Ivory or NI Piano on a MacBook Pro?

[spkguitar]

Can I ask what enclosure you using that holds 3 HDDs? Most of the time I don't take take my external drive with my laptop as I'm mostly editing MIDI and (at least at the moment) BFD is running fine of my system drive. I've been actually thing about mounting all this stuff, Keyboard, FW drive, A USB hub, My Mbox Mini on a Ozite coverd board to make it more "Portable" Ivory is definitly on the Horizon so I'm looking for solutions. You have any problems running BFD and Ivory from the Same drive?

They are actually 3 separate FW enclosures that I have mounted to an empty rack tray. A "homemade" single enclosure, if you will.

Ready made multi-drive enclosures are available, though.

I haven't (yet) had problems running BFD and Ivory (or any of my other sampled VI) samples from the same drive.

[sunburst79]

Thanks spkguitar! I agree about keeping the sound quality, ideally it would be good to get all this stuff fastened down to a something like a plank that you could drop in a keyboard bag or pedal board enclosure you could snap closed-grab the handle and go.

[poodlebuild]

With Ivory and many of the other large intensive sampled packages (BFD, etc), you need the samples on the separate drive to get the highest quality. It's a trade-off really; portability for audio quality. Hmmm... tough choice.

Seems to me the external FW drive might give better/faster throughput or whatever, but if you have your ivory samples on your macbook's HD(as I do) and they play without any problems(they do), the sound quality would be the same. I couldn't imagine it sounding any better! In what way do they sound better?

[spkguitar]

I was using BFD as an example of lower quality; setting the velocity layers to the highest value and running off the system drive causes frequent stops. To run them off the system drive I would have to decrease the velocity layers, thus decreasing the audio quality of the sample playback.

But the same applies to Ivory. I had a similar problem with Ivory when I first installed it on my PC laptop; samples were on the system drive and the only way I could use Ivory without hiccups was to set the voices lower than 24, which for some of the pieces that I work on is (for me) unacceptable (sustaining notes just disappearing because there aren't enough voices...), and/or set the buffer size to large which, depending on what else was in the session, would error out due to lack of available memory. Moving the samples to the external drive solved that problem for me. Due to that experience on the PC, I never installed it to the system drive of my mac (nor would I), and it's why I was/am recommending not doing so.

The better/faster throughput of the external hard drive allows you change the settings in Ivory to get closer to a real Piano sound. This is not to say that Ivory doesn't still sound excellent when reducing the voices or using the default setting (because I think it sounds awesome no matter what), it just sounds more natural with the higher setting that the external drive allows.

[poodlebuild]

spkguitar,thanks for your reply.

First, I should say that I'm using Ivory in a PT session with nothing else in it - no audio or other VI. I'm just playing - thinking about gigging with it. Haven't got around to recording yet. I usually record on my Mac Pro.

I have a 2.0 Ghz macbook with 1 GB RAM.

In this situation, with the samples on the macbooks HD, I am able to run the Bosendorfer 10 level with 24 voices, the release samples on and a TL space reverb. My buffer is small enough to allow instant sound. With all this, no hiccups, no notes stealing other notes.

What I meant was it sounds so good I might have an accident if it sounded any better.
I didn't mean that for technical reasons I know it can't sound better.
But what extra awesomeness I could be missing out on?

[BFrederick]

For gigging, I'd recommend using Ivory in its standalone mode. There is an updater on Synthogy's website. This way you don't have to worry about PT doing anything crazy during your gig.

Granted, you can't use the TL reverb this way, but Ivory has "Ambiance" on the effects page that should more than suffice for gigging.

I find that I can get better performance out of Ivory in Standalone mode in terms of more voices before seeing "slow disk"... perhaps since the computer isn't shouldering another application with it.

[poodlebuild]

Wow, I certainly will look into that! Thanks!

[cheekypaul]

Give this a go . . . PIANOTEQ

no need for big external hard drives with this...
you can run many at once...
sounds better...
IMHO

[poodlebuild]

Thank you for that post, cheekypaul!!! The Pianoteq demo is blowing me away.

[cheekypaul]

cool.
i didn't want to over sell it because it does have a unique sound.

but i'm anti massive gigs of samples and i'm pro technology.

let's go...