(not a deal) AmpliTube 5.1 update available

[Doug Rintoul]

7 hours ago, Marc Cormier said:

Thanks, everyone, for the comments.  I don't know how to roll back but I'll try anything at this point.  In the mean time, I'm replacing with THU until I can resolve this.

If you used Product Manager to install AmpliTube, the previous versions are in the IK Multimedia download folder.  You should be able to install the older version over top the new version. If you can't find a copy of the installation files, I think I can give you access to 5.0.3.

[Doug Rintoul]

3 minutes ago, simon said:

I think you can download previous version in the 'my products' area of the IKM website

Simon is correct. There is a past releases button that will lead you to a place to download previous versions.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Doug Rintoul

[Jacques Boileau]

I did some quick test. You can find my results here:

 

[chris.r]

4 hours ago, Jacques Boileau said:

I did some quick test. You can find my results here...

I can load all the Melda effects that I own without seen even slight change in the cpu progress bar. I can't load all the IKM effects without bringing my reasonable 8x 4.0MHz 6th gen i7-6700 to it's knees. 

To me it is a bit of nonsense all the high cpu demand vs high fidelity. When working with soft synths you don't create a song with just a single instance of Amplitube 5 and one other plugin, that would be obviously only one TR5 Tape Machine of your choice, as there would be not much cpu headroom left in that song. Plugins taking part in the song creation should have been optimized otherwise it is what it is, well a nonsense.

[RSMcGuitar]

I dunno, I have a song right now with about 8 instances of Amplitube 5 running and tape machines as well.

It really depends what the plugin is doing. I don't think it's fair to do a 1:1 comparison.

Edited September 21, 2021 by RSMcGuitar

[Marc Cormier]

1 hour ago, RSMcGuitar said:

I dunno, I have a song right now with about 8 instances of Amplitube 5 running and tape machines as well.

It really depends what the plugin is doing. I don't think it's fair to do a 1:1 comparison.

Since I first whined about this I've done a lot of component swapping and, as you'd expect, time-based plugins (reverb, delay) can cause a noticeable spike in CPU consumption.  What surprised me is how all of my favorite amps (mostly the newer models like VH4) absolutely chew through the CPU.  Bad news for me because the tones are specific to those amps as well as the quality coming through in the new models.

[Jacques Boileau]

It just seemed awkward to me that with little changes in the release notes a plugin would double its CPU utilization. We can all upgrade our PCs so we have enough horse power, but I hope these companies take the time before a release to see what impact their changes do and if it could be optimized if needed.

For now, I have rolled back the version of these plugins. It works better for me that way, although I know the day will come where I will feel the need to upgrade.

[Marc Cormier]

1 hour ago, Jacques Boileau said:

It just seemed awkward to me that with little changes in the release notes a plugin would double its CPU utilization. We can all upgrade our PCs so we have enough horse power, but I hope these companies take the time before a release to see what impact their changes do and if it could be optimized if needed.

For now, I have rolled back the version of these plugins. It works better for me that way, although I know the day will come where I will feel the need to upgrade.

Case in point: Neural DSP is looking back at plugins prior to Gojira and Henson to optimize the code.  Who knows when that will actually happen but there's an ocean of difference (and about two years) between Plini and Gojira in the CPU consumption dept.

[marcL]

7 hours ago, chris.r said:

I can load all the Melda effects that I own without seen even slight change in the cpu progress bar. I can't load all the IKM effects without bringing my reasonable 8x 4.0MHz 6th gen i7-6700 to it's knees. 

To me it is a bit of nonsense all the high cpu demand vs high fidelity. When working with soft synths you don't create a song with just a single instance of Amplitube 5 and one other plugin, that would be obviously only one TR5 Tape Machine of your choice, as there would be not much cpu headroom left in that song. Plugins taking part in the song creation should have been optimized otherwise it is what it is, well a nonsense.

The sad thing is that it is not only IK who goes this "nonsense" way! There is also NI (just look at their new effects), AAS (I noticed a resource hug some releases ago) and others. It's a shame, but more and more I have to replace those resource wasters with other plugins. Happily, there are a lot that do a better job!

[chris.r]

I wouldn't mind, if there is a cpu intensive convo tech under the hood, that the hi-res quality is being kept for final rendering of audio. But for the song creation process you need as much cpu power to drive your plugins and synths because each will take it's share anyway and you only need the rough taste of the response of some fx plugins sometimes until you're finally into mixing stage. And even some people like to do both creating and mixing at once because why not, if it's home studio you can do this now easily ITB. I mean, how many synth tracks you have to freeze first to save your cpu before you're fed up with all this.... nonsense?

Edited September 21, 2021 by chris.r

[Peter - IK Multimedia]

And if you are having issues, our support team would be more than happy to recreate and report to the devs if there is a global issue - or work with you to resolve any issue due to/triggered by/"tickled" via something specific to you.

[chris.r]

51 minutes ago, Peter - IK Multimedia said:

And if you are having issues, our support team would be more than happy to recreate and report to the devs if there is a global issue - or work with you to resolve any issue due to/triggered by/"tickled" via something specific to you.

Peter, are they still going to fixing AT4 bugs, now that the latest version is AT5?

[Jacques Boileau]

1 hour ago, Peter - IK Multimedia said:

And if you are having issues, our support team would be more than happy to recreate and report to the devs if there is a global issue - or work with you to resolve any issue due to/triggered by/"tickled" via something specific to you.

I would love to report my findings to support/developers. I did leave a message on the IK forum, but not sure this more good than here. Its for the community, not necessarily read by developers. I would rather get the info to developers as directly as possible and would certainly would have done so if it were easy to find where to enter a ticket! It might be just me, but I just can't find where on your web site. 

Edit: Scratch that, I finally found it!

Edit 2: Done! Will report back when I get news.

Edited September 21, 2021 by Jacques Boileau

[abacab]

5 hours ago, Peter - IK Multimedia said:

And if you are having issues, our support team would be more than happy to recreate and report to the devs if there is a global issue - or work with you to resolve any issue due to/triggered by/"tickled" via something specific to you.

Peter, thanks for responding. But I am sure that the issue is not "global", but actually only affecting older hardware. I experienced the same issue when SampleTank 4 was first released. I am convinced that generally most new software with state of the art features, not necessarily just from IK, is being developed and tested on the latest hardware.

When I upgraded from an Intel Core, gen 3 CPU to an Intel Core gen 9, my problem with performance issues was solved!

[Jacques Boileau]

3 hours ago, abacab said:

Peter, thanks for responding. But I am sure that the issue is not "global", but actually only affecting older hardware. I experienced the same issue when SampleTank 4 was first released. I am convinced that generally most new software with state of the art features, not necessarily just from IK, is being developed and tested on the latest hardware.

When I upgraded from an Intel Core, gen 3 CPU to an Intel Core gen 9, my problem with performance issues was solved!

Well, I have had a 36 year career in software development and we always worked at getting the best optimized code as possible. That is just normal professional behaviour for developers. Of course a faster machine can hide a not so well optimized app and of course there are times where your app needs more CPU power to be able to do what it set out to do. But I think that doubling the CPU usage of an app with very little new feature added might be an oversight. Any developer would be interested in knowing about it and that is the reason I brought it up.

Just as an example, I brought a similar observation for a Cakewalk EA release to Noel Borthwick and he was glad I did because he didn't like that Cakewalk would get less efficient. I gave him a project to reproduce the problem, he worked on his code to optimise it and gave me a build to test in my environment. It worked. Of course I have quite a lot of respect for Noel and the bakers, they have proven to be very professional developers indeed. As I am sure IK's are also and, if my findings gets to them, will be interested in investigating.

The only thing I regret is not having found how to contact IK support and decided to post my findings here hoping it would somehow magically get to them. Bad idea. In the future, now that I know how to contact support, that will be my line of communication with them.

Edited September 22, 2021 by Jacques Boileau

[abacab]

16 hours ago, Jacques Boileau said:

Well, I have had a 36 year career in software development and we always worked at getting the best optimized code as possible. That is just normal professional behaviour for developers. Of course a faster machine can hide a not so well optimized app and of course there are times where your app needs more CPU power to be able to do what it set out to do. But I think that doubling the CPU usage of an app with very little new feature added might be an oversight. Any developer would be interested in knowing about it and that is the reason I brought it up.

Just as an example, I brought a similar observation for a Cakewalk EA release to Noel Borthwick and he was glad I did because he didn't like that Cakewalk would get less efficient. I gave him a project to reproduce the problem, he worked on his code to optimise it and gave me a build to test in my environment. It worked. Of course I have quite a lot of respect for Noel and the bakers, they have proven to be very professional developers indeed. As I am sure IK's are also and, if my findings gets to them, will be interested in investigating.

The only thing I regret is not having found how to contact IK support and decided to post my findings here hoping it would somehow magically get to them. Bad idea. In the future, now that I know how to contact support, that will be my line of communication with them.

I hear you, and wish good luck!

The hurdle to get past with IK support is getting to someone who is not convinced that you are doing something wrong. I've gone in circles with every contact there, wasting my time. For example, I open a ticket with details, and they usually respond and close the ticket. I respond to reopen the ticket with more details, and they respond again and close the ticket again...

I've worked in IT for over 40 years, so do know a thing or two about problem determination and root cause analysis, and could probably run circles around most in tech support.