Re: Kyma questions

[Jim Coker <jcoker@jguru.com>]

Darcy Clark wrote:
> 
> 1. can the Kyma be rackmounted ?

Yup, this unit already has rack ears (most units do not)

> 2. can any Kyma users compare the useability and stability of Kyma to
> Opcode Max or the new jMax
> (http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/temps-reel/jmax/) ?

I've used Max (up to version 3.5.X) quite a bit.  I've also
looked a bit at jMax, but haven't tried to run it.  The primary
downside of jMax is configuration and support. Unless you dole
out quite a bit of francs to IRCAM, you don't get any help with
either (though, amusingly enough, you can get the src code). I
consider jMax to be a work in progress.  It has some very fancy
algorithms, but nothing that Kyma doesn't have (that I know of).
Also, you have to use Linux or SGI unix w/ jMax.

Max and Max/MSP are reasonably nice, but I've always found Max
to be a pain in the ass to program-- *everything* in Max has
to be done graphically, which gets to be very tedious. MSP
isn't terribly efficient, even on a fast G4 (you can get stats
on the cycling74 website. Finally, although you can run MSP
on a laptop, I/O options for laptops aren't that great.  This
is a distinct advantage for Kyma -- the external hardware means
that you get very low latency (down to 3 ms), excellent sound
quality (better than 100db S/N), and lots of processing power
w/o stressing your computer at all. You can tune some soundcards
for very low latency, but you generally pay for it (sometimes
dearly) in processing power.  As far as stability goes, I have
had ocassional bugs in the editing software (minor UI bugs), but
haven't ever had a running program crash on the capybara -- except
for when I was writing my own buggy 56K DSP code.

Jim