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Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra


synkrotron

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So playing around with it.  When you load all the mics (OK that's kind of crazy, maybe) the limits in the plugin options seems to be what's cutting out the sound.  If I up all the settings for memory and load amounts to the maximum it does stop the audio cut outs playing chords.  Not really sure what that means though.  I guess if you stick with a limited number of mics and just hope whatever those limits really mean don't kick in, you might be good.

Maximum Voices 999
Preload Size 1000000
Stream Buffer Size 1000000
Maximum Pitch Voices 32

 

Follow-up:  While setting these crazy buffer sizes does fix notes being cut off when loading all the mics, it has a lot of weird effects on a 40+ track template.  It's really sharing the memory pool or something in strange ways.  I've changed these back to the defaults as a result.  The settings apply to every BBCSO plugin and are global, so you can't pick and choose on a track basis.

Edited by Matthew Sorrels
follow up on not recommending crazy maximum settings
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I'm using a ASUS X299-Prime II with a Intel i9-9960X and 128GB of Ram, nVidia 2080-Ti video card.  It's a mildly overclocked 16-core monster.  Main hard drive is a very fast Samsung NVMe drive but I've put BBCSO on a 1TB Crucial MX500 drive (benchmarks around 560MB rw).  Running Windows 10 Pro.  The machine was built a little under a year ago to last me at least 5-8 years.  It's a pretty decent box.

Having played with BBCSO all day I'm still not sure what exactly it wants for the best performance.  I'd say 64GB of ram if you want to load a full orchestra is a must though.  The drive IO is very odd, even on the fast drive it seems to load some (not all) data much slower than I'd think it should.  All the data is compressed (you can tell because if you try 7zipping one of the files it doesn't change in size very much) so perhaps the decompression is making the loading so much slower than I would have expected.  I would love to know what the Crystaldisk marks for the Spitfire SSD is -- be sure to try some benchmark against the drive when you get it.  I've never bothered with sticking SSD drives on USB3, would be interesting to know what kind of performance that would get you.

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1 hour ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

'm using a ASUS X299-Prime II with a Intel i9-9960X and 128GB of Ram, nVidia 2080-Ti video card.  It's a mildly overclocked 16-core monster.  Main hard drive is a very fast Samsung NVMe drive but I've put BBCSO on a 1TB Crucial MX500 drive (benchmarks around 560MB rw).  Running Windows 10 Pro.  The machine was built a little under a year ago to last me at least 5-8 years.  It's a pretty decent box.

Man! When plugging this into PC PartPicker I almost stopped at the CPU but made it up to the Graphics Card and still not done  wow what a machine!  
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/praisetracks/saved/#view=CxpPnQ

1 hour ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

I would love to know what the Crystaldisk marks for the Spitfire SSD is -- be sure to try some benchmark against the drive when you get it.  I've never bothered with sticking SSD drives on USB3, would be interesting to know what kind of performance that would get you.

I will see what I can do. I think the Spitfire SSD is a Samsung so it should be a good one. I also have a SATA to USB 3 adapter I might try. I currently only have 3 SATA 6 ports with the rest being SATA I so we shall see ho things go.

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Here's the PC Part Picker list I used when building it last Dec.  (at the time they didn't have the 9960x as a choice)

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/msorrels/saved/C7HZRB

Note, no one in their right mind would buy a 9960x today, Intel's new announced chips are half the price and faster.  But last Dec this was the best you could do.  Honestly today I think I'd wait for the new AMDs.  I'll admit I have a slight bias against AMD that perhaps they earned, but their (shipping any day now) chips seem to be much better than Intel and vastly better pricing.

 

Edited by Matthew Sorrels
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Daniel James did a 7 hour Twitch stream on BBCSO.  I've only watched the first 28 mins and read his comments, but I think he's got this nailed.

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/spitfire-bbc-symphony-orchestra-first-look-in-depth.86440/

Quote

Basically it feels like they made a $300 starter library and are trying to make it look like its worth $1000. Lots of sloppiness everywhere, feels like lots of cut corners (something you forgive in cheaper libraries), Also its another Spitfire library that in general feels like it tops out around mf in some instruments (looking at you brass)

Its not an inherently bad library, the sounds are not too bad. Its just way too expensive for what it is and its hard to pinpoint who this is actually for. It out prices beginners, Its too sloppy for pros, many people in between have libraries that can do anything BBCSO can only better, with faster load times, multis, in tune, in time, with a UI that is designed with function in mind.

If this ever drops near $300 I would recommend. At $1000 I wouldn't. I am not saying you are wrong if you do decide to get it and enjoy it, everyone is different. But for me this library just doesn't come ANYWHERE near the hype they generated for it, and not for the first time.

-DJ

 

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If Spitfire is smart they will take all these comments seriously and dig in and make this the product it should be.  Or they will ignore everything and just stop talking about it completely.  This is the kind of library that can easily just completely drop off the radar.  Like DJ I'm having a hard time imagining the person that this is the best library for.

One of the factors that played into my getting this was the concept that the intro price is as low as it would go.  Spitfire for a long time were very hostile to sale pricing at all.  That has changed to some extent.  This may be the lowest price this winter, but I'm fairly sure now that by next Christmas they will offer this again at or lower than this price.  There is no reason to rush to get this now.

 

Edited by Matthew Sorrels
grammer
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If it doesn't run well on a PC like Matthew's, I don't think I should even bother trying on mine.

Which is fine; I'm happy with my recent orchestra upgrade from GPO5 to some libraries from the CineSymphony range, and a few 8Dio libraries.

Edited by antler
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Near as I can tell they have made some software design choices for the Windows version that make it vastly worse than the Mac version.  They seem to be doing some things I don't think I'd ever recommend any software developer do.  Interestingly I rebuilt the Cubase template in Cakewalk (well some of it, I didn't do all the bus routing).  When running my 2 bar ostinato test on Cakewalk, the CPU load is much more reasonable than it is in Cubase.  I'm not 100% sure why (but I'm pretty sure it's Spitfire's fault).  The load times of the full template are crazy though (in either DAW).  It opens up fast but then the plugins spend FOREVER loading the samples and there isn't any progress bars and you can't generally make any sounds until it's done loading.  Monitoring the disk usage during that time shows they aren't even close to saturating the IO channel like they should (like every Kontakt instrument does).  As a result on a PC (not sure this applies to the Mac) your load times are going to be crazy no matter how fast your hard drive and computer are.

Here's my test running in Cubase 10, notice how Core 13 is near 100% and all the rest of the cores aren't being used much at all(16 cores each have two CPU graphs for the 2 threads)

2AcIz9.jpg

Now here's the same thing in Cakewalk

EoKZ0v.jpg

Cakewalk and I'm guessing Reaper will both run this a lot better than Cubase does.  I just fear there is no chance they will be able/willing to change how they are managing the sample memory pool and how they should be managing the IO for better performance on Windows.  The kinds of changes they may need to make are sometimes hard for teams to accept.

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1 hour ago, antler said:

If it doesn't run well on a PC like Matthew's, I don't think I should even bother trying on mine.

Which is fine; I'm happy with my recent orchestra upgrade from GPO5 to some libraries from the CineSymphony range, and a few 8Dio libraries.

GPO is underrated.  Sure it doesn't sound like the big boys and has fewer articulations but you can lay down some stuff pretty fast.

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15 minutes ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

 

Cakewalk and I'm guessing Reaper will both run this a lot better than Cubase does.  I just fear there is no chance they will be able/willing to change how they are managing the sample memory pool and how they should be managing the IO for better performance on Windows.  The kinds of changes they may need to make are sometimes hard for teams to accept.

Very surprising since Cubase is claimed to be more resource efficient than Cakewalk.   There is a similarity on one core which means that's probably on the developer's side. 

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On the 9960x there are a few cores that are "preferred" (and overclocked faster on my system) which may be why #13 is pulling the main weight.  That green CPU usage is all the DAW too.  Generally Cubase does a pretty good job with cores, but Cakewalk has had a lot of improvements on the multiprocessing front. 

Though in this case looking at the way the processing is working I suspect each instance of BBCSO is sharing data and processing.  As a result it seems to be doing the bulk of the work in only a couple of threads (looking at the thread usage, only 2 BBCSO threads are at the top of the CPU usage list during playback rather than having all the threads at about the same CPU usage), which is leading to the higher CPU usage.  Each instance of the plugin is a slave to all the other instances maybe, one main worker and a lot of drones.  I wonder if it would be possible to run each instance without the shared IO/Memory (wrapping them perhaps, blocking whatever inner instance communication methods they are using).  I'm pretty sure it would be faster for me in that case.

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19 minutes ago, Paul Young said:

GPO is underrated.  Sure it doesn't sound like the big boys and has fewer articulations but you can lay down some stuff pretty fast.

Agree with you there. The bigger libs take so much longer to load as well; I still use GPO as my sketching library. The only problem is that sometimes the instrument ranges are different, so I end up having to re-arrange/rewrite some parts.

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