Matthew Sorrels

There is a new BBCSO 1.0.5 release out now, update it through the Spitfire Audio app. It seems to play back better (using the default stream/buffer settings) than 1.0.4. Load times (even after the optimize, which isn't public yet I don't think) are still crazy compared to anything else but at least this one will play back audio without screeching with the default buffer settings and doesn't seem to be leaking infinite memory. So progress I guess. Though I'm scared to waste my time actually making a real project with it. Right now the load time for the full orchestra with one mic and all the articulations is a bit over 5 mins. Or about 5 times longer than EW Hollywood Gold with a similar number of articulations. It also takes several minutes to close a project or to exit Cubase (looks like it's freeing ram very slowly or something). It eats about 30gigs of ram when you load the whole thing with the plugin's default buffer settings. Perhaps other settings will work better, I haven't gotten to trying that yet. Technically I guess this 1.0.5 release plus the optimize can be considered them providing what was promised and making good. So I guess I should be happy and talk about how awesome it sounds and how well it works and how great it is. Oddly enough I'm not. I think I see it as a $1k mediocre boat anchor that I am glad I only spent $750 on. Joy.

I'd love to hear what you think of their B3 compared to the IK Multimedia one you just reviewed.

Says it's new. So no Horizon. 😞

A year sub to Ask Audio (or one of it's affiliate sites that have the same content) might be a bit better deal, I'm sure someone will offer a year in the $100-$120 range this season, maybe cheaper.

The combined selection tool feature is worth $60. Be sure to download and install the latest eLicenser software, the Cubase 10.5 updater doesn't do it. This morning I couldn't get Cubase 10.5 to open (hung before the splash screen), debbuger showed it hung trying to access the eLicneser. Ended up having to reboot (removing and reinserting the dongle wasn't enough). Not sure my problem (it was working fine when I went to bed, workstation is left on 24x7) is fixed but there was yet another update to the eLicenser software available, version 6.11.9.3259

If it's crashing maybe try the new safe start mode? Hold down ctl+shift+alt on the title screen. Though it still seems to scan my ARA plugins...

Cubase 10.5 didn't take any of my settings from Cubase 10 over. Had to manually copy all the User settings over. Which seems to be a constant problem with Cubase. The new version blacklisted a bunch of the NI effect plugins. Had to re-enable each one by hand. But at least the iLok plugins bug does seem fixed, it didn't black list any of those. Still have yet to see any new features, guess I have to look a bit deeper they do seem to have videos on the new features on the "New Features" tab in the hub. The video rendering may be actually useful.

I'm already registered at both those sites, but getting this is kind of more pain than it's worth. Checkout at Audio Plugin Deals. Get coupon code. Checkout at Black Octopus Get text file with link to dropbox download Finally download from dropbox Samples are nice though, doubt I'll ever use them as is. A few nice FX sounds (impacts/risers).

The bundle should be your goal, just for the Rack alone. But getting to the bundle is always cheaper if you can combine a bunch of the smaller/cheaper/flash sale plugins to get the biggest discount.

So Spitfire sent me a build of the Spitfire Audio app that has an "optimize" button that does something to the BBCSO files on your hard drive. It ran for 2+ hours. End result is it does now load a bit faster, 5 mins vs 13 mins on my test project. Which I guess is good. But the engine playback is pretty awful with any stream/buffer settings they asked me to try. And it's pretty awful with anything I did try outside that. I could get the playback decent but it would eat 1gig of ram per-loop (and not last long), or the playback was studdery and glitchy (but the ram usage didn't grow so crazy) nothing even close to usable. And that's at 2048 samples on the audio interface. I wasn't sure it was reasonable to expect any computer could load up the whole BBCSO, so I loaded up an EastWest Play Hollywood Gold template (I bought a pre-made one recently since up to now I always built projects by hand). I enabled all the short articulations and put the same 2 bar midi loop on them. About 40 tracks total, and it plays perfectly and loads in 30.7 seconds (same hard drive as BBCSO). So I thought that still might not be fair since BBCSO loads all the articulations, so I went through the template and enabled every major/main articulation. Resulted in like 270 tracks in Cubase. That project consumes about 30gigs of ram (which is pretty close to the BBCSO) and loads in 1min7seconds and plays back perfectly. I guess the next thing to do would be to build a full on orchestra template with Kontakt and see how bad that is. In any case I'm more convinced than ever that they really haven't done the ground work to build a professional class sampler for this kind of work. Maybe it works well on the Mac, but I'm not even sure about that, maybe it's just my computer. I'm going to keep working with their tech support but I've moved on as far as thinking I'll ever be able to use this.

I do think they jumped the shark on the pricing on Symphobia 4. I have 1 and 3 and like them, but only bought them on massive sales. When they recently adjusted their pricing I felt they understood the world had changed. But with S4 they once again have returned to crazy pricing. This should be around $250 with an intro price around $199 with a black Friday deal next year (have to give it a year) around $130. But it has a full retail of $659. I have no idea why they felt the market will support that price level.

I was wrong, you can resize it. So that's nice (not sure why it didn't work when I tried it earlier). But no MIDI learn in the manual. Does have some nice presets. And is fun to play with. Reminds me a little bit of NI Spektral Delay.

To be honest I think they are missing a few things, I can't seem to MIDI learn any controls (especially the X/Y control). And there doesn't seem to be anyway to animation the X/Y pad via a LFO/curve/etc (like say Rob Papen's stuff). Also doesn't resize. I may be missing something, have to see if there is a manual or something other than the built in help. It has a lot of the Output-style UI features but the installer is garbage. It really insists on putting the plugins in a C:\Program Files\vstplugins and c:\Program Files (x86)\vstplugins directory, even if you don't use that and if you tell it where to stick it, it still puts it there and the place you picked. It also installs the 32 bit version even if you had it turned off. And it also stuck an extra copy of the vst3 version in the same dir I pointed it to for the VST2 (why would it do that?). I get tired of cleaning up after installers. I guess I should be happy, I got it using points so it was essentially free.

Musician Friend has Output's Portal for $26. Most likely a mistake. https://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-audio/output-portal-granular-fx-plug-in

Signal and REV are the most generally useful of all their stuff for me. I never really got on with Exhale, though to be honest it may have been because it came with the bundle (I upgraded to it from Signal and REV). Getting a huge pile of complex things like that all at once almost always means they don't get the time and attention they need. I had Signal for a long time before I got REV which I also had for a long time. Then I jumped to the bundle, which may have been a mistake. Still if I could only pick one though I'd pick Signal, no question.

They sent me a reply just now. Here it is I originally sent them a full System Info file for this machine. If you double click on a .nfo file in Windows you can see in detail every thing about my hardware, drivers, devices, system software, etc. But I'll bet they don't have a Windows box to do that on even, or know what it was. The Cubase template I got from VI/Spitfire themselves. It's the Cubase starter. I enabled all the tracks and then copy and pasted a two bar ostinato MIDI file into every track. A few of them I hand transposed up or down an octave to fit the instrument. Nothing magic at all. Nothing complex at all. Here's the CbB version of my test project, it's equally as bad as the Cubase one (bigger memory footprint) but doesn't seem to have the memory leak Cubase does when playing it back: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qIZb-pkkGJtFhtBLhiDUpSMlm8JYbBs8 The major difference is the percussion. The Cubase template has all the single hit instruments and I haven't set that up in Cakewalk. I should also stress here I realize having every instrument loaded is going to put a bit of stress on a computer. I'm not sure the 11.9Gb BBCSO says it's using is accurate but even if it isn't, this computer still has more physical ram than is being used. In Cakewalk this project has a working set size of 55GB and a Private Bytes of 32GB, leaving me 46% of physical memory unused. At this point I think I'm giving up.

It's not total CPU that is an issue, filling an audio buffer for realtime is a bit different than that. There are only so many clock cycles available before the next buffer has to go to the speakers (depending on the sample rate you are running at). If your CPU is busy doing anything other than constantly filling those buffers, like servicing other interrupts or if (as is the case with ASIO4ALL) the driver software isn't all that good and the hardware isn't that good, the amount of time available is going to be a problem. This is why people buy very expensive audio cards with well written ASIO drivers instead of using the built in motherboard hardware and ASIO4ALL. You can use LatencyMon to measure how much time other things are taking on your computer. Run it while trying to play your project and see what it says it taking all the time. https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon You may also be able to alter your soft synth to need less time, perhaps by making it load more data/use the disk less, etc. It's a very delicate balancing act. And one soft synth may be very different than another. And one DAW may be very different than another. But at the end of the day it's all the same math, the buffer has to go live to the speakers on the clock, if it's not done yet you will get a glitch. Anything that takes your computer away from filling that buffer can prevent you from getting it finished. Use LatencyMon to figure out what is taking the most time away, then see if you can alter it. For lots of things you can't, other than updating Windows/Drivers/OS. But at least you'll get some idea of what is taking the time.

ASIO4ALL is weak at best no surprise you can't get that to work well. But no matter what you are using for an audio driver (or audio interface) if your ASIO buffer size is too small and the synth you are using needs too much CPU time, Cakewalk can't fill the buffer before it goes "live" and that causes pops and clicks. Among solutions to this is to use a larger ASIO buffer, use a better ASIO driver, use a synth that doesn't need so much CPU power, alter the synth's settings to use less CPU power (turn off effects/reverb), update drivers and other software running your computer that cut into the CPU available for Cakewalk and the synth, buy a faster computer, buy a audio interface with a lower round trip latency/lower CPU overhead/etc. All of these things serve to make it more possible for your DAW and your soft synths (and effects) to process a buffer of information before the buffer has to be published to your speakers. If any thing slows that down, even just a little bit, the audio buffer will be played on the speakers but since the data isn't complete you get a glitch.

The DLL must be in the directory above the samples. Just like it is in the zip file. You put the DLL into the same dir as the samples and that won't work. Move it up one directory (leave the samples the .mse file in Iowq Piano - 64.instruments, move the DLL)

Radio Silence

No solos. And I really don't recommend the HO Solo's, they are not that good. OK the harp isn't that bad I guess. Not really sure I have much insight on what makes a quality harp. But for the violin and cello there are much better choices.

It's crazy they have no way to merge in presets so they are added to the menu. I looked at the files that drive the factory presets and I think it would be possible to merge the presets in, but then when they change/update the factory presets it would all be undone. They are just XMLish files though. I think you could build something (Python maybe) to do the merging though you might have to build a mapping from the directory names in the free presets package and the actual plugin names. Given how Waves like to be the reference standard you'd think they work to make their presets a bit more manageable.

I've had Synthmaster (and Synthmaster One) for a while, but the expansions do help take it someplace new. It's a pretty complicated synth to puzzle out presets yourself on. Now I have a ton of very nice presets at a pretty decent price -- can't beat that. I have a ton of synths but I think Synthmaster may be one of the most underrated of the bunch. It and Melda's MSoundFactory both have amazing potential and don't seem to get the press they deserve.

Well at least it's not just my computer. Lets see what happens.

It's only better in a narrow way. But it now has a super giant memory leak. I just spent an hour writing up a trouble report. The new version doesn't use as much ram on load as before (20gigs for my test vs 64gigs before 1.0.4) but it still takes 12:53 (so 13 minutes) to load fully. The last 8 of them it stops allocating ram and just sits there flashing the LED. For 8 minutes. No disc and no CPU activity. Then when you start playing my test 2 bar loop, every time through the loop it allocates another 2gigs of ram. Loop it 10 times and run out of ram. At this point I did what I didn't want to do (write up a trouble ticket). I attached a ton of data, screenshots, system info dumps, their logs, the project file, etc. But I fully expect them to tell me I need to reinstall something or otherwise ***** off. If they didn't notice it's leaking that much ram when fixing their issues, I feel their development team isn't up to it. I've put my Cubase 10 test project here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iBVWN4No4olyl6chlH4vluKBFu0sDK-k