Whoa, VST Networking from Steinberg...they did it again...

Say what you will about Steinberg, over-priced, developing new protocols and standards that only work with their apps, whatever. The fact still remains they are at the top of the game and not even ProTools can keep up to them these days.

I have always used WaveLab, since version 1.5 back about 3 or 4 years, and I have recently began mixing with Nuendo, Which bummed me out because Nuendo has some finicky needs but I need to have surround capability and thus far, my next favorite multitracking app, Sonic Foundry Vegas Video, has yet to implement that, which I find downright stupid that they haven't, as it puts them back a couple years because surround has become such a dominant force.

OK, that is all beside the point, what Steinberg did now is nothing short of amazing, they have implemented in their next versions of Cubase and Nuendo a feature I think they call VST Networking. What this is a shared computing power between PC's, not unlike Berkeley uses for their Seti@Home project.

This will allow people to network many PC's together and run audio on one, MIDI on another, effects on another and, say, the video you are scoring on yet another, all syncing in sample accuracy.

This is wicked-cool on many levels, first it allows the life of the average PC to be longer, rather than having to upgrade to a new high powered PC when you run out of resources, you can just buy another mid-level PC and use it's resources. Now those CPU intensive effects like chorus and reverb can just be run on the Pentium II that is gathering dust in the closet, or in my case, the K6/2 that is gathering dust...

Secondly, the only thing you need to do it is an ASIO compliant digital interface on each PC, it can be a TDIF, SPDIF, Optical, whatever, as long as the driver have ASIO compatibility. Which if you are using Steinberg's products, you are best off using anyway.

As a final note, please understand that any documentation I found about this was pretty vague and limited, but the above info is what I could get about it, so it may not be perfectly accurate, I am just very excited to share it all with you. If anyone finds out more, let me know, most of what I learned was from the recent issue of ProSoundNews.