Matthew Sorrels

Looks like they dropped Windows 7. And Version 10 won't support Mac OSX 10.15. It's the Macintax Waves Edition.

And I already own Mushroom Pusher! ?

My Mercury WUP ended Oct 7. ?

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stienberg download assistant also had an update (use it to get the Cubase update). Here's the fix list

It finally works for me, even had an update to Albion ONE. Which it did download and install correctly.

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.

Yes 3.0.6 does seem to fix this problem with the UI in Cakewalk too. At least for me.

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

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.

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.

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.

Every user needs to decide where they want to store VST2 files. VST3 has fixed directories you shouldn't change (it was one of the design changes they made) but for VST2 you have to pick something. And then you have to make sure it's added to the list of directories your DAW and other VST using apps scan. I'm using c:\Program Files\Common Files\VST2 for 64-bit plugins and c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST2 for 32-bit plugins This echos the two directories that VST3 always uses. I don't recommend users install VST into the Cakewalk VST plugin dir. Leave that for Cakewalk stuff. I also recommend you keep 32 and 64 bit separate. There isn't a single one good answer though and no matter what you pick you will have to deal with managing it yourself.

AudioModern products will go on sale again. Many, many times. Let them add MIDI out and then reconsider it. I know I am.

In Native Access you have to setup where to download files to and where to install them. Click the account icon in the upper right and choose preferences. Then give it a valid Download Location, Application location, Content location, VST 64 location and VST 32 location. Hoover over the grey ? next to each one for a description of what that path is. I suspect the path it defualted to for your download location isn't a valid directory which will cause that error. Here's what mine looks like, though my paths are custom so it doesn't download everything to my normal download folder and my NI content is stored on a large content drive. Your setup may be a lot simpler.

Goes $148 11/15

The old IK instruments (Sampletank 2.5 generation) do not work correctly in Cakewalk. I seem to remember their being 32-bit was a big factor but it also was some issues with just old Win XP style things as well. If you ran Cakewalk (or SONAR, it applied to both) as admin you could get them to work but it wasn't very reliable, which sounds like what your seeing. You might have more luck using them under jBridge, but I think most people just moved on. Newer versions of Sampletank will load those old libraries if you do some conversions (though you lose the Miroslav GUI features) and do work correctly.

So if you change your track filter to show All on a Simple Instrument track and make it tall enough it shows the output MIDI channel and you can change it. Makes sense now that I looked it up. Yours was set to NONE which means it uses what ever is in the MIDI clip for Channel. If you change it to 1 that'll also fix the problem. On split instruments those settings are all in the track mixer panel and don't depend on how large your track is.

OK first off, never use a simple instrument track with Kontakt. That always leads to a ton of issues because you can't easily control things. In this case if you open the event viewer on your MIDI you'll notice all the notes are set to MIDI channel 3. And since it is a simple instrument track you can't easily redirect it to MIDI channel 1 like you can with a split track setup. In fact I'm not even sure how you set the MIDI channel on a simple instrument track (I'd hope there is some way but I have no clue what it is). In order to hear that MIDI you either need to change the MIDI to channel 1 or change the Kontakt Instrument to channel 3.