hahaworld

Eastwest Vs. Apple

Hey, everybody!

HaHaWorld here. Sorry I've been out of touch.

Does anybody have any good news about the new PLAY products from EastWest and their compatibility with Leopard? I've been waiting for PLAY to come out so I can actually use my Symphonic Orchestra collection again from EastWest, but this article from Film Music Weekly makes me wonder. Here are some excerpts from this article:

"All of the new PLAY products, without exception, are designed for 64-bit systems. PLAY is ahead of many manufacturers of hardware and software in that PLAY is, indeed, 64-bit ready. This means that when you read the Minimum and Recommended specs on the Soundsonline.com website you should interpret
Recommended as meaning: designed for. Read Minimum as meaning: will run, but not up to full potential. 8GB or more of RAM is preferred since the number of samples being loaded into memory (RAM) is huge!
. . .some of the PLAY MIDI performances have over 3,000 samples in them. With so many samples, a large amount of RAM is needed.

Within the RAM, you must account for how much is needed by the operating system. According to Apple, the minimum needed for Leopard is 512MB of RAM. So if your system is only 2GB, roughly 25% is going to the OS.

EastWest is recommending the fastest drive possible for enhanced performance. I checked, and those are the Seagate Cheetah’s running at 15,000 RPM (Mac Pros have available 300GB 15,000 RPM drives). They’re now in two sizes: 300GB and 400GB. Street price varies, but for 300GB (what’s available from Apple) you’re looking at $725 and for 400GB, $775. However, you have to remember that for optimum performance you need to keep 20% of the drive open. So your effective space on a 300GB 15,000 RPM drive is 240GB and 320GB with a 400GB 15,000 RPM drive. By comparison, a 1 Terabyte (TB) drive is
running around $325 depending on the manufacturer.

One thing that would be very useful for customers is to see statistically how the performance specs change with PLAY when using 7,200 RPM drives for samples vs. 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah drives for samples. Again, EastWest recommends the faster drives. But I would like to know before creating such a system what exactly a 15,000 RPM drive is really providing. Since these 300GB Seagate drives’ street price is at around $725 apiece, what percentage gain is realistically being achieved? It would also be good to see a chart or brief paragraph showing with MIDI Performances, the improvement of using 8GB of RAM to 16GB to 32GB, as opposed to anecdotal comments.

Logic operates with only 2GB of RAM. That’s it. To get PLAY or any other External MIDI instrument to operate with Logic on the Mac, it has to run using a freeware program called Soundflower. Installing Soundflower is a snap. Implementing Soundflower, especially if you’re new to the Mac, is not a snap. People not comfortable in working with Utilities –> Audio MIDI are going to have problems with it.

It’s not that I’m opposed to learning it. I just believe that when you’re thinking about dropping $7K on an Apple system that you shouldn’t need freeware to get their flagship program to work to industry standards.

Exs Sampler Instruments

Hello, Friends.

I think I've done something extremely stupid, and I'm not sure how to recover from it.

I moved my EXS Sample Instruments and GarageBand instrument samples off of my system drive to my other internal SATA hard drive and left aliases to them in the library>application support>logic folder. Then Logic was unable to find the instruments, so I moved them back. Logic still cannot find them. Is there a way to fix this, or have I really screwed things up?

Thanks!

HaHaWorld

Slow drive, Logic on Quad 5

Dear Friend,

I am also using a Quad G5, and I have had Slow Disk errors while using Logic Pro since I bought it in July. Have you had this problem with your G5? I've been to the Genius Bar about 4 times, and no one seems to be able to pinpoint the problem. The Slow Disk errors happen whenever I'm using a third-party plug-in like EastWest Symphonic Orchestra or Synthogy Ivory. It also happens when I'm working with audio. The other day, I only had two audio tracks running, and the Slow Disk error kept popping up. I still use Logic on my PowerBook G4, and it screams along just fine. It's sad to have a G5 Quad that runs slower than a laptop I've had since 2003. Any ideas you might have would be greatly appreciated!

Sincerely,
HaHaWorld

Eastwest Platinum Symphony

I've got a question regarding East West Platinum Symphony. I just installed it on a new Mac Quad G5 desktop with 4.5G RAM, running it in Logic Pro 7.1, and the snaps, crackles and pops are just terrible. The samples are running from an external Maxtor FW800 drive. I can't even play 2 notes without the yellow DFD light flashing and going from yellow to red as the sounds just die. I've messed with the latency settings in the Audio Hardware control panel in Logic to no avail. I've been running these same samples on my 3-year-old G4 laptop just fine (1.33 Ghz, 2G RAM)

Is there a setting I'm missing, or something I should know about the NI Kompakt player that will allow me to actually use these samples?

Thanks for any info you can supply!

Sincerely,
hahaworld

Logic 7.2

Dear Friends, I am running Logic 7.1.1 on a PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz laptop with 2G RAM. Is there any reason for me to do the 7.2. upgrade? I do not have an Intel book. Thanks for any advice. Sincerely, hahaworld