VI Performance in PT 10 - Your Feedback

[Oblivion777]

I was just wondering what your feedback is on VI performance issues in PT10. I read that some of you are pretty much disappointed and I was wondering why or more specifically what did you expect? I am not saying that my point of view is that PT10 are ideal for VI's ... nor am I saying it's crap ... I'm merely wondering what your thoughts are; nothing more, nothing less.

For example I currently use PT10 and for VI's I use EW/QL Play (with its libraries) and VSL Instrument's (the old one) and have just purchased VSL's Ensemble Pro 5 with MIR (which I have not yet even installed so I can't really say anything about that product yet).

I guess I am a pretty small user in terms of that I do not have whole symphonies written in MIDI's and then apply 120 VI's to 120 MIDI's. So - for now - I manipulate with MIDI's in PT and I apply VI's in PT as well. I would generally say that this is working for me just fine, though I really cannot imagine doing the same (workflow-wise) if I had 40 MIDI's or more (at once). But I don't know if that's a PT issue or simply that the libraries are so vast that you simply cannot have that many samples loaded. Again I really do not know the answer (here I guess 64bit would help -> more RAM) ... so I would really like to know your thoughts and experience and expectations on this topic.

Keep it cool!

[Firechild]

I have not been doing some heavy VI arrangements yet but the "feeling" so far it is an improvement that´s for sure.
I guess it is mostly due to the disc cache feature making your audiofiles from the clip list coming all from RAM, no disc streaming at all and therefore you have all harddisc streaming capacity exclusively for you VI´s.

[Chingy]

So far, with the PT10 trial, I've found the performance is about the same as PT8 LE on my 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro with 8GB RAM. That is - quite poor. Rather easy to get CPU overload errors or other errors. Granted I am not able to try the disk cache feature since I do not have HD, so maybe the performance is better with that. Will be trying Vienna Ensemble Pro with PT soon, but so far, really disappointing that there aren't any performance improvements, especially given the price.

[TOM@METRO]

I see no improvement yet with VI usage in PT10. And yes, this is primarily a RAM limitation with a 32bit host. However, (as you know) the solution is easy... Rewire Reaper or use VEPro.

[RTFM]

I'm not seeing any improvement, either, other than slightly lower disk load when using disk cache and playing back lots of samples.

It's unlikely that anything regarding VI performance is going to get better until they rework the engine.

[benherron.rrr]

I use East West stuff as well, in PT8-9 I noticed that after loading about 4 patches Pro Tools would crash, and tell me I couldn't load any more. Since moving to 10 I can happily load a full kit from BFD2, a full EW piano with multiple mic positions, a couple of instances of an Arturia synth and about 6 different string patches from EWQLSO, with quite a few audio tracks as well. Play does give me a low RAM message when loading a patch but it hasn't badly effected performance, just slow responses to play/stop. I use separate drives for recording audio/sessions and samples

[TOM@METRO]

I use EW Play as well. Here in my system with Play3, I get about the same performance as in PT9.

[Oblivion777]

Thanx guys for the feedback. I also think that the VI experience from PT9 is pretty much the same as in PT10. I am currently in the process of exchanging my VI library disks from normal HDDs to SSDs ... This should make a difference with loading at least. However I guess we will see an improvement only when PT will be 64-bit (because of RAM).

In any case I hope that the major VI plug in engines will make the translation to AAX as RTAS is 32bit only... I have posted the question on SoundsOnLine but no reply yet. Fingers crossed though. Can you imagine DSP accelerated Play or VSL Instrument Pro? Wow...

[MarkH]

In general I feel the VI's function the same as PT9. Not better, not worse, but definitely rock solid and reliable for me (important!).

I had the CPTK for PT9 so I get to take advantage of the disk caching feature in PT10. This definitely makes a big improvement in overall avoidance of CPU overload errors. For example, if I load PT10's included session on my (now old) MBP Core 2 Duo machine, the CPU will average around 65-68%. Without disk caching I may get an error and playback stops. With disk caching enabled it's smooth sailing. Just as a test I started at some VI's to the session which increase the CPU utilization, but with disk caching I can push PT further than ever before while avoiding CPU overload errors.

[matthias.matthias]

This slowdown of Pro Tools might be a Windows only issue, but it's really annoying once you start working on larger arrangements (this bug is in PT only since 9.05).

I hope it gets fixed soon because other than that the combination of PT 10 + VE Pro 5 is really nice.