Sycraft

Basically anyone who isn't EastWest works fine with fast bounce. In fact, most programs will tell you it is the preferred method because it more properly might be called "offline bounce" meaning that the bouncing happens independent of the clock. Things process as fast as they can, but wait as long as they need. So if there is a dely fetching sample data, the DAW waits until it is complete. You can actually, in theory, have a "fast bounce" that takes longer than the song length if you loaded it so full of stuff that your computer couldn't process it in realtime. So you could have a project that was having crackles and dropouts in realtime, then you do an offline bounce, and everything sounds flawless because it can wait as long as it needs. However, EW just can't handle this. I don't know why, but they just are married to the idea of realtime bounce and won't fix their software. It really isn't a bug, it isn't like it is something that just cropped up, it is a problem they've had since day one and just refuse to deal with. I don't recommend using them, even with lots of RAM, because you can STILL have issues with fast bounce. They are much less likely, but in the event something happens, like some process on the PC happens to hit memory access hard at the wrong moment, you can get a glitch. Likewise why realtime bounce is not a good idea (aside from being slow) because if something happens to cause an interruption, you get a glitch.

I know this is a bit of an old thread but just wanted to add: This is a problem that has existed with Play since day one, and is probably never going away. I was on them for years about it and they are basically in denial, they feel that that there is no possible way to work with fast bounce and everyone should just use realtime bounce. The fact that Kontakt does fast bounce just fine is something they ignore. Their programmers can't figure out how to fix the issue and the owner is convinced he's hired the "very best programmers in the world (his words) so nothing is going to happen. I dumped EW for this reason years ago, and recommend others do the same. The are amazing at recording/mixing/mastering samples but garbage at software development. Sadly they've tied those samples to their software so ya. If they'd stop with it and use Kontakt or Halion or something I'd start buying from them again but since they won't, I've moved on.