EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

on 7/25/04 12:08 PM, Julie Larson at julielarson@... wrote:

> Thanks everyone for all the help,
> For starters....I'm using OSX...sorry not to have mentioned that.  I'm
> up against the wall on memory for a laptop.  1gig is all I can have.  I
> have de-fragmented the hard disk and it was pretty badly fragmented,
> but I didn't get any noticeable improvement.  What is odd about this
> case is that freezing tracks seems to exacerbate the problem.  This has
> not been my experience in the past.  Freezing does alleviate strain on
> the "Audio" side of things....but I immediately get Disk i/o failures.
> 1 frozen track will do this.  I am freezing at a lower bit level.  That
> eased the problem on a previous composition.   By the way, you set bit
> depth for freeze tracks in the Audio preferences window.  I've set the
> buffer values on my audio driver to maximum.  I thought that would give
> the best playback.   I reduced polyphony on several of the EXS
> instances...It helped in a couple of spots.
> 

Hi Julie,

I have almost the same setup you do (in fact until just a couple weeks ago I
was using a TiBook 867 MHz with 1 Gig RAM and the VxPocket 2, and a Kanguru
external 180GB drive) and use symphonic/piano libraries like you do.

Although I see the same dilemma between "audio" choking and hard drive
limitations, I could freeze something like a dozen tracks before the I/O
maxes out. So I think there's something wrong with your drive, disk I/O
system, or possibly the settings in Logic. OTOH, I don't think the settings
in Logic could possibly account for your getting problems with only one
frozen track.

A couple weeks ago, I fried my screen on the old TiBook, forcing an upgrade
to a new AlBook. Performance is considerably better, but not as much as I
expected. The FW800 port does help things, and I'm starting to use a newer
faster Firewire drive, but the result is not twice as fast as the old FW400
port.

I'm also wondering if one of the newer interfaces, like the RME multiface,
would be more efficient than the VxPocket. I noticed that the Vx was less
efficient (lower track counts) even on OS9 than a USB interface I was using
before.

Don Newmeyer