timestamping for sub-millisecond accuracy, and a single Ethernet cable)

To have a sequence sent to an audio device (not forgetting that some sound modules can play a MIDI sequence locally), which then mixes it locally should be the next thing. Maybe we could get higher level support for non-Western tuning thrown in as well, but then a rewrite of most, if not all sequencers would be required.

The only reasonable "workaround" I've found regarding MIDI latency is to record each sound producing event separately, and mix the recorded sounds locally, but that's not as straight forward as it may sound.--I've looked at developing something like this, but there are many details that would require external input, so it may not be very practical. The software wouldn't, for example, know whether a note relies on portamento, in which case it should record a series of notes continually, however, it could learn this if the sequence contained a controller message that enabled portamento, but it would still not know whether the receiving device supported it, and latency would still be present since we are dealing with a sequence of notes, though it wouldn't be that great, depending on controller information in-between, which is an issue in all cases here).--Every instance of a note would have to be recorded separately in general, because sound modules usually change the sound over time, even if it is played at the same pitch and velocity; panning, LFO parameters, etc. [That lead in Prodigy's Voodoo People comes to mind (a preset on the Roland D50).] End digression.

and the fact that you can only use a single ASIO device in Windows is absolutely ridiculous, and we get screwed in the ass with the most ridiculous pricing and dongles schemes. We're all criminals, even if we have dongles and serials and the receipt. Plus, if a softsynth is older than say, 3 years, you're kindly advised (read: forced) to upgrade. Product no longer supported? WHOOSH, it disappears. They don't even open up the codebase; it just stays locked in a single piece of legacy you can't tear apart. KVRAudio is littered with the skeletons of dead .dll and .hqx files.

hehe Frustrations noted.

Yes, but:

- it [Mac] handles ASIO better (in the sense that you can use more than just one device simultaneously)

- it's got CoreAudio which is good

- it has a great MIDI routing/visualisation tool built right in

- Logic works nicely with hardware (downside: AMT8 and Unitor 8 no longer are sold new, but MOTU does just fine the Apple folks told me)

- it can deal with Firewire daisy-chaining

I was going to add that any non-Windows-based system would have gotten this better in most regards. Windows barely cares at all. For instance, if one is thinking that putting the slider in the mixer at the middle position means "no gain", then one would be forced to think again. You actually have to calibrate each sound card using a loopback cable (one method) to get the correct/accurate slider level for no gain (no signal manipulation). Oh, the inaccuracy.--Any hiccup and the entire system comes to a halt. You'd think that sending more buffers to a hardware driver would solve this, but no. (It's not a real-time system anyway.) Sure, the hardware driver would have internal buffering, but that doesn't help if Windows doesn't handle the signal.

I build my systems from the parts I pick myself. I don't want off-the-shelf complete stuff because usually corners have been cut at points I deem rather vital (coincidentally, much of the same ones as listed in the PDF). However, I also do my own support, and with computers (which are outdated every 3 years or so, thanks to Moore) you eventually run into something called "the law of diminishing returns".

Ergo, a custom-built PC that costs 2000 euros may be a lot better than one that costs 1000 euros, but one that costs 3000 euros isn't better -that- much, and one that costs more than that is getting to the point of ridiculousness.

So you think their products were overpriced, or are you talking in general?

(Knowledge is discount/power.) I think one can assume that an average musician doesn't possess that level of technical insight or interest. They trust someone else to screw them over, err, sell them something worthwhile. In that regard, perhaps such a company would be ideal for them, and threads like these should always encourage or point to better options, though, having the knowledge to build your own system sort of renders such a company useless. Unless, of course, the hardware is at a good price and quality, so that you could save some money by using it as a base.