Remote Control your "old" Scope based DAW
by S.Di Guido
The new Xite hardware is available in stores and maybe you are saving some money to buy it in the future, but in the meantime your Scope based DAW is still a great tool for audio production...
The way audio producers are working today is a bit different than some year ago and many of us are more confortable working from a notebook.
I have 2 Scope based workstations, the first is equipped with 2 Scope srb 14 dsp expansions and one Pulsar 2 Plus linked together over the s/tdm connectors and the second DAW is less powerful, but good enough to run some synthesizer or efx and it's powered by one pulsar 1 plus board and one luna board with external z link lunabox.Both DAW are on amd 64 based pc hardware.
My Scope based workstations are rock solid and there is no reason to buy new pc hardware, because the dsp shark processing power is what i need to do everything and the remaining tasks such as audio recording, audio editing, etc. are done on the amd 64 processor with 4 GB of ram memory.
So selling my Scope Boards is not such a good idea, because the value on the market is too low compared to the power and i would be forced to spend lot of money to build a pc based system comparable in some way with the Scope power and environment (Real time processing, modularity, etc.).
Another good reason to keep my Scope based DAW is because i have a Scope SDK license which is associated with one of the Scope SRB expansions allowing me to develop my own modules and devices.
During the last 3 years i changed the way i produce music and i do most of my projects on my notebook and it would be great if i can connect the Scope pci boards together with the notebook, but the only way to do this is to buy some expensive adapter to be connected over the xpress card slot.
Watching at the picture of some pci to express card adapter i have noticed that the real advantage offered is loosing the system display, keyboard and mouse, but there is still a computer cabinet.
So the main goal to be accomplished is to control my Scope based DAW from my notebook without the need of my(obsolete) couple of 21 inches displays, the keyboard and the mouse.
After some research, i have finally found a good solution over remote desktop.
I have tested the most of free vnc tools and some non free (not vnc based) software too.
At the end of the test i have selected as the winner a non free, but low priced remote desktop tool and as free alternative a vnc tool.
Radmin is a remote desktop tool wich is composed by a server software(to be installed on the Scope DAW) and a client software(to be installed on the notebook).
Radmin allowed me to control my Scope DAW over my notebook in real time, without screen delays and letting me forget about i'm controlling a remote computer.
All i have had to do is to install the Radmin server on the Scope DAW and run the Radmin client from the machine i want to use as remote controller and of course connect the ethernet cables to a switch or straight pc to pc.
The Radmin server license is restricted to the computer where it is installed, but the Radmin remote software is free to be used on as many computers we want and it allows to control several remote computers by simply opening windows.
The special video driver used by Radmin is really what it makes the difference and i feel as i'm working locally on the Scope DAW
When i connect to the remote computer it opens a window where i have the option to see it stretched(adapted to window size), full screen or with scroll bars.
A useful feature of Radmin is the auto scrolling feature available when the desktop resolution is bigger than the monitor resolution, so even if we are working on a 1280x800 notebook monitor, we can use a resolution of 1600x1200 or more.
Radmin is available from here
The other solution is to use a free tool such as Tight vnc which works in a similar way as Radmin, but over vnc(virtual network computing).
It works the exact same way as Radmin, but it's a bit slower on monitor refresh (this is why i've choosen to pay for Radmin).
Tight vnc is available here