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Do I need to upgrade my computer?
If you have a computer that meets our prerequisites then you should be able to run Hauptwerk.
In summary, you should be able to run Hauptwerk if you have either an Apple Mac with:
- An Intel or G4 or G5 processor. The more powerful the better.
- 512 MB of memory or more. The more the better.
- Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.4.
- A MIDI interface.
- An audio interface. The audio output on your Mac is fine, but a professional audio interface will give better quality.
- 4 GB of free disk space or more.
... or a PC with:
- An Intel Pentium II processor or later or an AMD Athlon processor or later. The more powerful the better.
- 512 MB of memory or more. The more the better.
- Windows Vista or XP.
- A MIDI interface.
- An audio interface. A standard sound card is fine, but a professional audio interface will give better quality and performance.
- 4 GB of free disk space or more.
Very broadly speaking:
- Processor speed determines the number of pipes you can play at once ('polyphony').
- Amount of memory determines the size of organ (number of ranks) you can load.
- The audio inteface determines the audio quality and delay between pressing a key and hearing the sound ('latency'). It also affects the number of pipes you can play at once.
- Hard-disk speed determines how long an organ takes to load.
Even more broadly speaking, the better your computer, the larger the organs you can use and the better they will sound and perform.
For more detailed information on working out what performance you want from Hauptwerk, and whether your current computer will manage it, have a look at the technical info section.
If you are considering buying a new computer to run Hauptwerk, have a look at the 'Mac or PC?' section and the new Mac specs or new PC specs sections.
You should find that you can get perfectly adequate performance with all of Hauptwerk's features enabled for even quite large sample sets (30 ranks or so) on existing computers with a single 2 GHz processor or faster, provided that you have sufficient memory for the sample set you wish to use. To emphasize this fact, we recorded some of our audio demos in real-time on a PC with a modest 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor.
You can still easily use Hauptwerk on older computers (such as a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac or a 1 GHz Pentium III PC) with large organs and with excellent results and incredible performance by simply disabling some of the audio realism features such as interpolation and per-pipe filters. (With some of these new features disabled, the current version of Hauptwerk typically gives a much higher polyphony than the original Hauptwerk version 1 on given computer hardware. Hauptwerk version 3 also out-performs version 2.)
Please bear in mind that almost all of the parts of a computer have some bearing on its performance, as do many of the pieces of software installed upon it. This is especially true with PC platforms, where there are so many different components from different manufacturers, all of which interact, and which may never have been tested together as a whole (a reason we mainly recommend Apple Macs!). Thus we can only attempt to give general guidelines for PCs; the only way to have any level of certainty about the performance that will be achieved on a given computer system is actually to assemble such a system and test its performance with Hauptwerk.
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