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Everything posted by Matthew Sorrels
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I haven't installed the most recent version of Loopcloud but previous versions weren't that bad. But it mainly serves to help you manage what you bought at Loopmasters. This new version has a subscription component. Not sure how that works (I think you get so many credits each month?). For organizing your own samples I gave up on Loopcloud and moved to ADSR's Sample Manager. Which is very nice.
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No. Only in ReMatrix. You don't have access to the raw .wav files so you can't (easily) move them to other IR reverbs.
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That's funny. In the past it was much more of a game. And the products were actually better. Of course right after I finished solving it, I see someone posted the URLs on KvR. lol Kind of disappointing this year.
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Here's the clues and the answers for Loopmasters Holloween find the 90% off deals. Here's the page (without the answers): https://www.loopmasters.com/articles/4470-Trick-or-treat-Save-a-massive-90-on-10-award-winning-Loopmasters-sample-packs-this-Halloween- Halloween treat 1 Clue: a serious, groovy slash Answer: Deep Funk Cuts (Ginger Snaps) https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/59-Funk/products/9109-Ginger-Snaps-Deep-Funk-Cuts Halloween treat 2 Clue: The first appearance brought on an assault Answer: Hip Hop Arrival 01 - Attack Of The Illmatix https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/24-Hip-Hop/products/8814-Hip-Hop-Arrival-01-Attack-Of-The-Illmatix Halloween treat 3 Clue: the end of the world brought on low frequency and percussion Answer: Drum & Bass Apocalypse 2 https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/15-Drum-and-Bass/products/8699-Drum-Bass-Apocalypse-2 Halloween treat 4 Clue: Poisonous clouds of rhythm section Answer: Neurotoxin Drum & Bass https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/15-Drum-and-Bass/products/8391-Neurotoxin-Drum-Bass Halloween treat 5 Clue: A second, cold ambush Answer: Chilled Trap 2 https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/94-Trap/products/8284-Chilled-Trap-2 Halloween treat 6 Clue: Technological psychoanalysis Answer: Tech Therapy Vol 2 https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/66-Tech-House/products/8119-Tech-Therapy-Vol-2 Halloween treat 7 Clue: Spooky, atmospheric serum sounds Answer: Dark Cinematic - Serum Presets https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/73-Cinematic-/products/8789-Dark-Cinematic-Serum-Presets Halloween treat 8 Clue: Crazy enemies in the slums Answer: Mad Villains - Ghetto Deep https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/50-Deep-House/products/8059-Mad-Villains-Ghetto-Deep Halloween treat 9 Clue: Menacing berlin sounds Answer: SD Brooding Techno https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/40-Techno/products/8382-Brooding-Techno Halloween treat 10 Clue: Murky impending beats Answer: Dark Future Beats https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/14-Downtempo/products/8067-Dark-Future-Beats
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It's interesting in Guy's video (which are always entertaining) he can almost start playing right away when he loads something. On my computer the loading is taking much longer and no notes are available until it's pretty much done. A totally different experience. Spitfire posted something on VI about them looking at the Windows problems but it didn't exactly inspire me with confidence.
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Falcon was updated as well.
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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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Looks like they dropped Windows 7. And Version 10 won't support Mac OSX 10.15. It's the Macintax Waves Edition.
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And I already own Mushroom Pusher! ?
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My Mercury WUP ended Oct 7. ?
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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) Now here's the same thing in Cakewalk 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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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.
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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/
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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.
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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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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.
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So against my better judgement I picked this up yesterday. Downloaded reasonably fast (I have gigabit FiOS) but was dead on arrival. Would crash Cubase on insert, Cakewalk it wouldn't crash but there were no instruments or presets at all. My version of the plugin was 1.0.2 even though they released 1.0.3 on Friday. But with no way to manually download and the Spitfire app claiming 1.0.2 was the only version, I was pretty much hosed. This morning the Spitfire app let me see and download the 1.0.3 build, but that only fixed the crashing. I had to manually repair all the sections (Winds/Brass/Strings/Perc) in order to get presets/instruments to show up. They finally got back to me on the support this afternoon with completely unhelpful advice, pretty much let me solve the problems myself. I'm still kind of pissed off about it. If getting my money back was an option I would have returned it last night. Every fear I had about their plugin is pretty much true. It doesn't load/stream very effectively. No way you could even think of using this without having the samples on a fast SSD (takes up 527 GB for me). Some poor soul converted the Logic template Spitfire made available to Cubase. (Seems like if you aren't on a Mac running Logic they don't care about you at all). Using the converted template and loading/enabling every track the whole things takes about 25-35gigs of ram (I think that's just the Mix 1 mic). Some notes seem to get cut off and just stop playing then you release the key and the release tail plays. Maybe it's a streaming issue but that's with the whole instrument loaded. I placed a two bar ostinato on every track, tweaked all the tracks to use short notes and moved the notes into the right ranges. Playing that back in Cubase it is pretty clear they aren't multi-threading really well. One thread gets pegged at 100% and the rest are barely moving (it's possible this is a Cubase problem, Cubase isn't very good at breaking up soft synths to multiple threads). Reaper would be interesting, I bet it would do better. Not sure about Cakewalk yet, since I have no template. In any case even though they force you to load separate instances of the plugin for each track, it's not helping spread the CPU load at all. Which is kind of like the only advantage not being a multi-tembral instrument has. DLL's on Windows can share memory (so if multiple apps load the same DLL or a single app loads multiple copies of a DLL) they can all use the same pool of memory (they don't have to). It appears BBCSO may be doing that (every plugin instance reports the same ram usage and shows the same loading even if that instance isn't being changed), which may kill the advantage having all these separate plugin instances would have with spreading the CPU. May be very different on the Mac, again I suspect they have never used a Windows PC, ever. I'll admit I'm a little confused when I load up the Violin 1 Leader (the solo violin 1) and enable just one of the mic options (like the mono mic) and play a single note, the UI shows 6 voices active (with the legato articulation, other articulations have a different voice count, but still not just 1). I'm not 100% sure what all those voices are doing exactly but having that much mixing going on with a single note is unlikely to scale well with a full orchestral template. The UI is so stylish as to be nearly unusable. Things you need to know are tiny little blinking dots with no text (only way to tell it's still loading samples is this little led light in the corner, it flashes when loading, what is loaded and selected is often another little tiny led like dot, etc). The amount of wasted space is near epic, the amount of actually helpful tooltips are minimal. The mic control options are all on multiple pages(4 pages!), so you can't actually see all the mics and set their levels without paging forward and backward. Which is crazy stupid on a 4096x2160 monitor and 20+ different mic options. This is also true for articulations. The insane number of mics I'm not sure is a big win. If you load all the mics for the solo violin it consumes 12gigs of ram. You can't seem to purge articulations you aren't using (just mics). You load the instrument you get all the articulations, even though that means it eats a bunch of ram you most likely aren't ever going to use -- I think. With the UI designed by ustwo I'm not sure anyone could tell. I'm sure none of these things will matter to most of their customers (and even less to their near rabid fans). What it sounds like will most likely mask any of the engineering and design flaws they have made. On the sound front, to be honest, it sounds like every other high-end orchestral product I own. Not worse but also not better. The VI forum has a number of posts pointing out specific problems, but that's pretty much par for every library ever made. For very high end users these things may matter. For me, not so much. How the keyswitching works, how the plug manages thread, memory and disc -- these things do matter to me a lot. And on that score they aren't doing so hot. I got it at the intro discount, but $750 is about double my "acceptable" library expense point. If I paid MSRP $999 for it I'd feel even more cheated. This is not a good deal at either price point. If you are a professional music composer writing music for games, TV, movies, or media you might be able to get your money worth out of this. Depends on what you already have (people with all the other Spitfire libraries are going to find this is a bit of a step down). If you are just starting this isn't unreasonable. It does seem slightly easier to use than EastWest's Hollywood Orchestra. For me it's going to depend on if their software development is willing to bridge the gap between what the BBCSO plugin is now and what say Kontakt is. In theory a year or so from now this could be very solid. Or it could turn out that engineering doesn't mix with composing/art all that well and the plugin doesn't get the kinds of improvements it needs, like what happened to EastWest Play. Right now as I'm writing this I have the A3 trumpets loaded up and I'm playing on the MIDI keyboard a three note sequence then I play all three notes as a chord. When I switch from the single note to the chord the whole plugin stops making sounds (a sharp cut off) until I let go, then I hear the release tails. I'm not sure why it can't play a three note chord with THREE trumpets. Maybe it's because I have all 19 mics loaded (but I like how that sounds). I'm not sure a $1k library should fail to play a simple chord, no matter what I did to the mics.
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Stienberg download assistant also had an update (use it to get the Cubase update). Here's the fix list
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It finally works for me, even had an update to Albion ONE. Which it did download and install correctly.
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I think they are borked due to the BBC release. The new issue of Sound On Sound is out today, cover article on Spitfire's BBC product. https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/spitfire-audio-bbc-symphony-orchestra It's an interesting read (subscription required). Perhaps I was looking for reasons to not spend the crazy money on this, but it's not the super positive review I would have thought. To be sure it is positive, but it points out a bunch of issues, chief among them their plugin just isn't that good UI-wise (see quote below). I think I'm going to have a hard time convincing myself it is worth getting. The disc space cost alone is almost enough to punt it.
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UVI Workstation won't work in Cakewalk
Matthew Sorrels replied to Ellsworth Hall's topic in Cakewalk by BandLab
Yes 3.0.6 does seem to fix this problem with the UI in Cakewalk too. At least for me. -
UVI Workstation won't work in Cakewalk
Matthew Sorrels replied to Ellsworth Hall's topic in Cakewalk by BandLab
UVI has a nice portal app now to manage updating all your software and libraries. It's pretty nice. https://www.uvi.net/uvi-portal -
Sampletank 4.0.8 (Update 30th Sept 2019) (Not a Deal)
Matthew Sorrels replied to ZincT's topic in Deals
They really need a download manager. The pain that installing Sampletank 4 MAX inflected really shouldn't have been allowed to happen. If Toontrack and UVI can do it, IK can too. Even if they are determined to keep charging for extra downloads they could at least create a manager so that downloading and installing all that content isn't so painful. If they could remove that customer crushing download policy AND solve their download/install pain and suffering factor it would be a huge win. It's also perhaps the cheapest advertising platform they could ever hope to have. Offering them a chance to present new products right to their existing customers along with that comfy warm feeling of getting updates. There is a reason you manage your products using store fronts for Google Play and Apple -- promotion/exposure/advertising. -
Sampletank 4.0.8 (Update 30th Sept 2019) (Not a Deal)
Matthew Sorrels replied to ZincT's topic in Deals
It is an improvement. Before when your sound downloads expired you could no longer download the sound updates as well. So when they updated the sounds you might have to pay to get that update. They have now fixed that, the updates are now separate from the sounds download. It's a good step. -
Kontakt player invalid download path
Matthew Sorrels replied to Stephen Simmons's topic in Instruments & Effects
Actual performance of any external (or internal) drive is a combination of so many factors it isn't funny. USB external devices have so many supported fall back modes they often under perform for reasons you may not be able to see. Internal SATA and NVMe devices don't have many fall backs, so they either work at the right speed or don't work at all. That awesome fast USB3 SSD external drive hooked to the wrong port (or the right port configured wrong) will still work but be dog slow. If you have good USB3 ports and a good external USB3 container and a good SSD drive, you may get decent performance. Hooking that same drive to an internal SATA port will almost always get better performance though, USB3 isn't as good as SATA for discs. USB3.1 and Thunderbolt may beat internal SATA3 connections. Maybe. But right now the hot ticket is NVMe drives. The right combination there can get you very high speeds. In any case I'd recommend getting the largest fastest drive you can to store your NI instruments on. My NI content directory is more than 2.2TB. (OK I've been at this for 20+ years and never let anything go). Libraries are only going to get bigger and bigger. I'd say 1TB is the minimum I'd use for a sample drive. And I also recommend always buy drives in groups of two. One for the data and one to backup the data. I usually don't buy the same brand/model either. I use very large old school hard drives for the backups personally. My backups take a bit longer but it's more manageable.