EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

MARCH 9th, 2004

"The Dawn Of The New Era"

by Evan Evans


It's not easy being a guru. You get calls from people asking you for help with little things 
all the time. The pay sucks. But every once in a while an innovation comes out of it that 
makes it all worth while.

It was early this morning (the end of my Monday work day), a friend in Sweden asked me if 
there was a way to get Klopfgeist to go to Audio Instrument #1. We worked with it for a 
few minutes trying to do it. No avail.

Instead I suggested he use an external MIDI sound module. Then within 1 minute a 
cavalcade of brainstorm thoughts started to stream through my brain.

- Why not use a little AU Host app and run a simple click and route it to it with a Virtual 
MIDI port of a MIDI PATCHBAY
- That would free up another EXS Instance
- I thought, what little other APP could we use?
- I thought I could just run another instance of Logic Platinum
- But that doesn't work
- And surely the XSKey wouldn't let you do that
- But actually you can do that if you just rename the APP
- Whoa. This way we could overcome the 4GB limit that G5 users have been experiencing 
with Logic, by running a totally separate copy of it in another RAM Space (that's how OSX 
works)
- You could then access the other copy with MIDI Patchbay and sync them over some kind 
of MIDI Sync Piping.
- Oh heck, why not run 3, 4, 5, 6+ versions of Logic
- And you could PIPE back the audio to the MAIN Logic with WormHole AU
- Oh heck, why not just set the other Logics into Loop Play and use them as simple sound 
modules?

Surely someone had thought of this before. I have been playing a lot of online Poker lately 
and it's not a good idea to share your tricks or everyone would get as good as you and 
make all the money ... Maybe someone has figured this out but kept it to themselves! But 
the possibility of it has only been around since Dual G4s, and certainly with the more 
recent G5s. So maybe there just hasn't been enough time for anyone to realize it, let alone 
set it up and do it, which would take a few days. But if they did, maybe they hoarded it for 
themselves. Well, I for one have never been like that. I think if we level the playing field, we 
each have our own musical gifts and talents and there is still more respectable ways to 
forge ahead and make money. So I am sharing this with you ALL. You can thank me here 
(310) 691-8163 (Gotta love the prank calls that are gonna come from this!)

So I tried it. I duplicated and renamed my Logic Platinum 6.3.3 five times as follows:

Logic Platinum 6.3.3
Logic Platinum 6.3.3 TWO
Logic Platinum 6.3.3 THREE
Logic Platinum 6.3.3 FOUR
Logic Platinum 6.3.3 FIVE
Logic Platinum 6.3.3 SIX

It worked. Connect them up with MIDI Patchbay, pipe Audio back to busses in the MAIN 
Logic with WormHole AU, and bingo!

You can have between 200 and 400+ EXS Instances spread across different Logics this 
way. And since I have about 200 Instruments loaded into 63 EXS Instances via 
keyswitching (using VSL Pro Edition), I can run over 1,200 instruments. Having them all on 
tap. It's possible on a Dual G5 to actually have about 350 EXS Instances sound at the same 
time, but who the heck writes like that? Likely this is to have all teh instruments "on tap". 
Still using only 50 to 150 tracks for writing.

This whole concept is best for orchestral writing where you can set up a template. Because 
you can't use AutoLoads with this setup or all the different Logics will load the same 
sounds up. instead you must save a different template file for each Logic. But because you 
are using the other Logics as a soundsource you have some benefits and one downfall:
BENEFIT: All the Song Information is in the main one songfile.
BENEFIT: Share same PREF file so key commands are same and environment can be same
DOWNFALL: Can't do offline bouncing
DOWNFALL: only works with true CoreAudio compatible Audio Drivers (just about 
everything but Pro Tools hardware)

So there it is. As I see it is a very exciting discovery and I wanted to share it with you all so 
we can say ASTA LA VISTA to being limited to 8,192 open samples, 64 EXS Instances, and 
4GB of RAM. That sucked.

Another barrier broken by the guru!

Evan Evans