EastWest instruments problem fast bouncing to tracks

[mfanning]

Last week I bounced to tracks a Cakewalk project with a EastWest QL Pianos part and whole piano sections(not all) bounced down to play back staccato notes.    Playback of the project before mix down sounded fine.  Cakewalk updates are current.  I replaced the synth for the piano part with SampleTank3 grand piano which bounced to tracks with no problem.  Over the weekend I began working on a full orchestra piece with all parts  EastWest  Orchestra Gold and mixed it down today to find that  the same thing was happening to other instruments.  I have been using EW instruments in Cakewalk projects for years and bouncing to tracks using Fast Bounce and this has never happened before.  I checked for Play updates and installed the new EW update but it still happens.   I have always used Fast Bounce for projects with EW instruments with no issues.  I did another mixdown and unchecked the Fast Bounce option and it mixed down just fine.   Fortunately, the problem seems to only occur when using Fast Bounce.

It seems after one of the recent updates that Cakewalk  Fast Bounce isn't working right with EW Play instruments.  Anybody else having this happen?  -MF

[gustabo]

Have the Play engine stream from ram instead of disk, or vice versa (change it to the opposite of what it's set to).
I've had your issue before and changing the stream option in the play engine took care of it.

[Matthew Sorrels]

Fast bounce starting with Play version 5 and up has been pretty much broken.  It's not new.  There are a few threads (sadly I seem to be post in many of them).  There are no real solutions.  If you put your samples on fast SSD drives and load everything into ram (if you can even do that) you might get it to work, sometimes, maybe.  Which of course is the real problem, you do the fast bounce and it sounds mostly OK, so you assume it worked.  It's only if you look/listen closer you realize it's not always playing release tails on some samples/instruments, sometimes.  This "sometimes, it mostly works" leads people to believe it's good, when it really isn't.  It's also not just a Cakewalk problem (though Cakewalk does seem to have a harder time with it than Cubase).

[mfanning]

3 hours ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

Fast bounce starting with Play version 5 and up has been pretty much broken.  It's not new.  There are a few threads (sadly I seem to be post in many of them).  There are no real solutions.  If you put your samples on fast SSD drives and load everything into ram (if you can even do that) you might get it to work, sometimes, maybe.  Which of course is the real problem, you do the fast bounce and it sounds mostly OK, so you assume it worked.  It's only if you look/listen closer you realize it's not always playing release tails on some samples/instruments, sometimes.  This "sometimes, it mostly works" leads people to believe it's good, when it really isn't.  It's also not just a Cakewalk problem (though Cakewalk does seem to have a harder time with it than Cubase).

I'm probably last to notice the problem.  Always seemed to work before and this made me think it was related to a recent Cakewalk update.  But, at least turning off fast bounce fixes the issue.   Thanks for the information!  -MF

[mfanning]

Thank you Gustabo for suggesting changing the streaming from RAM instead of disk.     Today I was able to fast bounce to tracks the Cakewalk orchestral project I've been working on with 22 instances of Play instruments and the mix down was good.   In PLAY- Settings menu Streaming tab I changed the Sample Cache level.  Streaming options show Sample Cache-  Disk Volume /Cache level and next to "New Volume" there is an up/down arrow with a corresponding number which is defaulted 3.   I raised it to the maximum 5.    The EW explanation is "The lower the level, the more is streamed from disk.  The higher the level, the more is loaded into RAM"   After changing this setting my Cakewalk project RAM went from about 6 gigs when Fast bounce didn't work right to now loading in about 8 gigs and Fast Bounce mixing down everything without issues.   It's good to be able to use Fast Bounce again!

[gustabo]

De nada

[Sycraft]

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.

[Robert Bone]

I have had fast bounce issues (and others), with EW Play, and once in a while with other content, so I usually just turn off Fast Bounce, when working with content from plugins that have given me fast bounce issues in the past.

My desktop DOES have 128 GB of memory, so I would give that a shot, but I got rid of my EW subscription, and am loaded up with Kontakt libraries anyways, so I just don't encounter issues with it anymore, and Kontakt seems to render/bounce just fine, with Fast Bounce.

I do wish I had been aware of the notion to load more of the EW content into memory, because surely 128 GB would be plenty.

Best of luck to those who find success with moving sounds into memory for use with Fast Bounce - wonderful time saver.

Bob Bone

[Sycraft]

20 hours ago, Robert Bone said:

My desktop DOES have 128 GB of memory, so I would give that a shot, but I got rid of my EW subscription, and am loaded up with Kontakt libraries anyways, so I just don't encounter issues with it anymore, and Kontakt seems to render/bounce just fine, with Fast Bounce.

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.

[Matthew Sorrels]

EW can fail to play correctly in realtime/normal play mode as well.  It seems to skip release tails if it can't get the data to the buffer fast enough.  It's not just fast bounce that is broken.  Loading everything into RAM seems to help this the most though.