EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

On a fine day, 22-08-2003, Darcy Phillips wrote:

>Logic 5.5, OS 9, EXS24, Atmosphere, etc. on a powerbook 667 with 778 meg of
>ram.
>I have the preferred size for logic set to 200,000, and locked.
[...]
>I'm just pretty much thoroughly
>confused about how much memory to give Logic in the first place.

Your 200 MB seems a reasonable figure.  Indeed in most cases samples 
for virtual instruments are loaded in memory _not_ assigned to Logic 
directly, so if you gave Logic e.g. 95% of your available memory, you 
would surely run into trouble.  Some things however do use Logic's 
own memory -- the LM4 drum machine is an example of this, and won't 
be able to load all its samples if Logic has too little memory. 
Those plug-ins are the exception rather than the rule though.

Most people on the LUG seem to agree (and have agreed in the past) 
that something around 200 MB should work in almost all cases. If it 
really doesn't work, try increasing memory to e.g. 250 MB and see if 
it works now.  Etc.  Experiment a bit -- even though the memory 
settings really aren't that critical.  My LAP6.1 is set to 150 MB on 
a 500 MB machine, and works without problems.  There's no need to 
change the mem-assignment individually for each session -- not at 
all, in fact.  Just find something that works and leave it there.

Also: turn on virtual memory in the EXS.  With big instruments you 
want the EXS to stream from disk instead of having it attempt (and 
fail :) to load all samples into RAM directly.

>But tonight near the end of a project with maybe 5 exs instances 
>open and one (big) atmosphere instance, the program begin to move 
>very ponderously. Took a look and sure enough, the program had 360 
>some meg of memory, but the bar showed that it was almost all used 
>up.

Simple test: open another complex Atmosphere instance and look at the 
mem-bar again: has it grown?  If yes, then Logic apparently grabs 
free memory when needed, and you needn't worry about the bar showing 
memory being all used up.  I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 
"move very ponderously" though.  If you're talking about real 
movement, of e.g. the SPL, then that's more a of a CPU problem than a 
RAM problem.  As long as the song plays without overloads or other 
errors, I wouldn't worry.

-- 
Hendrik Jan Veenstra   h @ k n o w a r e . n l
Omega Art: http://www.omega-art.com/