Hi everyone, here's a short snippet of a piece that I composed using a new (to me) bare-bones closed score system. The PLAY engine kept overloading my CPU so I decided not to finish it. Guess i'm going to have to get a different percussion library.

https://soundcloud.com/lixiaoan/tales-of-home-snippet

Xiao'an

Nice piece!

PLAY is, indeed, cumbersome. But there are some work arounds. What is your set up like? Depending on your software, you can freeze certain tracks and lighten up the RAM load on your CPU. Increasing RAM can definitely help - if you have the room. Finally some DAWs do better than others. For example, Sonar was one of the WORST in my experience for handling VSTi RAM and performance. A change from Sonar to Reaper yielded HUGE gains in what my computer could do - all with everything else (the samples, HDD set up, RAM, etc) being the same.

I have 32g of RAM and a 3.4gHz Intel Quad Core i7 CPU (iMac). My programs are installed on an SSD, my projects are saved on a regular 1TB hard drive, and my samples are loaded on a 4TB G-Drive with a FW800.

There were around 44 separate tracks, but they never all play simultaneously.

I can load a ton of samples but load more than 3-4 instances of PLAY and it just keeps overloading. I'm in the process of learning how to use Reaper. Have you found that PLAY works better there? I currently use Logic 9.1.8 and to be perfectly honest it is more or less capable of doing most of what I want to do.

I'm pretty confident that if I were to replace my PLAY percussion libraries with CinePerc, I wouldn't have any problems with the CPU overloading, but i'm not sure if that confidence is unwarranted. Do you think it's a problem with Logic?

Hey,

I wish EastWest would still use Kontakt... PLAY is ugly, bloated and a lot less versatile, plus I had massive problems with the iLok when switching to the new machine. And EastWest's support wasn't exactly helpful. Anyway, everything's good now and I don't see why you should have a CPU problem, so there should be some fix.

Might be some kind of problem with your iMac's CPU or even GPU management.
What's the rest of your setup (what OS, audio interface, buffer setting, sample rate, graphics card...?)

I'm currently working on a project with 40+ tracks - of which about 30 have instances of PLAY on them - in Ableton Live (32-bit!) without problems and with low latency on my far inferior Macbook Pro (Retina, 2.6 GHz Quad i7, 16 GB RAM). In Logic, things run even smoother.

...Heh, sorry for not commenting on your music at all - will give it a listen later, right now my ears are toast. ;)

Cheers,
Moritz

My audio interface is currently not in the picture as I sequence on headphones and I just use the output from the iMac. I mix with an Apogee Duet but i'm working with audio files then and never have a problem.

My OS is 10.7.5. I use 44.1 or 48kHz most of the time for my sample rate. My buffer setting i think is 1024 and honestly I have no idea what graphics card i'm using, haha.

It does sound as though i'm doing something wrong. I'm partially relieved because then it'll be a problem that I can fix. I wonder if uninstalling and reinstalling the PLAY software so that I KNOW I have the latest version might do anything.

Your technical feedback is much more valuable to me than someone just listening to it, haha, so I appreciate what you've said so far. Thanks man!

Anyway I'm pretty sure graphic card won't have any effect on it whatsoever, because graphic card is a matter of display

As a matter of fact, graphics can have a serious impact on performance, especially when you have a lot of floating windows with software and plug-ins not optimized for graphics performance. I quickly ran into this problem with my old MBP as it only had an integrated Intel HD GPU.
On my new machine, I disabled the graphics switching feature that would switch to the weak on-board GPU when the MBP feels it doesn't need the powerful GPU and can save some power. I have the power adapter plugged in most of the time anyways, and graphics performance shouldn't become the achilles heel with the powerful CPUs we can use today.

My OS is 10.7.5. I use 44.1 or 48kHz most of the time for my sample rate. My buffer setting i think is 1024 and honestly I have no idea what graphics card i'm using, haha.

Seems like there's no graphics switching feature on iMacs, so that lead was wrong... if you're curious though, you can find out what card you're using by clicking Apple -> About this Mac -> More Info.

Reinstalling the PLAY engine and iLok drivers might actually help - and it's easy to miss an update, EastWest's product support is very lacking and sometimes downright confusing. Double-check their downloads pages. Nevertheless, if that fails I'd write a mail to support. Might take them a few days to get back to you, be warned!

Your technical feedback is much more valuable to me than someone just listening to it, haha, so I appreciate what you've said so far. Thanks man!

Sure my friend, hope I can help - I know how frustrating it can be to be hindered by technical obstacles like this. Rest assured, with a CPU/RAM behemoth like that sitting on your desktop, Logic really shouldn't be complaining even with 50 instances of PLAY @ 256 samples.

Does it make a difference performance-wise if you use the Apogee's Core Audio driver?

Cheers,
Moritz

The problem is, I run my samples off a firewire drive, and I only have one firewire port, so I can't connect the Apogee (i'm using the old firewire version). Do you think it'll make a difference? I'd love to run both at the same time but i'd have to buy a firewire repeater or a thunderbolt - firewire adapter.

Honestly having one firewire port is just ridiculous. Do you have any solutions for that?

The problem is, I run my samples off a firewire drive, and I only have one firewire port, so I can't connect the Apogee (i'm using the old firewire version). Do you think it'll make a difference?

It might help, not too sure about that, just wanted to check... I can definitely recommend switching to the Apogee anyway, the D/A conversion will be better, allowing a better monitoring sound.
Not to mention the possibility of doing some nice recordings with the Duet's pre-amps, which sound lovely!

Honestly having one firewire port is just ridiculous. Do you have any solutions for that?

My MBP has no native Firewire ports at all... the Thunderbolt -> FW800 works flawlessly though, even when daisy-chaining. I have it hooked up to a FW800 HDD which in turn is chained to my FW400 audio interface (Focusrite Saffire Pro 40).
On that note, doesn't your G-Drive have a second FireWire port? You should be able to daisy-chain your Apogee interface then!

Cheers,
Moritz