Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra Arrived Today

[JoeGBradford]

Good luck chaps - that Closure track sounds superb!

[Simeon Amburgey]

@Matthew Sorrels, Just installed the BBC SO update bringing it to 1.04. It looks like some memory management issues have been improved. I would love to see what your results are when/if you install the update.

 

[Matthew Sorrels]

It's only better in a narrow way.  But it now has a super giant memory leak.  I just spent an hour writing up a trouble report.  The new version doesn't use as much ram on load as before (20gigs for my test vs 64gigs before 1.0.4) but it still takes 12:53 (so 13 minutes) to load fully.  The last 8 of them it stops allocating ram and just sits there flashing the LED.  For 8 minutes.  No disc and no CPU activity.

Then when you start playing my test 2 bar loop, every time through the loop it allocates another 2gigs of ram.  Loop it 10 times and run out of ram.

At this point I did what I didn't want to do (write up a trouble ticket).  I attached a ton of data, screenshots, system info dumps, their logs, the project file, etc.  But I fully expect them to tell me I need to reinstall something or otherwise ***** off.  If they didn't notice it's leaking that much ram when fixing their issues, I feel their development team isn't up to it.

I've put my Cubase 10 test project here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iBVWN4No4olyl6chlH4vluKBFu0sDK-k

 

[Simeon Amburgey]

37 minutes ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

It's only better in a narrow way.  But it now has a super giant memory leak.  I just spent an hour writing up a trouble report.  The new version doesn't use as much ram on load as before (20gigs for my test vs 64gigs before 1.0.4) but it still takes 12:53 (so 13 minutes) to load fully.  The last 8 of them it stops allocating ram and just sits there flashing the LED.  For 8 minutes.  No disc and no CPU activity.

Then when you start playing my test 2 bar loop, every time through the loop it allocates another 2gigs of ram.  Loop it 10 times and run out of ram.

At this point I did what I didn't want to do (write up a trouble ticket).  I attached a ton of data, screenshots, system info dumps, their logs, the project file, etc.  But I fully expect them to tell me I need to reinstall something or otherwise ***** off.  If they didn't notice it's leaking that much ram when fixing their issues, I feel their development team isn't up to it.

I've put my Cubase 10 test project here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iBVWN4No4olyl6chlH4vluKBFu0sDK-k

 

Thanks so much.

I am trying to load your Cubase project now ?

[Simeon Amburgey]

9 minutes ago, Simeon Amburgey said:

It's only better in a narrow way.  But it now has a super giant memory leak.  I just spent an hour writing up a trouble report.  The new version doesn't use as much ram on load as before (20gigs for my test vs 64gigs before 1.0.4) but it still takes 12:53 (so 13 minutes) to load fully.  The last 8 of them it stops allocating ram and just sits there flashing the LED.  For 8 minutes.  No disc and no CPU activity.

Then when you start playing my test 2 bar loop, every time through the loop it allocates another 2gigs of ram.  Loop it 10 times and run out of ram

CONFIRMED!

Just watching the memory usage grow is amazing, even when it is not playing back it is consuming memory. 

[Matthew Sorrels]

Well at least it's not just my computer.  Lets see what happens.

[Matthew Sorrels]

Radio Silence

[JoeGBradford]

That must be really disappointing. I've downloaded the midi that was with the Orchestration video Spitfire put up and used it with my Miroslav Philharmonik 2 - doesn't sound anywhere as good as the one in the video made with BBC SO but at least it loads in less than a minute! 

 

Hope you get the problem resolved quickly

[Simeon Amburgey]

19 hours ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

Radio Silence

I sent a couple of videos and a project to Spitfire yesterday. Sandy my contact there mentioned he merged it with another support incident which in all possibility could be yours. ? Here’s hoping that they can see the source of the issue and correct it.
 

@Matthew Sorrels, what is the gist of your Cubase Template you sent to test this? I would love to see what a similar Cakewalk template would look like and if there was a similar memory issue there? 
 

i will be sure to post any updates or findings here.

[Matthew Sorrels]

They sent me a reply just now.  Here it is

Quote

Thanks for getting in touch. Thanks for your patience during this busy time.

Regarding the load times, we have some new developments on this issue.

Firstly, please run through this article.

https://spitfireaudio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014486454-How-can-I-improve-my-sample-streaming-performance-on-Windows-

Secondly, please can you update me with the following,

1) Please can you tell me the format of the hard drive you stream the samples from, NTFS or EXFAT?

2) Please can you send me a screenshot of the audio settings. (Located in the top right corner cog menu)

3) How much RAM do you have?

I originally sent them a full System Info file for this machine.  If you double click on a .nfo file in Windows you can see in detail every thing about my hardware, drivers, devices, system software, etc.  But I'll bet they don't have a Windows box to do that on even, or know what it was.

The Cubase template I got from VI/Spitfire themselves.  It's the Cubase starter.  I enabled all the tracks and then copy and pasted a two bar ostinato MIDI file into every track.  A few of them I hand transposed up or down an octave to fit the instrument.  Nothing magic at all.  Nothing complex at all.

Here's the CbB version of my test project, it's equally as bad as the Cubase one (bigger memory footprint) but doesn't seem to have the memory leak Cubase does when playing it back:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qIZb-pkkGJtFhtBLhiDUpSMlm8JYbBs8

The major difference is the percussion.  The Cubase template has all the single hit instruments and I haven't set that up in Cakewalk.

I should also stress here I realize having every instrument loaded is going to put a bit of stress on a computer.  I'm not sure the 11.9Gb BBCSO says it's using is accurate but even if it isn't, this computer still has more physical ram than is being used.  In Cakewalk this project has a working set size of 55GB and a Private Bytes of 32GB, leaving me 46% of physical memory unused.

At this point I think I'm giving up.

[Matthew Sorrels]

So Spitfire sent me a build of the Spitfire Audio app that has an "optimize" button that does something to the BBCSO files on your hard drive.  It ran for 2+ hours.  End result is it does now load a bit faster, 5 mins vs 13 mins on my test project.  Which I guess is good.  But the engine playback is pretty awful with any stream/buffer settings they asked me to try.  And it's pretty awful with anything I did try outside that.  I could get the playback decent but it would eat 1gig of ram per-loop (and not last long), or the playback was studdery and glitchy (but the ram usage didn't grow so crazy) nothing even close to usable.  And that's at 2048 samples on the audio interface.

I wasn't sure it was reasonable to expect any computer could load up the whole BBCSO, so I loaded up an EastWest Play Hollywood Gold template (I bought a pre-made one recently since up to now I always built projects by hand).  I enabled all the short articulations and put the same 2 bar midi loop on them.  About 40 tracks total, and it plays perfectly and loads in 30.7 seconds (same hard drive as BBCSO).  So I thought that still might not be fair since BBCSO loads all the articulations, so I went through the template and enabled every major/main articulation.  Resulted in like 270 tracks in Cubase.  That project consumes about 30gigs of ram (which is pretty close to the BBCSO) and loads in 1min7seconds and plays back perfectly.  I guess the next thing to do would be to build a full on orchestra template with Kontakt and see how bad that is.

In any case I'm more convinced than ever that they really haven't done the ground work to build a professional class sampler for this kind of work.  Maybe it works well on the Mac, but I'm not even sure about that, maybe it's just my computer.   I'm going to keep working with their tech support but I've moved on as far as thinking I'll ever be able to use this.

[Matthew Sorrels]

There is a new BBCSO 1.0.5 release out now, update it through the Spitfire Audio app.  It seems to play back better (using the default stream/buffer settings) than 1.0.4.

Load times (even after the optimize, which isn't public yet I don't think) are still crazy compared to anything else but at least this one will play back audio without screeching with the default buffer settings and doesn't seem to be leaking infinite memory.  So progress I guess.  Though I'm scared to waste my time actually making a real project with it.

Right now the load time for the full orchestra with one mic and all the articulations is a bit over 5 mins.  Or about 5 times longer than EW Hollywood Gold with a similar number of articulations.  It also takes several minutes to close a project or to exit Cubase (looks like it's freeing ram very slowly or something).  It eats about 30gigs of ram when you load the whole thing with the plugin's default buffer settings.  Perhaps other settings will work better, I haven't gotten to trying that yet.

Technically I guess this 1.0.5 release plus the optimize can be considered them providing what was promised and making good.  So I guess I should be happy and talk about how awesome it sounds and how well it works and how great it is.  Oddly enough I'm not.  I think I see it as a $1k mediocre boat anchor that I am glad I only spent $750 on.  Joy.

[Simeon Amburgey]

4 hours ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

There is a new BBCSO 1.0.5 release out now, update it through the Spitfire Audio app.  It seems to play back better (using the default stream/buffer settings) than 1.0.4.

Load times (even after the optimize, which isn't public yet I don't think) are still crazy compared to anything else but at least this one will play back audio without screeching with the default buffer settings and doesn't seem to be leaking infinite memory.  So progress I guess.  Though I'm scared to waste my time actually making a real project with it.

Thanks Matthew, they also sent me the version you used but honestly I have not done anything with it yet as I have the Spitfire SSD and was very wary of doing anything to mess with the drive contents and then having the possibility of downloading everything again (unless they wanted to send me another SSD ?).

one of the loading issues in a theory might have to do with their custom audio or file compression (or encryption) methods but only they know what is actually going on behind the scenes.

In reality, my situation other than BBC SO is requiring me to look very,  wry seriously at building a new system. I have been having waaay too many random crashes and frustration to tolerate things much longer so I am hoping things will get better eventually with a new build.

The other side of things is the idea of loading everything; I just can’t see from my current way of working if that would ever happen in any project I might be working on (now watch someone come along wanting me to do exactly that). I do think it sounds amazing and honestly it would not have been something I would have invested in myself were it not for my dear friend who gifted it to me (which was amazing).

I am hopeful going forward that all of the disjointed parts of this puzzle can eventually come together and music will once more flow unimpeded once again.

I so appreciate you keeping me in the loop and please continue as will I if new miracle sightings appear!

All the very best!

[Matthew Sorrels]

As much trouble as this has been, this morning I loaded up one of the Cubase templates from The Page, enabled all the strings and one horn.  Armed them all and recorded in a small little bit.  Then tweaked it for all the various parts.  Since I can't play at all it sounded at best silly, but it plays back without glitching (using the default streaming settings).  Now it does take 20gigs of ram, which for the small number of instruments is a bit high, but that's one mic and all articulations.  I think people trying to make this work on 16 and 32 gig systems might feel a bit of pain.  In theory I could try some lower streaming settings, might lower the memory footprint.  I also could unload a bunch of articulations I'm never likely to use.

I've still got to figure out the key switching, the template is rigged for using Cubase expressions but I'm not sure how to run that from the keyboard yet.  I wish I could see the keyswitches on the keyboard.  It has an option for it but the template's keyswitches are all at C-1 which I guess isn't visible in the plugin's keyboard and there is no way to pan/scoll the keys.  I also really wish there was some sort of commander mode so that I could easily configure all the instances for mics and loaded articulations.  Even just being able to see what everything is set to would be useful.  Opening each instruments UI and expanding it to see the settings  is a lot of work.  Their plugins do talk to each other already, just need some additional UI and functionality to manage all the instances.

The strings definitely sound nice.  The legato is a bit touchy on the keyboard but that's not all that uncommon.  Had to edit a bit to make it right.  A better player may not have much trouble with that at all though.

Lots of people on VI are still having problems after 1.0.5 with streaming and memory, even I can get it to hiccup if I load more mics on just one instrument.  I figure they are still a few patches away at this point from Windows users being happy.  And maybe 2 full major releases away from a good usable system.  They really need to give up on their UI's style over functionality bias and instead focus on creating stylish functionality.

[Matthew Sorrels]

1.0.7 of the BBCSO plugin is out this morning.  Big improvements in playback and load times.  Memory usage is still kind of high and closing Cakewalk/Cubase/Project still takes way too long (to free all that memory I guess).  But I'd say 1.0.7 is at least usable by normal people if you have enough RAM.

If you are using Cakewalk be sure to get my template package, will save you some time on your quest to get your own.