DFH Superior in PT successfully? anyone?

[coryc]

Hello,

Just wondering if anyone one was using DrumKit from Hell Superior successfully in Pro Tools without major H/W buffer errors. It works beautifully and sounds great but i can't get it work without encountering H/W buffers errors like mad and once i set it at 1024 then i get CPU error -9129 telling me to decrease the H/W buffer size. This system works pretty good without DFHS running so i'm lead to believe it is that. Setting up 13 DigiRewire plugins for each track obviously is taking extra CPU cycles for each one and i'm sure that's what is causing this. I just wondering if anyone has figured any kind of workaround to get the full potential from the software without frying up the system?. I'm running an AMD 2600+ with 1GB ram and separate audio drive (DMA enabled) and i've tweaked DFHS to use less than 300MB of ram for my kits, i definately think my system should be more than capable to handle it. Any suggestions or insight would be great.

thanks,
cory

[rossscarbro]

I'd suggest going here...these guys have alot of experience with DFHS

metallabs.com

Click on "the hotplate" and enter the forum. You'll find some threads on DFHS and PTLE.

Good luck!

[coryc]

cool thanx!

[Room24Prod]

Well unless you've got a really good pc setup, you'll have trouble trying to maximize what DFH can offer. I'm able to run it no problem, although I don't use ALL the mic bleedings either. That will take up a lot of RAM. But a basic kit, with bleeding to the overheads and ambients is no problem. But I think the trick is to minimize any plug-ins while running DFH and programming your beats. Once you've programmed your beats, then bounce, or record them, to audio. Then disable all those Aux Tracks with the DFH plug-in on them and close DFH so you're not using so much cpu usage. Then all you're left with is your drum tracks as audio tracks. But you can't have a bunch of other plug-ins running while trying to program DFH. DFH needs too much attention and resources. Unless you've got 2 gigs of RAM or something.

[cruisemates]

Yes, I bought DFH2 and tried to set it up on a brand new PT session and was amazed to see it say it was running out of ram just during the initial loading process (and I have 1 GB). I wanted to just take it back to GC where I bought it, where ironically they dont take back open software but the box was open when I bought it. However, I registered it, so I figured it is not fair to take it back.

I have seen on some other boards some tricks about about keeping the drum selections basic, and even some about loading the drum sounds on a dedicated drive. Just seems amazing that any product would be such a resource hog, plus it is very hard to find support because the manual is the worst I have ever seen and the actual product (DFH2) is a hybrid from Kompakt & east/west. It is all very confusing - and not worth the bother IMHO. Kinda sorry I even got involved.

I saw some other notes on running it through rewire, but I am not sure how to assign the different instruments to different rewire channels. It is amazing to me how all these sound programs get away with such horrible design and documentation.

And here's an update, I just saw this note on the East/west Sounds site:
"(***RTAS USERS PLEASE NOTE - If you encounter performance problems while using the RTAS version of your Kompakt instrument, please keep checking back at the Native Instruments updates section. Native Instruments and Digidesign are aware of this problem and are working together to solve the problem as soon as possible. RTAS is not supported for MAC OS9***)"

EVEN THOUGH IT DOES SAY RTAS COMPATIBLE ON THE BOX!

[Room24Prod]

Well you have to understand what the program is actually trying to do. The whole problem is recreating the mic bleeding. For instance, when you have a snare sound on the snare mic with no bleeding, then the only thing DFH is required to load up is that one snare sample. Now, when you have other instruments bleed into that snare mic, then the program has to load up other samples to recreate what those instruments sound like bleeding over to that mic as well. Then..............on top of all that, each time there's a different velocity on the snare drum, it will take up more RAM as well. So unless you've got 2 gigs of RAM forget about really using this program to it's fullest potential.

I only have 1 gig of RAM right now and what's worked best for me is to only have the bleeding on the overheads and ambients. And.............to only bring up samples that I'm going to use. Meaning, if I'm not using 4 Toms, why have them in the Construct window? Why have them set up to bleed into the overheads and ambient mics? It's just going to take up more cpu and ram. Cuz I've found that you can achieve a really good drum sound by only bleeding into the overheads and ambient mics. Besides, most people gate the kick and toms anyways. So if that's the case, is it really worth it to have the snare and hat mics bleeding as well? Probably not. The overheads and ambient mics are what makes a drum kit sound real, and big. And if you play with the ambient tracks and send them to the same reverb as the snare, things really open up nicely.

[coryc]

Thanks for all the replies, actually i've found a solution that seems to work for me, at least while i'm constructing the song. I just put DFHS into Stereo mode and only need to run 2 rewire aux channels 0 & 1, it gives me a stereo mix for programming the song and then when i'm ready i just bring the midi drum track into a template, use DFHS Bounce feature and then import all the separate audio tracks back into the session.

definately unless your running 2GB of ram you can't get the full potential, got 2 GB's of Kingston HyperX on order..

thanks,
core