Should I sell my G5 quad?

[Hype]

CV, are you using BFD or BFD lite? I believe there is an update on the FXpansion site called "v2" that is supposed to make BFD work correctly with PT7 I'm using BFD lite and all the traffic is being redirected to Digidesign's website but I have yet to see any information on the subject here.

It seems mostly 3rd party plugins that are having issues with the Quad, everything else seems to work great for me except when I try to change sound patch with Sampletank 2.1 XL, PT will lose communication with the 002r for a few annoying seconds and a couple of times and then it will work again. However I am able to run it at 64 buffer which is great!

I can't remember ever seeing the "Pre-ananysis" message when loading a sound into Sampletank in the past???? Again I suspect an incompatibility with PTLE7. That's what is making PT freak out and divorce the 002r temporarily.

It's unfortunate that we have to suffer these growing pains with every Protools Upgrade. The same happened with PTLE6, it was only stable and supported by 6.4cs9 and then they cut the 001 support. I hope the same doesn't happen with the 002/002r.

I'm going to hang in there with PTLE7 and the Quad because the majority of what I do is either Audio recording (Music/Film) and editing. If you really have to run virtual synths at this stage I'd say take a look at the options (DP/Logic...)

Good Luck!

[Mt.Everest]

My first post on the DUC in a year or more, and already embroiled in controversy... First of all I am posting to the pro tools le user board, am I not? I think your last paragraph summed it up well. Part of having a " feel" for your D.A.W. is knowing what software to stay away from. If it says its unsupported, try it a few times, (get lucky) and or then wait for an update. As far as condescending to anyone, let's face it, the very LE nomenclature suggests an entry level user. Out of the thousands of le systems that have been sold and are in use today, its a fact, that a very small percentage of end users are "seasoned professionals"... although many may think so.

Actually, the mere fact that Digidesign lists many RTAS instrument plugs compatible with PT (on the Plugin Info Page) shows that they are supported, hypothetically. But many of them don't actually work RELIABLY. And you are presumptous in thinking that the people active in this thread are not professionals. If you weren't so full of yourself, playfully using PT LE just to see how you can work around the limits, while flying planes and controlling Word with voice commands, you would be able to clearly see the difference between amateur posts like " What is Quickpunch?!?! " and professional threads like this one.

Get it through your head. Many pros use LE for many things when there isnt a need for a TDM system. BUT THAT DOESN"T EVEN MATTER because my TDM rig AND my LE rig BOTH suffer from the same poor implementation of RTAS synths and samplers.

One unfortunate byproduct of the pro tools revolution, is that it has clouded the audio recording market with users who have professional gear, yet are not audio professionals. Many years ago if an engineer had a digital editing system, by sheer Association there was no doubt you were dealing with a "seasoned professional".... unfortunately this is no longer true. its a double edged sword, because I'm glad so many new enthusiasts have access to such wonderful gear; yet I hackle at the idea, that simply owning the gear somehow automatically makes a person a " seasoned professional." in fact in the entire United States there are not that many seasoned professionals, I mean really how many do you think there are 1000, 5000, 10,000 on the outside?

Maybe you should stick to not posting for another few years. You haven't said ONE helpful thing thus far. You just continue to condescend and say how great you are and how you just know how to do things. I wonder why you haven't actually offered any specifics of how you have your system running. Im SURE you are not using any RTAS instruments in PT.

pro tools le, exists for one purpose, and one purpose only; to draw users into buying pro tools H D, that's it and that's all. if pro tools le functioned perfectly and did everything exactly as we wanted it to... there would be no need for pro tools H D. I'm amazed that it works at all. This has been a long-running theme on the DUC ... why doesn't pro tools le offer everything, that pro tools H D offers? well the subject has grown quite thin; and its one of the reasons I quit posting here, it's beating a dead horse. even though I own pro tools H D, I also own pro tools le Systems, why? Because I've always thought, that it would be neat to have low cost pro tools systems that can compete with the higher dollar offerings. I also enjoy the challenge of finding worked arounds in pro tools le, that make it competitive with pro tools H D.

If you really knew anything, you would know these are not LE specific problems. They span both TDM and LE systems. And, um, sorry there Mr. Pilot, but LE exists also for people like myself to be able to work on the road or at home when Im away from my main rig.

It's the same reason as a pilot, I purchase and build kit planes. I feel like I have accomplished something when I build an airplane from a relatively inexpensive kit, that can do the same things that are offered in million dollar, polished and delivered complete aircraft. In the field of aviation, there is a standing rule, that a pilot must do a complete and thorough mechanical walk around of his aircraft, before each and every use. I have known many pilots, over the years who thought they had that something extra, that "sixth sense" if you will ... after going down because of a rookie mistake they came to realize that they weren't quite as skillful as they once thought. ... and that having a thorough mechanical knowledge of the aircraft, was every bit as important as knowing how to operate it. W/O getting too far off into the blue...

Actually, you have been 'far off into the blue' of your own massive, yet useless EGO for a while now.

Hmm, I wonder if next he will go into how self-fulfilled he feels when hes hired by the NSA to build robotic arms for the production of laser guided missles. Maybe he will talk more about the fun lil' lunch breaks he has rewriting PT code for kicks. (Can we please see this code btw?) Maybe he's figured out how to take the track limit off of PT LE because he is such a truly seasonsed professional and, while he offers no ACTUAL input to this thread, he can't really get into the specifics about it cuz its just not proper for the LE thread because his knowledge above and beyond the other pros on here. Then again, he DOES have 20k worth of RAM in 2 G5s, so maybe he is miles above us.

e,
If you post on this thread again, why don't you try actually helping out instead of going on your long rants about pilot philosophy and how it relates to CPU spikes.

thanks

MT

P.S., CV, sorry for hijacking the thread a bit there, but this guys posts really needed to be addressed. I hope the thread stays active and that other ppl offer some USEFUL insight into your rig problems. good luck.

[Slim Shady]

CV,

That's an awful lot of sample based soft-synths to try to run off of one computer. The EWQLSO is actually unsable as a plug-in in any DAW, we ended up getting a second computer just to host that library (using Kontakt2) because it's performance is also terrible in Logic - a very poorly conceived (and overrated) library if you ask me (as an owner of it), so I can understand your frustration about that one, but PT isn't the problem there.

I'm also surpised you can run Kotakt2 or Collosus along with Ivory - do you have multiple firewire drives to hold all the sound libraries? I've found Ivory needs it's own dedicated drive, it doesn't like sharing bandwidth with any other samples trying to be pulled from the same drive as it's sound library is on. Logic's 'freeze tracks' makes it pretty easy to work around Ivory's system hogging, It'd be almost unsuable without that function, I've never even tried using it in PT because of that.

I don't have any experience with BFD, but I had noticed that all the plug-ins you mention having problems with do have very large sample libraries to go with them - in my experience that just doesn't work no matter what DAW you're using, you might need to offload some of those onto another machine to regain some performance. FWIW, we're using a Dual 2.5 G5 w/4.5gb of RAM - the performance problems with these types of instruments isn't the CPU, but the disk-streaming bandwidth and RAM requirements needed to load/stream their giant libraries. In my research about our performance problems with them in Logic, I turned up an interesting fact... apparently for both windows and macs, the largest amount of RAM any one program can use is 2GB, which means even if you've got 4.5gb like we do, Logic (or PT) can only use up to 2gb of it, and that INCLUDES any soft-synths you load as a plug-in within that program. You can see how that would dissappear pretty quickly with these instruments whos libraries are enormous and individual samples can get up into the 100mb+ range. Even on our dedicated EastWest G5 I can eat up the memory with about 20 channels of samples (which is nothing when you're trying to do an orchestral template), but the CPU is barely affected so it's all about the drives and the memory.

[CV]

hi

cool I'll look into the BFD update.

I'm not running all of those VI's on the quad simutaneously. I'm running my EWQLSO off of the muse receptor. Slim, you're right, DFD streaming VI's need to be running native and on their own machines.

When not using the muse, I'm running all of my DFD samples off a separate internal 300 gig Maxtor with a 16mb cache.

I have much smaller sessions stopping the quad. For instance:

1 small 15 sec movie track
7 audio tracks
2 midi
1 Kontakt 2 instance (with 2 small samples loaded through DFD)
5 AUX tracks
3 or 4 Digi rack plug-ins
1 Altiverb (had to switch to D-Verb)

I was trying to write some music to this video clip with a client present. My machine was giving me constant CPU errors stopping playback. I have to run with the buffer at 128 so I can play a keyboard patch with decent latency.

Digi admits their Pro Tools 7 RTAS is not working correctly
Native Instruments has admitted through forum moderators that Kontakt 2 does not run properly
but still on a $3300 computer I can't run a session of this size. I'm trying to remain calm and productive but ...



thanks for all the productive input.

DIGI support...it's been a few MONTHS since a statement regarding the quad. any news ?!?!

-CV

[Slim Shady]

Oh right, I forgot about the Receptor. If you don't mind me asking (and I know you've kind of covered this but...), how's the performance on those things? We're still having problems with the EWQLSO even when running it on a seperate machine using Kontakt2, and not really able to load up anywhere near as many samples as we'd like given the specs of the machine. It seems Kontakt2 has a 480mb RAM limit no matter how much physical RAM is in the machine, so I've started thinking about selling this whole extra G5 rig and trying out the Receptor. Just wondering how many instances and channels of the EWQLSO you're able to run on the receptor, we weren't even able to get an entire woodwind section loaded on our G5, but that was because Kontakt started crapping out after we loaded up about 460mb, if the Receptor is better about memory management it sounds like it could be the way to go.

Thanks, and I hope I've been able to help somewhat with your dilemma, you quad users have definitely had the rough end of this whole transition to be sure.

[sophie]

Regards

e

--------------------
Partial list of album credits/editor.
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/apple/

you'd think someone with such a superiority complex would have a link that actually works, haha!

open your mouth further and you'll be able to fit both feet.

[Hype]

Nice catch sophie!

[CV]

Slim,
I'm actually in the process of making sure I'm not doing something wrong with the Receptor. At a lower buffer setting I get one instance of an East West 70 piece orchestra, one Kontakt 2 with a decent size sample.


plugorama


has lots of info and the link to their KVR forum.
I'm not overly impressed with the performance, especially with DFD. Its great for smaller VST's where you can play something on stage / use it in the studio. The people at the company are great and the interface is pretty solid, but not without its bugs. You'll want maximum RAM and the larger disk size (160 gig.)
Its cool but for a big setup, you might use several of them.

uniwire looks promising

-CV

[editor]

Nice catch sophie!

Just a little FYI: I took down the page that references some of my album credits, (yet left the link on purpose ...the purpose being, to give hot heads/" Seasoned professionals" on this message board a moment of pause, before posting hasty replies!) also because I never wanted to use this message board, as an advertising space for my company's and in addition, I can post my thoughts freely w/o alienating companies and individuals who are on my client list, digidesign included.

I gave some excellent advice in my post, that has been echoed by others!

No. 1. get more RAM
No. 2. be more patient
No. 3. be realistic in your expectations
No. 4. the use of multiple machines and do your homework, as someone stated above the way RAM is allocated in Mac OS X is a factor, as well as hard disk buffer settings. The way you were running your setup, was breaking some very basic rules
No. 5. Edgetech gave me an excellent deal on RAM for the G5 quads, when I bought in bulk, although quite frankly it is one of those if you have to ask situations...

I also might add, that when the 001 and pro tools version 5, had a strange exploding sound and no one could isolate the problem, I did. ...and the patch that I distributed from my ftp site to fix the problem was not appreciated by the software maker's; and made me the honored recipient of an e-mail regarding the finer points of tampering with intellectual property. One is not allowed to even go so far as to post a single line of private code, on a public message board such as this one or to even transmit such code, in private! However, I would be looking in the near future for a patch for pro tools 7, that addresses the issue of the way RAM is allocated for RTAS application's on Quad G5's!

I personally get a kick out of the way this board turns into a p*ssing contest, ignoring the original subject. I think you have received some excellent, free advice from a host of users in this thread, that are right on target, addressing the original issue. To address your comments regarding dictating into Microsoft word, I am dictating directly into safari ... why not look for answers instead of trying to tear a persons post apart sentence by sentence. One word does come to mind, "Hubris" indeed!


Hubris in modern times

Modern negative consequences of actions stemming from hubris appear to be associated with a lack of knowledge, interest in, and exploration of history, combined with overconfidence and a lack of humility. The common reference is 'The false pride that comes before the fall'.

Regards

e

[editor]

[QUOTE]

Regards

e

--------------------
Partial list of album credits/editor.



you'd think someone with such a superiority complex would have a link that actually works, haha!

open your mouth further and you'll be able to fit both feet.

0h yes btw, turn on the nodes in logic and hook up almost any C P U, via Ethernet and the experience, can glean you up to 50 percent more performance, as mentioned...

...and if you open your Pie Hole any further fella' you might just finally be able to achieve your dream and stretch it around two of those new "Goat tubes" (mics), simultaneously, I have no experience with anything like this, but I hear they have an awesome low-end pump also, perfect for an 002some, but hey you're the "seasoned professional" on this subject. I'm sure that is one link that will be working perfectly! -