EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

--- In exs-users@yahoogroups.com, Murray McDowall <murraymc@m...> wrote:

> Lemme see now --  you are going to load 20 - 80 gigs of samples onto a drive
> and set up an arrangement for a whole orchestra and then the heads are going to
> hunt all over your drive and keep 270 voices streaming happily. Sorry -- I
> think this is an unrealistic scheme at this stage of the technology. 

murray

i agree that this is unrealistic, but more because of the RAM limitation in one mac now.  i obviously haven't been able to test EXS with VSL, but from what i've seen, streaming requires about 10% of the RAM of non-streaming.  so, i think at best, you'd be able to load 15 GB worth of samples on one mac (using OS X - which has poorer streaming performance.  in OS 9, i'm figuring 10 GB to be a realistic limit).

i've gotten 278 stereo EXS voices streaming without dropping data using one 15K scsi drive. 

see here for the details:

http://community.sonikmatter.com/emagic/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=25;t=000261

granted, that's with 4 GB of piano samples across 4 instruments - time will tell how more, smaller instruments effect the performance (though i've done a very limited testing with more - see below).  and you'd obviously need enough 15K disk space to hold 100 GB of data.  2 73 GB 15K scsi drives would be $2000, plus $400 for the scsi controller - so this option isn't cheap.  but how many gigastudio set-ups would it take to get even 200 stereo voices playing back at once (assuming a considerable performance drop between my testing and real world results)?

> If you want an arrangement with strings, horns, woodwinds, percussion etc with
> the samples necessarily spread out all over the drive(s) I think you will be
> struggling to get anywhere near that number of voices on available hardware.
> You will need to bounce/freeze tracks to complete your arrangement -- and
> playing back bounced tracks will, of course, load your drives too. 

again, i don't think the voices are going to be as much a problem as the RAM (and therefore the ability to load more instruments).  in fact, with 15K scsi drives, i can stream 278 simultaneous stereo voices across 64 EXS instances, bounce those to 64 separate stereo tracks (on another 15K scsi drive), then load up another 64 EXS instruments and stream 170 simultaneous stereo voices while playing back those 64 stereo tracks.

perhaps this will change with more instruments (and it will surely change with 24 bit samples), but i've added the demo cube instruments to one of these songs and not found any drop in performance - EXS voice performance remained the same.  again, the demo cube doesn't have many instruments, but from what i've seen i wouldn't expect full VSL performance to drop too terribly.

anyway, i'm not trying to suggest that a single mac with EXS will outperform multiple gigastudio machines.  and i agree - you clearly can't currently load up a full orchestra into Mac RAM (perhaps in 6 months - if we're lucky).  but how many gigastudio machines do you need to buy to outperform a fast mac?  i think mac/EXS gives one and two gigastudio set-ups a run - and for some people will be the more comfortable experience.

unfortunately, freeze doesn't help with EXS RAM consumption.

cheers