I'm configuring a big orchestral setup with 16-17GB of Kontakt and EW Play instruments.
It takes 25-30 minutes to load, mainly for the Play instruments.
If I load the project without Play, it takes about 4 minutes to open the project and maybe another minute to load the Kontakt samples in the background.

I'm using Play3, because with play4 I get these real time peaks all the time.
After upgrading to CU 7.5.2, I thought the problem was solved, but now I'm back at 25-30 minutes.
I don't know what's changed since then, or if I dreamed about the improvement.
I made a lot of tests with different Cubase versions from 7.5 to 7.5.2, but there's no significant difference.

Does anybody know the problem?





PC with i7-4930K 6x3,4GHz CPU, 32 GB Ram, Win 8.1 Pro System on a 120 GB Flash Drive and Libs on a 4TB 7200 Hybrid. Cubase 7.5.2

Hi,

I have a similar system but with a 3930x


I have my EW composers collection on a SSD drive an have no issues with load time.

I would seriously buy yourself a regular SSD drive for your play libs. Hybrid drives are NOT GOOD FOR AUDIO/SAMPLES.

I'm using play 4.x and have no issues with Cubase 7.5.x x64


MC

Hi MC,
thanks for the hint. You said that before. Unfortunately I didn't hear of that before building my machine... Shit happens.
Are you on Windows 8?
Best

yes I'm on the latest 8.1 x64. the large play libs do take a long time to load and putting them on an ssd really cuts down that time, it's still not lightning fast (you're loading masses of samples) but it's probably 10x quicker than a regular drive.



MC

sounds reasonable, maybe I should spend another 150€ for a small SSD.
What do you know about these Hybrid issues? I was told that it would be good for repeated requests, so I thought i might be good with samples. I thought, if it can't make an effort, it would still work like a normal drive.

Just look at all the audio issues with the new iMac's with fusion drives.



MC

so you would exchange it by a normal drive or keep it and add a small ssd?

From what I've read, fusion drives are good for general use in a system with 1 drive like a laptop, not for DAW usage.

I have my drives like this:

128 gig SSD for my OS/Programs; windows 8.1 x64. Cubase/Nuendo
512 gig SSD for my EW samples
2 TB 7200 rpm regular drive for all my other samples
2 TB 7200 rpm regular drive for Audio


I back up to a 4TB NAS in my house so I have projects in another physical location should the worst occur and my studio burn down!!


MC

I'll think about it and see, what I can afford at the moment. Maybe a small 250 EW SSD for the moment, and then we'll see.
Thanks a lot..

I'd stay away from Play. There spokesperson here has said that I'm impatient because of the products slow load times. I've dumped Hollywood Strings and moved on to the Spitfire Audio products. Better sounds, playability and load times - not cheap but worth the money.

I cannot stand losing inspiration when composing waiting for poorly designed products to load just to see if I like a sound.

Yes, tinder, I would have done that, if I had known this before. Now my money is at those EW guys..

I just made a winsat disk test, which returned on the 7200rpm:
random16.0 read 2,39 MB/S
Sequential 64.0 Read 119 MB/S

The ssd is at 290 random and 380 seq

So the random read of the HD seems pretty slow. Is that a normal value, or does it hint to a hardware problem?

For orchestral stuff, having everything loaded in Vienna Ensemble Pro is the way to go, especially as those are not something you would be making changes to the patches.

I have HS, HB, HOW (all diamond), percussions from SO/SD loaded and ready to go in VEP all day (decoupled/preserve), so that I can open/switch Cubase sessions without reloading samples for every project. I am running VEP in the background on the same machine I run Cubase on. It saved me so much time.

It is possible to put just part of the libraries on SSD. I have a 250 GB SSD from Samsung, and I have only the main mics from HS, HB, and HOW on that disk - the rest is on another HD. I am using symbolic link to get the folders on the HD to point to the SSD.

Complete Guide to Symbolic Links (symlinks) on Windows or Linux

This can be done easily by using a utility called Junction Link Magic (must be run as administrator).

Junction Link Magic

As for Play 4.1.x having peaks - what engine level are you using? Having it set to Medium works well here. I am still on Cubase 6.07, though. 256 samples as buffer for RME HDSP9632.

Hi Yutaka,
these days I'm doing all kinds of tests with the VEPro, as I borrowed a license from a friend for a few days.
While VEPro is bringing many advantages to the system and flow, the loading time is still about 24 minutes for the 16 GB Samples in RAM.
My engine level is set to medium and buffer is 512.

Today I made some tests with loading only a part of the setup and stopping the time it takes to load the samples.

I do the tests with a Play multi with HS Gold Violins and Violas using 3,2 GB RAM

To load this in Vienna Ensemble Pro takes 4 minutes 40 seconds from the SSHD. If I close the session and reload it without rebooting the computer, it's done in 18 seconds. Maybe it's stored in some kind of cache.

Then I have placed the samples on the SSD, which is my system drive. Now it takes 2 minutes 20 seconds for the first load after reboot and 45 seconds if I load it again.

I put the cubase file, the Play multi and the VEPro Session in the attachment.
Maybe someone wants to test how long it takes him to load it.
It's with Cubase 7.5.2, Play 4 HS Gold and VEPro 64bit.

Ok, another try with the attachment...
Archiv.zip

Froschn,

I can't really test your file as I have diamond here, but unfortunately, 24 minutes for loading 16GB samples off an HD sounds about right. The second time around being faster I think is the system cache thing as well. This is probably the reason why something that won't play properly the first time would playback okay after trying a few times with Play using an HD. I had to get an SSD after going HS - it was unbearable for me here as well. I think my template loads in about 6-7 minutes using an SSD.

My point about using VEP was that you could have the meta frames loaded at the beginning of the day, so that you can keep those loaded during the day no matter which project you are working on. This will allow you to switch between projects without having to load the samples for every project. It may actually load slightly faster in VEP than in Cubase, since VEP seems to be a more robust and efficient VST host (less CPU hit also), but I don't think it would be by that much. Having all the Play instances in VEP (decouple/preserve mode) would also allow you to save the projects much faster in Cubase. My sessions would take around 2 minutes to save every time if I kept all the Play stuff within Cubase, whereas using VEP in the background would allow me to save projects in a few seconds.

I don't know why you are getting so much CPU peaks, though. That really should not happen. My machine is 2600k @ 4.3 GHz from a few years ago (W7 pro SP1 x64), so yours should have more processor headroom than mine. Maybe some settings in W8 or BIOS need changing? Mine has all the energy saving state turned off.

BTW, when using HS, you might want to see if the "light" versions of the patches you are using may sound just as good. I used to use the heavy patches until I realized that I was not losing anything by using the light versions.

Hi,
I'm aware of all the VEPro advantages you are telling, and I find they alone are worth the money, especially the fast cubase auto saving times with decouple. Otherwise you cannot use the autosave feature or you have to pause all 5 minutes.
VEPro also enables me to use Play 4 with its background loading ability.
I just hoped it would raise my speed because other people with huge setups told me it should be faster even without ssd. Maybe they had a RAID and didn't tell me...

With "heavy versions" you mean the powerfull system? You're right, I should compare the patches by ear and by stopwatch before using them.


As Leon/dawplus said, the spikes appear with Play 4 when the mouse pointer icon changes. That's a strange behavior which seems to occur on some system configs.

I tried and put Vl-Va from HS on the SSD and left VC and Basses on the SSHD. It works even without links and saves a couple of minutes.

I'm using a mac so I cannot compare to Windows setups. With a large collection like Hollywood Strings Diamond it takes forever to compare sounds and mics variations. I'm running a Drobo Mini thunderbolt with four SSDs (2.7 TB) and everything else I use for samples load very quickly with similar data sizes. I have 32 gig of RAM. I would think that Play is the bottleneck, not the sample data. Kontakt, EXS24 and YellowTools Independence all load with reasonable speed.

Maybe someone will make a sampler format converter to allow me to move Play based libraries to Kontakt or some other quality sample library player. I hate thinking that I pissed hundreds of dollars away on a product that I will not use. Should anyone from EW be reading this and wish to refund my purchase, it would be wise, at least I won't pop my head up every week or two giving valid reasons why folks should stay far away from buying any Play based sample products.

VEP looks like a good move in many ways but poor product design in Play and the expense of another piece of software isn't a good reason for me to move that direction to make an EW investment work the way that it should out of the box. I'm happier with the Spitfire Audio products at the moment adding other libraries where needed.

EastWest is so 2007...

Even though I've spent thousands on their products (which very unfairly I can't even sell...), I rarely use any of them today, because they're basically obsolete. There are way better libraries on the market today, which ironically cost less than what I paid for EW stuff. Like TinderArts said, Spitfire's orchestral libraries are an entire order of magnitude better than anything from EW. Ivory II instruments easily trounce their pianos (not to mention that pedals through Play have huge issues in Cubase) and you'll definitely find a better (and probably cheaper) product that can replace any of the other EW libraries.

Fortunately, I no longer have to cope with that piece of shitake hilariously called "Play."

Yutaka, I have the same problem with Play freezing when touching the GUI in Cubase 7.5 so I invested money in Vienna Ensamble, very happy with the sounds but it can't upload EastWest Play_VST.dll; it just doesn't see it at all... did you have th esame problem and if so how it gets fixed? Thanks, e.

emanicus-

Did you define the plugin folder location in the VEP preference? Other than that, maybe there's a mix up on 32/64 bit versions? Those are only two things I can think of for Play not showing up. Mine showed up without any problems.