Mac Pro running logic 8 on leopard. PLAY makes logic crash every 2 minutes.
Anyone got any ideas?

Rubbish bin?

You can't sell it so unless you want to wait for them to get it right I see no other option.

I don't usually like going around knocking other people's work and when I don't have anything good to say I'd usually rather say nothing, but EW play is complete rubbish, and their forum sucks. I can not think of a single good thing about it. I got voices of passion as a free product in one of their proportions and I it was nothing but problems. High CPU usage, drop outs all the time,problems exported Cubase mixdown, the interface is terrible, they managed to take as much screen real estate as possible while still keeping everything very hard to read.

I can not think of a single good thing about it, which is a shame since their libraries are very good. I have a lot of their Kontakt stuff and not even if they pay me I'll downgrade them to play!

I sooooooo agree.....
I bought th EW ultimate Pianos and have tried for 4 months to get it working in LOgic 7 on my G5....... its rubbish and the support is rubbish
Drops out all the time,,,, have got all the latest versions.
....a wast of £250........will never buy from them again....
ROB

Quote Paul Farrer:

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Mac Pro running logic 8 on leopard. PLAY makes logic crash every 2 minutes.
Anyone got any ideas?

---

PLAY IMO is the buggiest, most unstable sample playback engine I have ever had the misfortune to buy and try to use. Which PLAY libraries are you trying run Paul - SD2 perchance or worse still, Pianos?

Myself and a few colleagues have been having an extended public argument on a forum with the CEO of EWQL for the last 9 months about SD2, MOR and VOP. They all exhibit the same instability issues caused by a fundamental flaw with the PLAY engine.

The reality is that EWQL refuses to accept that PLAY has any flaws, bugs or is in any way unreliable, and asserts instead that we who are having problems are either, 1. imagining them, 2. don't know how to use a modern computer (I kid you not) or 3. that the specs of our computers are not up to snuff since SD2 uses eleventy gazillion samples per note. Their usual response to any criticism is to cite how many awards they have won for their samples, or which film composer has used their samples in the latest Hollywood blockbuster (again, I kid you not).

There's abosolutely no use whatever going through their customer support channels (that should be Victim Support BTW) and any mention of bugs on their own forums will get you banned.

I'll spare you any more gory details, but I'd bet you're having the same issues as we are (which of course don't exist or are as rare as rocking horse pooh).

Cheers

'ello Paul, good to see you pop your head up above the parapet again.

As above, Play is really rather buggy to say the least. Plenty of things you can try though. Do you still have my number? I'll be up on the hills later in the week so can swing by and help you swear at it if you like?

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

The only libraries I am running in Play are VOP and Storm Drum 2. Both of which crash ALL THE TIME, so much so I always bounce down anything I do in PLAY and remove it asap.
I updated to the latest version of Play yesterday and it has made it worse, which I didn't think was even possible. I would love to upgrade my Symphonic Orchestra libraries but they only sell them for Play now. What a ridiculous state of affairs. I love the libraries but why should the front end be SO bad? Can't we get Apple to make EXS24 a bit more open to other libraries? *crosses fingers* *prays to Steve Jobs shrine*

Love the sounds, hate the bloated buggy interface. Don't even attempt to run SD2 anymore and only occasionally give VOP a whirl.

On a related note, I got two of the funniest / most infuriating emails a couple of weeks ago from an online retailer in the US that I've dealt with in the past. This is his general mail out (2 parts) - read and weep......


Dear Friends,

I'm writing to speak directly to posts I'm seeing in various forums telling customers to think twice before they buy any EastWest PLAY library. This is not true.

All the EastWest PLAY libraries have been designed for 64bit PC and Mac systems with at least 8GB RAM.

On the PC, this means running under Vista or XP64. You need a motherboard that can handle a minimum 8GB RAM, or one that can hadle 16GB RAM but with 8GB installed. On the Mac, you need 8-16GB RAM. On the PC, the sequencing programs operating at 64bit are the newest version of Sonar and Nuendo. Cubase 4BETA is operating at 64bit. If you mix 32bit applications with 64bit applications the system will drop down to a 32bit level of operation. Because each company uses a different scheme for streaming samples off the hard drive, you need to assign one drive per companny. For example, if you have a lot of libraries with K2 players, then apply one drive to Kontakt only.

On the Mac, both Logic and DP6 are 32 bit, while the Mac itself is 64bit. With Digital Performer, PLAY will operate in multitimbral mode, with Logic, one instance per articulation (like the EXS24). On the new Mac Pros, you can get upto 32 instances using Logic.

Some users are experiencing issues because they're not installing their free PLAY updates. Once these updates are installed, PLAY is working fine on many systems.

As a reminder, the Buy 1 Get 1 Free sale ends November 30th.
http://www.truespec.com/play-1get-free-c-134.html

Blessings from,

Peter & Caroline Alexander
Alexander University, Inc.
www.truespec.com



and then, in case it wasn't clear enough,


Dear Friends,

One additional point. You can still use PLAY very effectively on Pentium 4 Systems, G5 systems, etc. You just get fewer instances.

Peter Alexander



Do you get the feeling EW are a little bit sensitive about their white elephant?

Well mine's an 8 core mac pro with 16GB of ram and I can't get two of the bastards running without the spinning beach-ball of death popping up every 2 minutes.

Edited by Paul Farrer (03/12/08 07:03 PM)

Don't get me started on that email... so many factual inaccuracies it's untrue...

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote Paul Farrer:

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I would love to upgrade my Symphonic Orchestra libraries but they only sell them for Play now.

---

Man, oh man, I'm in exactly the same boat and am constantly looking out for anyone who might be selling the NI Kompakt version of Platinum, which I foolishly failed to upgrade to before they took it off the market forever

I have been using MOR, Gypsy and Fab Four - I also got VOP free in one of their promotions but haven't installed it. Like everyone else, I love the sounds but they are so glitchy - I can usually manage one or two instruments at a time on my G5. I just use the violin in Gypsy, rock chugs and a lead guitar in MOR, that's about it. Try to use a bass or a drumkit at the same time and it's all over. With that kind of performance how are we supposed to trust it to run full orchestras?!

I hate the interface as well - why have that massive knob in the middle which is basically a distended metering section, massive knobs for totally secondary functions like ADT, and yet have not enough space to list all the articulations without scrolling? And within the articualtion list the individual volume controls are ridiculous

Basically I'm not surprised they giving them away in two-for-one deals even though the sounds are great. They say cryptic things like "works better on Intel Macs" and "we have a duty to produce products that utilize the power of the latest computers" - sure they can do that but they're leaving a sizeable chunk of the market out in the cold.

And if I had a Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM and it still didn't work, I'd be even more annoyed about, so you have my total sympathy

Ben

Funny.... I was slapped down by their support, and some other users for not running on a Mac.... as apparently it runs perfectly on Macs...... ROFL.

Apart from a couple of forum users elsewhere who claim to have had no issue whatsoever, I don't know of a single pro, let alone hobbyist who has anything but issues with Play.

A great shame - yet again EWQL have come out with some nice samples, yet in their haste to get away from Native Instruments have successfully and comprehensively shot themselves in the foot.

Begs the question how the collosal VSL library suddenly popped up with their own player way ahead of schedule then their host and now plugin suite, and it all just works, yet Play after 18 months on the market is still un-Play-able.

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

What I do find a bit puzzling is why the SOS reviews of PLAY - I think they're done by Dave Stewart though don't quote me on that - fail to mention any of these infuriating issues which seemingly afflict all PLAY libraries for both PC and Mac users.

It's all the more curious since I remember thinking that the same reviewer slated the VSL player for being buggy when virtually no one on the planet had had any problems with it at all.

WITCH HUNT!!!!!


burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,bur n,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,bur n,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,burn,

But then have you ever read a review in SOS that was anything other than polite, middle of the road and full of bland platitudes? Usually knowledegably written, but anything approaching unequivocal criticism is unheard of.

errr, I can cite several examples of a real slating in the pages of SOS.

assorted monitors , a roland digital mixer, one or two mics, and various softwares, and some oddball processors, have had their sales careers abruptly slashed by a poor SOS review....


i recall one beuaty by Hugh...

" I cannot think of a single reason to recommend these monitors."

or words very close to that....


my advice, keep an old PPC machine to hand, and use the old NI based versions.....

Play is horrible. I run it on a PC Q9450, xp with 4gb Ram, initially I had Goliath, it's a total pain. From day one it has always hung on the last moment of install, the point where it's all actually installed but the routine won't close. Irritating. Tech support said uninstall, clean register etc, this trick has worked once, but it still always wants to update although I have the latest version. It loses the reverbs for no reason, says I need to update, although I **have** the latest version . I added SD2, what a pain to get my PC to work around the glitchy install.
Love the sounds, but it's glitchy as a clicky thing in a box marked "clicks". Experimenting with different settings helps slightly, to the point where it clicks/pops when first loaded, then settles down, no idea why. I'm no novice, I am happy to tweak and everything else I seem get running like a dream, but this one just doesn't add up, whatever PC tweaks I make. The other day I had 6 instances running at once (a new record, that) including 4 droney sounds (usually very click prone) succesfully, showing CPU 10%, but the whole time I felt like it could all collapse at any moment...
Not to be trusted, which is a shame 'cos the sounds are great.

Quote Herewego:

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Play is horrible. I run it on a PC Q9450, xp with 4gb Ram, initially I had Goliath, it's a total pain. From day one it has always hung on the last moment of install, the point where it's all actually installed but the routine won't close.

---

That's the problem I had, and it was solved by disabling all network connections. One of the moderators in the forum actually suggested this and it worked. He did it privately though, and of course they deleted my thread were I posted this, so I could never post a solution there for other people to see.

Quote Nuno_:

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Quote Herewego:

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Play is horrible. I run it on a PC Q9450, xp with 4gb Ram, initially I had Goliath, it's a total pain. From day one it has always hung on the last moment of install, the point where it's all actually installed but the routine won't close.

---

That's the problem I had, and it was solved by disabling all network connections. One of the moderators in the forum actually suggested this and it worked. He did it privately though, and of course they deleted my thread were I posted this, so I could never post a solution there for other people to see.

---

Ah so there's a fix that will break things? So when their much vaunted and still not appeared "network" functionality appears it won't work because everyone will have disconnected their networks? What about those of us who use VSL's Vienna Ensemble for very nice, shiny and happy audio and MIDI over LAN? Or people like me who then use a second network connection for Euphonix EuCon?

Dear oh dear...

Shall I mention the "support" chap on the forum who told me I should only try and run Play on a 32-bit system with "minimum least 4Gb free RAM".... he didn't like it one bit when I pointed out this was a physical impossibility!?

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Hey Nuno thanks for the tip, duly noted

Quote Nuno_:

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of course they deleted my thread were I posted this, so I could never post a solution there for other people to see.

---

Here's one for the search engines...

Goliath Play install hang problem installation fail

Play won't install

Quote idris y draig:

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errr, I can cite several examples of a real slating in the pages of SOS.

assorted monitors , a roland digital mixer, one or two mics, and various softwares, and some oddball processors, have had their sales careers abruptly slashed by a poor SOS review....


i recall one beuaty by Hugh...

" I cannot think of a single reason to recommend these monitors."

or words very close to that....

---

Can you calm my doubting heart and post some links to any reviews that become real slatings - I really want to believe it's true, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying it can't possibly be

Quote Herewego:

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Here's one for the search engines...

Goliath Play install hang problem installation fail

Play won't install

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Sorry, didn't quite catch that Herewego - did you say

East West PLAY won't install?

.....or was it maybe.....

East West PLAY Quantum Leap won't install.

No, I think what you actually said afterall was

East West PLAY won't install.

Quote redleicester:

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Ah so there's a fix that will break things? So when their much vaunted and still not appeared "network" functionality appears it won't work because everyone will have disconnected their networks?

---

Actually, it's only during installation that this needs to be done, if you do have this problem, which I don't think everyone has.

The whole company is in denial because that is the premise on which it is founded. They'd rather call you a liar than admit they made a mistake. I had an unpleasant experience with them a couple of years ago, so I'm not surprised at what's happening with Play. It comes from the top...

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madtheory creations
Synths and pianos for Kontakt

Edited by Tomás Mulcahy (04/12/08 11:14 AM)

Usually, I'm the first to bash a company for selling shoddy products, but I haven't had a single problem with Play/SD2, on both my MBP and Mac Pro-8. Why's that? Am I just lucky? Somehow, I find that hard to believe. I think it more likely that PLAY is particularly sensitive to the presence of incompatible 3rd party apps - at least on the Mac, dunno about PCs. Personally, I use tons of commercial apps, shareware an freeware. No probs whatsoever (touch wood).

(PS: Hi reid, here we go again! )

To say that Play is unstable would be the understatement of the century! It completely destroyed my G5. Even uninstalling SD2 did nothing. A complete clean install was required to get things up and running. What we, my Technician and I (thanks Dan), couldn't understand was, it essentially is only playing back MIDI loops and yet caused absolute havoc. It also shut down access to any other software on my computer!
My advice to anyone contemplating buying a Play driven plug in is don't do it and to East West I would say, go away and start again...
As someone has already pointed out I have bought SD2 and therefore the license, so cannot sell it. It will sit on my shelf until one day maybe someone will finally fix it

+1

Yep - same problems

Glitchy Playback
Crappy Interface – what really annoys me is the volume sliders - rubbish.
More than 2 instances – forget it.

I got the platinum orchestra for play and barely use it. I just stick with the Gold version in Kontakt (absolutely solid) and use the other samples as and when is necessary in Play - but essentially I try and avoid it.

Their support is awful: I had problems registering MOR and they responded after a week via email requesting I resubmit my query! Good job I managed to sort it myself because it was like talking to the cat.

The sounds are blooming fantastic – especially those basses in MOR!! Just a shame about PLAY

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Support your right to arm bears!

I posted once on their forums a few years back asking if a licence transfer was possible (since I thought I would not want my copy of Silver after all since I wanted Gold). Got deleted immediately. The place is run by the bleedin' Gestapo. I really hate that muzzling of criticism and free speech by Doug Rogers and the moderators (and my post was not even critical, it was just a question!).

These guys are "head in sand" all day, and the mystery for me is why SOS continues to feature their products (and in this/last month's issue, them) without mentioning that many people have huge problems with their products. I bought Gold on Kontakt and that is great - bought the Play upgrade and am glad I have never installed it.

All in all, their arrogance is breathtaking.

So, SOS, what's the answer?

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www.youtube.com/leonardngmusic

Well this week I have screaming deadlines with Gladiators, Dancing on Ice a Playstation 3 game and The Krypton Factor, so its the perfect time for it all to be acting like a Atari 520ST with a faulty diskdrive
:-(
I feel a 'Notes From The Deadline' rant coming....

Edited by Paul Farrer (04/12/08 05:06 PM)

Quote Paul Farrer:

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Well this week I have screaming deadlines with Gladiators, Dancing on Ice a Playstation 3 game and The Krypton Factor, so its the perfect time for it all to be acting like a Atari 520ST with a faulty diskdrive
:-(
I feel a 'Notes From The Deadline' rant coming....

---

ooooh the irony. Last month your short article coincided with a major interview with Doug Rogers in SOS... If only...

Paul,

While I'm not sure what the prob is, for the sake of getting you up and running with Sd2, try deselecting "stream from disk" for every sound you have loaded. It's in the file menu I think under "current instrument".

You are then bypassing the disk streaming and hopefully that will help in the short term!

Cheers

Paul

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------------------
paul-thomson.com

Quote reid:

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Can you calm my doubting heart and post some links to any reviews that become real slatings - I really want to believe it's true, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying it can't possibly be

---

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec03/articles/maudiobx5.htm#2

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Feb02/articles/maudiosp5b.asp


neither of these gave a glowing report, and both products were basically sales flops as a result... and "updated" or withdrawn sooner than otherwise planned....

there are others , but i actually have work to do rather than spend the time i'd normally be sleeping in, digging out negative reviews for the unbeleiver..

Well, that's me told - I didn't realise Paul and Hugh could be so uncomprimising, so merciless, so, so......insulting!

Seriously though, thanks for pulling those reviews out of the past - neither's quite what you could call a 'slating' , but they're certainly to the point. Back on topic, it does seem bizarre that the Dave Stewart reviews made no reference whatsoever to the widespread difficulties that folks have been having around the world with the PLAY interface.

Dave Stewart is Nick Phoenix. (That can't be his real name, surely? He should be directing S.H.I.E.L.D, not poncing around with sample libraries)

Quote reid:

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Dave Stewart is Nick Phoenix. (That can't be his real name, surely? He should be directing S.H.I.E.L.D, not poncing around with sample libraries)

---

interesting thread..

as a distributor I am always interested in making sure the products I represent get as good a review as possible and there have been a number of occasions where SoS haven't been the kindest - but it's always in everyone's interests to see honest reviews where possible and you can always read between the lines.

and regarding EW PLAY - I was going to write a few things but after thinking about it, the comments above are plenty..

Steve Parker
Music Technology Manager
Arbiter Group

My QLSO Platinum Complete Upgrade is still gathering dust, waiting to installed. Sounds like I won't be doing this for some time... if ever.

I had no idea Play wasn't recommended (or indeed, not designed) for use with 32bit Win XP systems. Niiice!

I am, sort of, tempted to install it anyway... if simply out of curiousity!

P

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Composer, Producer, Sound Designer
www.universal-sound-design.com

There's a 20 page (and counting) thread on this very issue on the Northern Sounds forum. I cannot see how EW can recover after this fiasco. If their entire business model has now shifted to PLAY, and the majority of people find that PLAY does not work, it's game over for them.

Two things are unforgiveable:

1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming); and

2. Deleting all posts (and banning posters) on their forums which appear to criticise PLAY in general.

Goodbye EW - I'll continue to use (and love) my EWQL Gold on Kontakt, but that's the last time I'm spending money with you.

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www.youtube.com/leonardngmusic

Quote Stephen Parker:

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and regarding EW PLAY - I was going to write a few things but after thinking about it, the comments above are plenty...

---

ouch!

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hourglass | random thoughts | doubledotdash!? collective

Quote Len:

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1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming)

---

They seem to make a habit of that. The issue I had was with a sale item that was not as advertised, and I was accused of all sorts of things when I pointed this out.

They're also listing past clients of Cello Studio as if they were clients of the current studio.

Seems like a case of megalomania to me...

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madtheory creations
Synths and pianos for Kontakt

Quote Len:

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1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming)

---

Mine works (albeit after much hassle - see above) on XP 32 bit. They do say it will on their site.

I think one of my overriding frustrations was that it was buggy on day one, which in this day and age is understandable - after all, rare indeed is the product that just works out of the box on every possible software/hardware combo, so for that they can be forgiven. However, many raised issues with support, or on the EW forum, or on other forums, to which the standard answer was "it's your system" or "it's your hardware", or "it's your problem"...

Yet with successive updates over the last 18 months it has slowly become more stable and potentially even usable for more than 4 minutes without crashing, and will actually play back sounds.... without any changes to hardware or software configurations....

Now I'm not a software designer, but six or more updates over that period (I've long since lost count), and many of the issues which I was assured were entirely my problem and down to me having an "inadequate" system (after all, a Q6700, 4Gb, multiple HDs and so on is just poo), have been resolved, which surely would imply it might just have a teensy-weensy bit to do with the Play plugin, and be nothing to do with my puny DAW?

Extremely frustrating.

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote redleicester:

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... after all, rare indeed is the product that just works out of the box on every possible software / hardware combo,

---

Which begs me to wonder why the heck an efficient form of standardisation isn't put into effect to minimise this. Compatibility issues are becoming the norm and spiralling out of control... or at least they will be if nothing is actioned NOW.

Everything should be built to protocol that will work universally, in a way that MIDI was devised back in the early 80's. If component manufactures worked together and stuck to standards, life would be a LOT simpler for s/w developers.

Slightly OT, I know... but needed to be said.

Cheers,
Peter

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Composer, Producer, Sound Designer
www.universal-sound-design.com

Quote idris y draig:

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errr, I can cite several examples of a real slating in the pages of SOS.

---

Here's one from me:

www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec03/articles/staudio.htm

"Within a couple of minutes of initial WAV playback auditioning, my ears were telling me that something was wrong at the bass end... ...low frequencies were seriously lacking, being 0.5dB down at 120Hz, and -3dB at 45Hz. ...ST Audio soon confirmed my findings, and reported that the problem was again simply due to unsuitable capacitor values being used, and was easily corrected.

From serial number HOON0315 onwards more suitable values will be used, and all remaining units in the field will be recalled."

What really tickled me at the time was the manufacturer initially claiming that I must be wrong, since this unit had already been favourably reviewed in two other magazines


Martin

--------------------
YewTreeMagic

Glad to see I'm not the only one.
It can be a pretty lonely business locked in a room with all this technology particularly when it doesn't work as you expect. However...
I will restate how much I love the sounds themselves and its 'ALMOST' worth buying a PLAY soundware product and spending a few weeks sampling them into the EXS 24 so they work as you expect. When will manufacturers realize they don't need to re-invent the wheel with their front ends? For example the first EWSO library originally sat in the stand alone Kompakt player. Which doesn't work on intel macs, so when I upgraded my mac I had to invest in Kontakt in order to play the sounds. Fair enough, but 12 moths later we are all being forced to move to PLAY- a front end that simply is not good enough in my opinion. When I load an empty new track and insert a single instance of PLAY I get a huge white block where the plug in should be. Clicking on it resolves this but I have simply never got more than two or three PLAY's working at once without a complete crash. I have cash waiting to invest in loads more EWQL soundware but I simply can't as long as they insist on forcing PLAY on us.
SORT IT OUT.
void(0)

Quote Herewego:

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Quote Len:

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1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming)

---

Mine works (albeit after much hassle - see above) on XP 32 bit. They do say it will on their site.

---

Matters little, I have thus far tried it on XP32 with 4Gb with and without the /3GB switch, XPP x64 with 8Gb RAM, Vista64 with 8Gb of RAM and all have shared a common theme, which wasn't a terribly tuneful one.

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote Paul Farrer:

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When will manufacturers realize they don't need to re-invent the wheel with their front ends?

---

They obviously did it for a reason, and we don't know what the deals with NI were - it could be that renegotiating a deal to bundle a Kontakt player became cost-prohibitive. I know NI annoyed a lot of people around the UB transition time by not offering UB versions of Kompakt, and forcing third-party soundware developers onto a new deal with a later engine version, and I've a feeling the costs went up a lot - there were a lot of transitions away from Kompakt players at that time, iirc.

However, my view on Play (and I haven't used it, or had any personal experience with it) was that it was almost *guaranteed* to cause issues for some time.

A sample playback engine in itself is not a particularly hard thing to develop, but a really good one, with a lot of internal playback features, large-memory and streaming support, across multiple plugin-formats from, and this is the key, *a company that has no experience developing audio software* - well, it's going to have kinks.

Kontakt is a fairly mature piece of software from a company with a lot of experience developing audio plugins and engines, and is reasonably solid. EW have either had to contract out to external developers, or buy in development talent to build the platform. I don't know which, but in either case, building these engines, and basing the future of the company on them, is a pretty big task.

Any company making the transition from soundware to software is going to have kinks, and customers should bear this in mind when getting tempted by shiny new gui's from soundware companies, until the products are tried, tested and proven solid.

The biggest annoyance with all this is not the fact that the product itself may have issues, hey, nobody's perfect, software has bugs and these things are complex - it's the attitude of the company that really matters. If customers are reassured that these issues are being worked on and will be resolved, it inspires confidence.

Alas, the feedback from the support side of EW, as evidenced by many posts here and elsewhere over the years, paints a rather dreary picture of how much their customers are valued, and does not inspire confidence that these issues will ever be resolved.

It sounds to me like EW need to step it up a bit, at least in how some of these issues are being treated on the user side...

It has to be said, after reading this thread there is no way I will buy any EW product (and my studio is probably in the market for some decent orchestral samples right now).

Their zealous purging of all criticism from their own forums is not going to change the facts.

Surely samples - which are only a bunch of little audio files - can be, and should be, offered for multiple formats (such as Logic's EXS24, Kontakt and the rest).

What's currently happening is a bit like Coldplay putting out a new album which only runs on Sony CD players. In other words, barking mad.

--------------------
Dynamite with a laser beam...

Quote Steve Hill:

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What's currently happening is a bit like Coldplay putting out a new album which only runs on Sony CD players. In other words, barking mad.

---

Barking mad? Nah - small favour to the world, more like.

@ desmond - thanks for saying all that, it's exactly what I wanted to say but couldn't be bothered to type ;0 .

When I read the SOS article I thought it unusual to say the least that a music company - not even an engineering company - decided to write something as tricky as a sample player (simple in concept, but it HAS to work in real time within a range of unpredictable system conditions, on multiple platforms). I had a quick shudder and thought "glad I don't work there - they'll be learning how to make it stable until release 3".

Then this thread popped up and it seems EW have compounded the issue through poor customer relations.

It doesn't have to be this way. In the early days of the liquid mix I couldn't get it to work with Sonar. Both Focusrite and Cakewalk handled things very well (Focusrite especially), recognised the issues, avoided finger pointing, and engaged with the people having the problems to diagnose the issue. I think it took them about 6 weeks to put out fixes - pretty good. And they didn't delete posts about the problem from forums either.

Sigh

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getting better all the time..

Quote adrian_k:

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When I read the SOS article I thought it unusual to say the least that a music company - not even an engineering company - decided to write something as tricky as a sample player (simple in concept, but it HAS to work in real time within a range of unpredictable system conditions, on multiple platforms). I had a quick shudder and thought "glad I don't work there - they'll be learning how to make it stable until release 3".

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Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works. Mac and 32 and 64bit PC, and it's been so successful they have subsequently released their own plug-in specific host which features built-in audio and MIDI over LAN, a suite of 64-bit plugins and now have annouced that the next version of the host will support 3rd-party plugins too....

All from a sample developer....

As you say, EW's challenge was immense, the learning curve collosal, but others have done it and succeeded.

--------------------
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote redleicester:

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Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works.

All from a sample developer....

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I'm not saying it's impossible. Spectrasonics have also transitioned from being a soundware developer to a software company as well. And Eric will tell you I'm sure that that path hasn't exactly been trivially easy...

There's a right way to do it and a wrong way. And potentially alienating your customers when your products aren't right isn't the right way...

Especially when I keep seeing press releases about how EW have bought expensive studio facilities, and have every amp ever made, and all this other stuff, indicating that they are making quite a bit of money - some of which doesn't seem to be being channelled back into software engineering resource (of course, that's conjecture only, and may be completely innaccurate, but...)

Quote desmond:

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Quote redleicester:

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Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works.

All from a sample developer....

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I'm not saying it's impossible. Spectrasonics have also transitioned from being a soundware developer to a software company as well. And Eric will tell you I'm sure that that path hasn't exactly been trivially easy...

There's a right way to do it and a wrong way. And potentially alienating your customers when your products aren't right isn't the right way...

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Aye that's what I meant - it is difficult, it is fraught with difficulty, but others have made it, and others have supported their users through it, which as you rightly say seems to be fundamentally where EWQL have come unstuck irrespective of whether their player is a bit shoddy or downright disfunctional.

--------------------
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote redleicester:

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Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works. Mac and 32 and 64bit PC, and it's been so successful they have subsequently released their own plug-in specific host which features built-in audio and MIDI over LAN, a suite of 64-bit plugins and now have annouced that the next version of the host will support 3rd-party plugins too....

All from a sample developer....

As you say, EW's challenge was immense, the learning curve collosal, but others have done it and succeeded.

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Yeah, VSL is beginning to look like an increasingly attractive option, especially when I get my Mac Pro and move to a two computer setup - could be time to make the switch...

B

Quote BenLD:

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Quote redleicester:

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Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works. Mac and 32 and 64bit PC, and it's been so successful they have subsequently released their own plug-in specific host which features built-in audio and MIDI over LAN, a suite of 64-bit plugins and now have annouced that the next version of the host will support 3rd-party plugins too....

All from a sample developer....

As you say, EW's challenge was immense, the learning curve collosal, but others have done it and succeeded.

---

Yeah, VSL is beginning to look like an increasingly attractive option, especially when I get my Mac Pro and move to a two computer setup - could be time to make the switch...

B

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Indeed. And of course it sounds way way better anyway.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to start searching for common factors, as to why PLAY doesn't work for some people. Personally, I have used PLAY/SD2 with all of my recent projects (such as radio jingles) without as much as a single glitch. On my Mac Pro-8, I use Logic 8 and simultaneously Drumcore/Rewire and Rax in Rosetta mode. Plug-ins by Waves, Flux, URS, PSP, NI, MusicLab, Synthogy, Expert Sleepers, plus shareware/freeware. OS 10.5. I also have Macaroni, SMARTReporter, MenuMeters and smcFanControl running in the background. The same goes for my MBP, with the exception of smcFanControl.

I wonder if there is a preference setting in either PLAY or OS X that causes trouble for some people. Alternatively, there might be a background process that interferes with PLAY, such as internet or network connectivity, or the (firewire) audio interface (I use an RME PCIe/Digiface). Also, I wouldn't rule out USB devices, such as mice, printers, or midi interfaces.

I think its a great idea.
But given the number of possible things that might potentially conflict with it (audio units, preferences, usb devices etc etc) how much of a detective job could that be?
Interestingly you are the second person to have mentioned running a stable PLAY system using a non-firewire audio interface. It CAN'T be that can it?
And if it is why aren't we told to avoid firewire systems with PLAY - or even better why after all this time haven't they fixed it?

Yes, there might be some detective work involved, but I'd say it's worth it - SD2 sounds fantastic.

Could the firewire interface be the culprit? I don't know, but it's easy enough to find out. Disconnect your audio interface, and use your Mac's internal audio (which is how I currently use my MBP).

Quote Paul Farrer:

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And if it is why aren't we told to avoid firewire systems with PLAY - or even better why after all this time haven't they fixed it?

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Becuase it's not our PLAY system that's wrong, it's YYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUUUU - ALL OF YOU!!!!! All of you with your stinking PCs and Macs, incorrectly set up and full of foul fripperies like mice, monitors and QWERTY keyboards!!!!! It's not US - we're PERFECT and our software is BEAUTIFUL!**^&!!! You're all against us, you stinking little fuckers using your 'oh-I'm-so-perfect-because-I-was-designed-in-Austria' bits of software. AAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!<><>%!!!! What's Austria ever done for the world? Stollen and Mozart, that's IT!!!! BUt we've given you StrümDrum, Voices of Poisson and Gypsy! All [ ****** ] amazing!!! Well, not Gypsy, that's true - but it's GOT A NICE COVER!&^!!! Do you think we bought Cello Studios just so we could sit around and soak up the atmosphere? AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! Don't mention Atmosphere!!!!! That smug little [ ****** ] Eric Persing and his [ ****** ] frog designed front end!!!! I HATE HIM!!!! Why did he get it to work first time and we can't??!!???? HE's sold a billion units of his mincing bits of code and IT WORKS!!!!! GGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! You never see his software on 24/7/12/365 sale, two for one offers, 40% off til the end of time do you! DO YOU!!????!!!??? NO!!!! Of course not - because he doesn't have to! It works!! People buy it because it WORKS!!! People like him BECAUSE IT WORKS!!!! He doesn't have to dump on his clients when they complain BECAUSE IT WORKS!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




















i want my mummy

Quote reid:

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Quote Paul Farrer:

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And if it is why aren't we told to avoid firewire systems with PLAY - or even better why after all this time haven't they fixed it?

---

Becuase it's not our PLAY system that's wrong, it's YYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUUUU - ALL OF YOU!!!!! All of you with your stinking PCs and Macs, incorrectly set up and full of foul fripperies like mice, monitors and QWERTY keyboards!!!!! It's not US - we're PERFECT and our software is BEAUTIFUL!**^&!!! You're all against us, you stinking little fuckers using your 'oh-I'm-so-perfect-because-I-was-designed-in-Austria' bits of software. AAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!<><>%!!!! What's Austria ever done for the world? Stollen and Mozart, that's IT!!!! BUt we've given you StrümDrum, Voices of Poisson and Gypsy! All [ ****** ] amazing!!! Well, not Gypsy, that's true - but it's GOT A NICE COVER!&^!!! Do you think we bought Cello Studios just so we could sit around and soak up the atmosphere? AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! Don't mention Atmosphere!!!!! That smug little [ ****** ] Eric Persing and his [ ****** ] frog designed front end!!!! I HATE HIM!!!! Why did he get it to work first time and we can't??!!???? HE's sold a billion units of his mincing bits of code and IT WORKS!!!!! GGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! You never see his software on 24/7/12/365 sale, two for one offers, 40% off til the end of time do you! DO YOU!!????!!!??? NO!!!! Of course not - because he doesn't have to! It works!! People buy it because it WORKS!!! People like him BECAUSE IT WORKS!!!! He doesn't have to dump on his clients when they complain BECAUSE IT WORKS!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




















i want my mummy

---

Quote Tui:

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Yes, there might be some detective work involved, but I'd say it's worth it - SD2 sounds fantastic.

Could the firewire interface be the culprit? I don't know, but it's easy enough to find out. Disconnect your audio interface, and use your Mac's internal audio (which is how I currently use my MBP).

---

With respect Tui, it's got nothing to do with firewire, USB, global warming, aliens, Sarah Palin, or even Gordon Clown selling off our gold reserves, just good old fashioned programing ineptitude. PLAY was released without proper quality control and testing. Rigourous beta testing would have revealed these issues; it is as simple as that. EWQL dropped the ball...

I've had two of my game coders look at it and their diagnosis is memory leakage at a very low level (which in normal speak means crap coding). They also said that disk access streaming in PLAY is byzantine.

We're still waiting for it to be fixed 9 months after release.

With respect Rousseau, if you and your game coders are so sure what it is, why don't you get cracking and fix it then? The fact of the matter is, some people use PLAY day in, day out, without any problems. I happen to be one of them. Clearly, PLAY isn't broken for all users, but only for a certain percentage. How high that figure might be, I have no idea, but that's immaterial. PLAY works for me, on two machines, multiple instances, different sample rates, 100% of the time.

I tried to help Paul Farrer by listing what equipment I use. I hope that this helps him with figuring out what precisely it is that conflicts with PLAY in his set-up.

Tui, that would require Mr. Rogers and co to release the code to them... nuf said.

--------------------
madtheory creations
Synths and pianos for Kontakt

Quote Tui:

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Clearly, PLAY isn't broken for all users, but only for a certain percentage. How high that figure might be, I have no idea, but that's immaterial.

---

It's not immaterial. Even if it's only 2% (and I suspect it's a lot more), how long do you think say a car manufacturer would last if 2% of its products failed? Or how about an aircraft manufacturer?

They get a bad reputation, people stop buying their products, they go bust, and then the people who have already bought their products have no support. Fear of that happening meanwhile stops people buying their products.

There's only one answer in the MBA textbooks: acknowledge the problem, fix it, offer refunds/compensation/freebies, and do it all FAST.

Denial is corporate suicide.

These people have a crap CEO. You should be worried.

--------------------
Dynamite with a laser beam...

Quote Steve Hill:

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Quote Tui:

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Clearly, PLAY isn't broken for all users, but only for a certain percentage. How high that figure might be, I have no idea, but that's immaterial.

---

It's not immaterial.

---

No it is. I was trying to make the point that, as long as there is a single user out there who runs PLAY without problems, a blanket condemnation is simply inappropriate.

I am also puzzled by the general tone on this thread. Are we here to help each other resolve tech issues, or do we come here to rubbish certain developers/manufacturers/distributors?

Quote Steve Hill:

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Quote Tui:

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Clearly, PLAY isn't broken for all users, but only for a certain percentage. How high that figure might be, I have no idea, but that's immaterial.

---

It's not immaterial. Even if it's only 2% (and I suspect it's a lot more), how long do you think say a car manufacturer would last if 2% of its products failed? Or how about an aircraft manufacturer?

They get a bad reputation, people stop buying their products, they go bust, and then the people who have already bought their products have no support. Fear of that happening meanwhile stops people buying their products.

There's only one answer in the MBA textbooks: acknowledge the problem, fix it, offer refunds/compensation/freebies, and do it all FAST.

Denial is corporate suicide.

These people have a crap CEO. You should be worried.

---

Agreed, and if that CEO is paying attention to what's being said on the net (if not someone please tell him/her), if he wants the likes of myself to consider buying his company's products in the future then he should be drafting a suitable statement v soon. Or are the lawyers advising him that he cannot infer that there are problems (there are no 'problems' - only 'features'....)?

Tui, you can't be serious. Are you?

--------------------
madtheory creations
Synths and pianos for Kontakt

Sure I'm serious.

Somehow, this thread seems to live in a parallel universe, where EW is the worst company ever, none of their software works, and I should be worried (?) because of their CEO. Huh?

In the real world, lots of people use PLAY quite successfully, and post on forums about it. One random example I came across today:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/209743-quantum-leap-pianos. html

Quote Tui:

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Quote Steve Hill:

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Quote Tui:

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Clearly, PLAY isn't broken for all users, but only for a certain percentage. How high that figure might be, I have no idea, but that's immaterial.

---

It's not immaterial.

---

No it is. I was trying to make the point that, as long as there is a single user out there who runs PLAY without problems, a blanket condemnation is simply inappropriate.

I am also puzzled by the general tone on this thread. Are we here to help each other resolve tech issues, or do we come here to rubbish certain developers/manufacturers/distributors?

---

Tui, the general tone on this thread reflects people's experiences dealing with that company's products and representatives - nothing more, nothing less.

Quote Agamemnon:

---

Quote Steve Hill:

---

Quote Tui:

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Clearly, PLAY isn't broken for all users, but only for a certain percentage. How high that figure might be, I have no idea, but that's immaterial.

---

It's not immaterial. Even if it's only 2% (and I suspect it's a lot more), how long do you think say a car manufacturer would last if 2% of its products failed? Or how about an aircraft manufacturer?

They get a bad reputation, people stop buying their products, they go bust, and then the people who have already bought their products have no support. Fear of that happening meanwhile stops people buying their products.

There's only one answer in the MBA textbooks: acknowledge the problem, fix it, offer refunds/compensation/freebies, and do it all FAST.

Denial is corporate suicide.

These people have a crap CEO. You should be worried.

---

Agreed, and if that CEO is paying attention to what's being said on the net (if not someone please tell him/her), if he wants the likes of myself to consider buying his company's products in the future then he should be drafting a suitable statement v soon. Or are the lawyers advising him that he cannot infer that there are problems (there are no 'problems' - only 'features'....)?

---

Agamemnon, what we're saying has been said directly and indeed repeatedly to the CEO in public on a forum for the past 9 months, so he is well aware of this.

Cheers

Quote reid:

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Becuase it's not our PLAY system that's wrong, it's YYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUUUU - ALL OF YOU!!!!! All of you with your stinking PCs and Macs, incorrectly set up and full of foul fripperies like mice, monitors and QWERTY keyboards!!!!! It's not US - we're PERFECT and our software is BEAUTIFUL!**^&!!! You're all against us, you stinking little fuckers using your 'oh-I'm-so-perfect-because-I-was-designed-in-Austria' bits of software. AAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!<><>%!!!! What's Austria ever done for the world? Stollen and Mozart, that's IT!!!! BUt we've given you StrümDrum, Voices of Poisson and Gypsy! All [ ****** ] amazing!!! Well, not Gypsy, that's true - but it's GOT A NICE COVER!&^!!! Do you think we bought Cello Studios just so we could sit around and soak up the atmosphere? AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! Don't mention Atmosphere!!!!! That smug little [ ****** ] Eric Persing and his [ ****** ] frog designed front end!!!! I HATE HIM!!!! Why did he get it to work first time and we can't??!!???? HE's sold a billion units of his mincing bits of code and IT WORKS!!!!! GGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! You never see his software on 24/7/12/365 sale, two for one offers, 40% off til the end of time do you! DO YOU!!????!!!??? NO!!!! Of course not - because he doesn't have to! It works!! People buy it because it WORKS!!! People like him BECAUSE IT WORKS!!!! He doesn't have to dump on his clients when they complain BECAUSE IT WORKS!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i want my mummy

---

Now look here young man. I hold you personally responsible for my new hernia.



--------------------
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

As PLAY seems to work for some people and not others, have we come across the software equivalent of Behringer? All we need now is for EW to reduce their prices to Behringer levels and people will buy PLAY in vast quantities.

The flaw in my argument is that if a bit of Behringer kit goes wrong in the warranty period, you'll get another one to replace it that works (for a while anyway), but if PLAY doesn't work on your system, a replacement copy of the software isn't going to make it any better.

Quote Wonkey Wabbit:

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As PLAY seems to work for some people and not others, have we come across the software equivalent of Behringer? All we need now is for EW to reduce their prices to Behringer levels and people will buy PLAY in vast quantities.

The flaw in my argument is that if a bit of Behringer kit goes wrong in the warranty period, you'll get another one to replace it that works (for a while anyway), but if PLAY doesn't work on your system, a replacement copy of the software isn't going to make it any better.

---

Well the EWQL buy one get one free deal has been extended, they've got a 40% pre christmas sale on, so perhaps there's something in your comparison

Wow I seem to have started World War III.
I agree with some of you, software that doesn't work sucks golf balls through a garden hose, and it is of course completely unacceptable that we should even be trying to do the detective work of what makes PLAY work and what makes it crash. However lets stop trashing the company or its employees personally and keep the thread focused on digging ourselves out of the hole. Hopefully it will shame the PLAY people into getting their act together. The nastier and more personal and spurious we are the greater the chances they will get stroppy and force SOS to remove the thread. Which benefits none of us.
Does this make me a huge cotton candy assed pussy cat? probably, but just trying to be pragmatic and get my system happy.

Quote Tui:

---

Perhaps it would be a good idea to start searching for common factors, as to why PLAY doesn't work for some people. Personally, I have used PLAY/SD2 with all of my recent projects (such as radio jingles) without as much as a single glitch. On my Mac Pro-8, I use Logic 8 and simultaneously Drumcore/Rewire and Rax in Rosetta mode. Plug-ins by Waves, Flux, URS, PSP, NI, MusicLab, Synthogy, Expert Sleepers, plus shareware/freeware. OS 10.5. I also have Macaroni, SMARTReporter, MenuMeters and smcFanControl running in the background. The same goes for my MBP, with the exception of smcFanControl.

I wonder if there is a preference setting in either PLAY or OS X that causes trouble for some people. Alternatively, there might be a background process that interferes with PLAY, such as internet or network connectivity, or the (firewire) audio interface (I use an RME PCIe/Digiface). Also, I wouldn't rule out USB devices, such as mice, printers, or midi interfaces.

---

Okay, lets run with this then:

I have had Play glitch, fall over, appear to operate but produce no sound, open a blank plugin window, and crash the DAW (all/and/or combination of the above) on the following systems:

System 1 (DAW):
Asus P5B Deluxe
Intel Q6700
8Gb RAM Crucial PC6400
1x 75gb WD Raptor SATA System HD
2x 500Gb Samsung F1 SATA HD
2x 750Gb Samsung F1 SATA HD
RME HDSP MADI PCI / ADI-648
EuCon
TC Electronic Powercore Firewire
UAD2
PS/2 Keyboard
Kensington Orbit Pro Trackball
2x Nvidia 7600GS GPUs driving 2x 20" and 2x 24" TFT displays

OS - Hardware multiboot - XPP 32 / XPP 32 with 3Gb Switch/ XPP x64 / Vista64 Ultimate


System 2 (DAW2):
Asus P5Q Deluxe
Intel Q9550
8Gb RAM Corsair XMS2 6400
1x 75gb WD Raptor SATA System HD
2x 500Gb Samsung F1 SATA HD
2x 750Gb Samsung F1 SATA HD
RME HDSP MADI PCI / ADI-648
EuCon
TC Electronic Powercore Firewire
UAD2
PS/2 Keyboard
Kensington Orbit Pro Trackball
2x Nvidia 7600GS GPUs driving 2x 20" and 2x 24" TFT displays

OS - Hardware multiboot - XPP 32 / XPP 32 with 3Gb Switch/ XPP x64 / Vista64 Ultimate


System 3 (x2 Slave):
Asus P4C800 Deluxe
P4 3.2GHz
4Gb RAM
1x 74Gb WD Raptor SATA System Drive
2x 500Gb Samsung F1 SATA Drive in RAID0
2x 500Gb Samsung F1 SATA Drives
RME HDSP 9652 PCI
EuCon
PS/2 Keyboard
Kensington Orbit Pro Trackball
Nvidia 5200LE GPU driving 20" TFT

OS - Hardware multiboot - XPP 32 / XPP 32 with 3Gb Switch

Cubase 4.5 and Standalone Play
Vienna Ensemble running Brass / Woodwind / Percussion / Keyboards


System 4 (x2 Slave):

Asus P5DW2 Deluxe
Intel Core 2.66
8Gb RAM
1x 74Gb WD Raptor SATA System Drive
2x 500Gb Samsung F1 SATA Drives
RME HDSP 9632 PCI
EuCon
PS/2 Keyboard
Kensington Orbit Pro Trackball
Nvidia 7200GS GPU driving 20" TFT

OS - Hardware multiboot - XPP 32 / XPP 32 with 3Gb Switch/ XPP x64

VSL Vienna Ensemble 2 Running Strings sections (solo and ensemble)



System 5 (x2 DAW):
Mactintosh MacPro Quad 3GHz, 16Gb RAM, 4x 1Tb HD, MacOS Leopard / Tiger / Tabbycat
UAD1
RME HDSP MADI PCIe + ADI-648 / MOTU Traveller / Internal Audio via ADI-192
2x ATI GPU of some flavour driving 3x 30" TFT displays
Apple metal flat keyboard thing (TM)
Apple Puny mouse (TM)


For the sake of brevity, I have not bothered listing any and all plugins, merely an off-the-top-of-my-head list of those I commonly use.

The two DAW machines are to be found running the following:

Nuendo 4.2.2 + NEK
Sonnox Suite
Vienna Suite
Altiverb & Speakerphone
Komplete 2, 3, 4, 5
EWQL Play versions of SD2, Orchestra Platinum Plus, Goliath
NI Komplete 2, 3, 4, 5
Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Stylus RMX, Atmosphere, Trilogy
Project SAM TrueStrike
Synthogy Ivory, Italian Grand and Upright

Notable Konktat 2/3 Libraries:
SD1
Colossus
SO Platinum
Symphonic Choirs
RA
Kirk Hunter
Symphobia
Chris Hein Guitars
BelaDMedia - Anthology 1 & 2, Lyrical Distortion 1 & 2, Tenor, Retro Flute, Diva and Diva Extended
Art Vista VGP 1 and 2
Acoustic Legends
Cinesamples Harp, CineToms and Drums of War
Heavyocity Evolve
Soniccouture Hang Drum, Mbira, GuZheng, Bowed Piano
Countless converted Akai / Roland / Kurzweil libraries


Network Spec:
It is notable each machine is running with 2x Gigabit network ports, with each motherboard having been chosen expressly for this purpose being as they're equipped with pairs as standard.

Inside the studio cloud, we have two physical subnets:

DMZ1 - EuCon specific
Sonicwall Router
Netgear GS724TP 24-port switch, no jumbo frame, full managed QoS, no packet inspection.

DMZ2 - MOL / File transfer stacks
Cisco 1721 Router
Netgear GS724TP 24-port switch, jumbo frame (7418 frame size), managed QoS for MoL.
2x Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS 2Tb
2x Buffalo Terastation Pro 1Tb
1x Canon Pixma 970MP Network Scanner/Printer

The GS724TP here then takes a gigabit fibre uplink to the main subnet outside of the DMZ, via a third GS724 and to a Netgear DG834PN Router and ADSL Modem.

As a result of this simple architecture, all of the subnets are entirel isolated from one another with no packet or frame collision, time critical packets are managed via QoS, and the DMZs can be opened up individually to the main WAN and allowed free reign for updates / downloads as and when needed, but are otherwise entirely cut off from the rest of the WAN and the world, thus simply and easily negating the need for any further firewalls / anti-virus etc.

Now for the sake of clarity, I should point out all of those systems bar the Macintoshes were handbuilt, and the older 8Gb machines are currently in comfortable service as VSL Vienna Ensemble Slaves and regularly run up to 7.2Gb of samples loaded into Ensemble without so much as breaking a sweat. ALL of the systems use MIDI-over-LAN, and ALL of the systems use EuCon. It should also be noted for those who haven't already worked it out, DAW2 was the replacement upgrade for DAW1, and what was DAW1 is now another VSL/Cubase slave, still exhibiting the same issues...

So that's 8 systems I have personal experience of which cannot run Play in anything that resembles a reliable and stable manner, much less be relied upon under time-critical and screaming-paying-client-OMFG-I'm-going-to-die pressure. The rig is used for music for film, tv, theatre, computer games and for me to fart into microphones for peurile pleasure. Oh, and for my three year old to wander in and bash notes at random.





PS - For my detractors amongst those who know me, I should also be at pains to point out the Macs are not mine.

--------------------
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote Paul Farrer:

---

Wow I seem to have started World War III.
I agree with some of you, software that doesn't work sucks golf balls through a garden hose, and it is of course completely unacceptable that we should even be trying to do the detective work of what makes PLAY work and what makes it crash. However lets stop trashing the company or its employees personally and keep the thread focused on digging ourselves out of the hole. Hopefully it will shame the PLAY people into getting their act together. The nastier and more personal and spurious we are the greater the chances they will get stroppy and force SOS to remove the thread. Which benefits none of us.
Does this make me a huge cotton candy assed pussy cat? probably, but just trying to be pragmatic and get my system happy.

---

Paul, have you tried dealing with EW's forum or support? If so you'll know the notion that they might be shamed into action by a(nother) thread on a forum in a distant land is crazy talk. Going on personal experience, it's pretty clear they couldn't give a monkey's nuts about any unhappy customer who questions the quality of their products.

Which is bonkers - just a couple of years ago they were held in high regard the world over for having ground breaking products that sounded unbelievably good. Stuff like Stormdrum was almost visionary when it first came out; the respect in which they were held in 'our' little community was almost limitless. Yet in 18 short months they pissed everything against the wall due to their almost psychotic attachment to a piece of software that doesn't sit up and beg the way it should. With that kind of blind devotion to duty, they deserve everything they get.

If being pragmatic is the name of the game, it's time for your assistant to boot up Redmatica's 'Auto Sampler' and get busy.....

Hmmm, I'm just working on a demo using the Low Irish Whistle (Goliath) in Play, sounds Ok except whenever the pitch bend crosses the centre point there's a click. No matter what I tweak. I'm not sure if it's Play or the sample set, but fortunately this is a demo, and I'll be recording a whislte player for the actual part, but that's not the point...

Despite this, and despite the fact the standalone version is still silent for me (all the lights are glowing, but nobody's home, it only works within my DAW using VST), I do like the sounds.

Red, I know this is probably a grandmother/egg scenario and not relevant to all your setups, but have you tried making the Play engine LAA (Large Address Aware), I used Laatido to do this. Opinion seems divided on the need, but it cured a whole bunch of streaming pop/click problems for my setup (PC, xp 4gb ram, 32 bit, cubase SX3).

OK, that's about one million variables to sift through... Quite a task. Not to mention that Macs are better.

Naturally, it's not satisfactory that EW's customers should be expected to put their systems under a microscope, in order to find some obscure bugs in PLAY. No argument there. Now that this is out of the way, I would suggest the following:

Use a spare HD, freshly install the OS and your favourite DAW, then PLAY, to see if it still doesn't work. Pull out all cables (except for the power cord ) and use your 'puter's internal audio. Then, one by one, connect audio interface, USB and ethernet devices. Somewhere along the line, I'd expect the gremlins to surface.

Quote redleicester:

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...

As a result of this simple architecture,

...

---

Simple? Blimey. Are you sure you didn't attach a USB toaster and firewire brain scanner as well somewhere?

Quote Herewego:

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Red, I know this is probably a grandmother/egg scenario and not relevant to all your setups, but have you tried making the Play engine LAA (Large Address Aware), I used Laatido to do this. Opinion seems divided on the need, but it cured a whole bunch of streaming pop/click problems for my setup (PC, xp 4gb ram, 32 bit, cubase SX3).

---

Sadly my Grandmother must have some Scottish heritage along the line somewhere as she'd never buy eggs.... too expensive.

Laatido is a great program isn't it? Have used it on countless things and yes, I've tried it on Play. However, even if it had worked, it would have served only to show again that there's something amiss in the Play coding - afterall, if it's not working properly in standalone 64-bit mode on those slave (as it indeed fails to do), then there really is something awry.

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote Tui:

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Quote redleicester:

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...

As a result of this simple architecture,

...

---

Simple? Blimey. Are you sure you didn't attach a USB toaster and firewire brain scanner as well somewhere?

---

Nope. Just the Firewire Trouserpress.

Really is a fairly simple rig, but given the above, I am rather bored of being told I don't know what I'm doing, and that clearly it's all my fault as I don't know how to set up a kompooter properly...

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Likewise - my numerous EW packages purchased over the past year are awaiting a new computer; and this news is nothing short of disastrous - I have invested heavily in EW.

To sum up what this thread has so far revealed:

- Eastwest products do not work under 'Play'

- Eastwest have no intentions of resolving this issue so their products are effectively useless

- The reputations of Eastwests talent - including Doug Rogers, Nick Phoenix and Professor Keith O. Johnson - all party to this fiasco - are now in tatters and they should never be trusted again in any music or music-technology venture.

- Sound on Sound reviews, in not identifying and flagging this significant issue should not be trusted; and at a bare minimum the reviewer(s) of EW products should be disregarded from here on in.


This is all very interesting and informative. I for one will now look at VSL from here on in (although cautiously); and although I've being buying SOS since issue one; this strengthens my argument on another thread that SOS is going downhill with regard to their review and journalistic quality. I’ll be delighted for all of the above points above to be wrong as all we want are working products and a strong and relevant SOS; but this episode is incredibly telling and worrying all round.

Kevin.

Strangely, all I had to do was install PLAY and, er, play with it.

Then again, I have always known that I'm special.

Quote redleicester:

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Really is a fairly simple rig, but given the above, I am rather bored of being told I don't know what I'm doing, and that clearly it's all my fault as I don't know how to set up a kompooter properly...

---

Sure, but you do realise that with every bit of gear you attach to your rig, your chances of encountering an incompatibility increase accordingly?

Go on, try the bare bones approach I suggested earlier. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get PLAY to work that way.

Quote Tui:

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Quote redleicester:

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Really is a fairly simple rig, but given the above, I am rather bored of being told I don't know what I'm doing, and that clearly it's all my fault as I don't know how to set up a kompooter properly...

---

Sure, but you do realise that with every bit of gear you attach to your rig, your chances of encountering an incompatibility increase accordingly?

Go on, try the bare bones approach I suggested earlier. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get PLAY to work that way.

---

Already done chap, on one 32-bit and one 64-bit slave built from the ground up...

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

... And..? Enquiring minds want to know.

Quote Tui:

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... And..? Enquiring minds want to know.

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Sorry, thought the answer was implicit in the explanation - no joy, zip, nada, nix, naff all. Made little discernable difference, still didn't work to any reasonable standard of operation.

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Bummer. That's really bad.

Now, can you do the same with one of the Macs? That simply has got to work. When I said I never had a problem with my two Intel Macs, I honestly meant it. Up until this thread, I was unaware of the massive problems some (many?) people seem to encounter.

If I remember correctly, I think I noticed a couple of samples in SD2 that didn't play well or perhaps glitched, but considering the size of SD2, I didn't take much notice and pretty much forgot about it. Most of my libraries contain the odd duff sample (Kirk Hunter, for example), and I kind of take that for granted. Importantly, however, PLAY never gave me any real problems, but happily works alongside all the stuff I listed earlier.

Quote Pete (Conz) Connelly:

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Everything should be built to protocol that will work universally, in a way that MIDI was devised back in the early 80's. If component manufactures worked together and stuck to standards, life would be a LOT simpler for s/w developers.

---

That's exactly how it's supposed to work - it's called an API. Nothing is going to talk directly to anything - it's always going to be through several layers of abstraction. That's not to say that many APIs aren't over complex, badly documented or just plain buggy of course. There are also of course platform specific.

To other comments earlier, what hardware you have plugged into your DAW really shouldn't make any difference - but admittedly you are opening yourself up to any bugs in the associated drivers.

All of these really does sound like incredibly poor testing on EW's part. It really shouldn't be this hard - highly likely their code is just poor, also inexperience could mean they are invoking stuff in pretty non-standard ways and exposing platform bugs or they themselves are using some pretty buggy 3rd party libraries. Either way it does sound totally unacceptable.

Quote Tui:

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If I remember correctly, I think I noticed a couple of samples in SD2 that didn't play well or perhaps glitched, but considering the size of SD2, I didn't take much notice and pretty much forgot about it.

---

Aha!

Tui, do me a favour chap if you would, load up the following midi performance please:

Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130. What do you get?

If you get the drop outs, mute the following sample: 130bpm Glitched drone. What do you get now?

Cheers

Quote Kevin Nolan:

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- Sound on Sound reviews, in not identifying and flagging this significant issue should not be trusted; and at a bare minimum the reviewer(s) of EW products should be disregarded from here on in.

---

Not entirely sure I'm with you on this Kevin - reviewing software in particular is a tricky business, and can easily swing both ways: You could (as clearly Dave Stewart did), have totally plain sailing and see no issues, even if that was a million to one shot, it could still happen.

Conversely you could have crashes/bugs/issues on a machine that no one else experiences, and support staff cannot reproduce... Basically just the same as a user themselves may have a utopian experiance or a dystopian one.

I think it's a little unfair to point fingers at specific reviewers, it's not an easy exercise as anyone involved in the field will agree I'm sure, and others would be just as quick to leap on the over-cautious reviewer for being paranoid or picking holes if they covered every single itty-bitty fault found.

That said I am astonished that there have been nothing but positive reviews, given the number of issues raised on these forums and on countless others over the past 18 months, and that scant attention has been paid to looking back and wondering why.

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

Quote HugoL:

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That's exactly how it's supposed to work - it's called an API. Nothing is going to talk directly to anything - it's always going to be through several layers of abstraction.

---

The other issue for things like sample playback engines is that not all APIs are realtime safe, the audio handling code typically must not (for example) call anything that might allocate memory (Thereby causing page faults), and typically the audio code cannot even draw anything on the screen (memory management and locking issues), this sort of bug can be **HARD** to track down and its appearance can be highly system dependant. Realtime programming is a totally different mindset to writing GUI code.

Quote:

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That's not to say that many APIs aren't over complex, badly documented or just plain buggy of course. There are also of course platform specific.

---

All too true, and often all three at the same time. There are also the cases where poorly documented API behaviour changes between different versions of the 'same' operating system.

You can test till you are blue in the face, but sometimes code that worked perfectly in all your test cases, crashes and burns when released to retail customers (Had it happen, it is painful). Of course the modern practise of pushing stuff to market without an adequate set of beta and release candidate testing (It adds a year to your release cycle if you do it right) does tend to make problems with early releases more likely.

Avoid any version number ending in .0 for anything, and especially avoid 1.0 else you WILL be a beta tester.

The real test is in how the company responds to a decent bug report.

Regards, Dan.

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Audiophiles use phono leads because they are unbalanced people!

I absolutely agree Dan. It does sound EW are being less than pro-active though - you'd think even if they couldn't reproduce (and I've also experienced things going wrong you'd never expect) they'd supply select people with debug code to assist.

Quote redleicester:

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Quote Kevin Nolan:

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- Sound on Sound reviews, in not identifying and flagging this significant issue should not be trusted; and at a bare minimum the reviewer(s) of EW products should be disregarded from here on in.

---

Not entirely sure I'm with you on this Kevin - reviewing software in particular is a tricky business, and can easily swing both ways: You could (as clearly Dave Stewart did), have totally plain sailing and see no issues, even if that was a million to one shot, it could still happen.

Conversely you could have crashes/bugs/issues on a machine that no one else experiences, and support staff cannot reproduce... Basically just the same as a user themselves may have a utopian experiance or a dystopian one.

I think it's a little unfair to point fingers at specific reviewers, it's not an easy exercise as anyone involved in the field will agree I'm sure, and others would be just as quick to leap on the over-cautious reviewer for being paranoid or picking holes if they covered every single itty-bitty fault found.

That said I am astonished that there have been nothing but positive reviews, given the number of issues raised on these forums and on countless others over the past 18 months, and that scant attention has been paid to looking back and wondering why.

---

Listen - people are paying hard earned money on these products. SOS are reviewing many of them and they have mentioned nothing of this issue, let alone its severity.

If this was a Car magazine or Audiophile magazine (as ridiculous as some Audiophile issues can be) they'd hunt down the issues until they were revealed. I'm not on an SOS bashing session for the sake of it; but I was about to purchase EW Pianos partly on the basis of SOS's recent review.

SOS reviews are increasingly toothless. They should stress test these products on multiple platforms. It should not cost a lot of money to install each of the major DAWs and test plugins in them. Virtually always, SOS reviewers clearly indicate that they review software on only a single platform / DAW. That's no use to most users.

SOS claim they are a major music recording publication, but look at the disaster that is EW Play, and not a peep out of SOS. What's the actual point of them reviewing if they are not going to highlight vital issues?

EW are one of only two major orchestral sample release companies, so many people like me have invested heavily in them. This makes it all the more vital that the likes of SOS do thorough and robust reviews. But they are not. Too often their reviews are like a summary of the brochure, with nothing of substance or real world insight. This issue verifies this to be the case.

I'm honestly shocked at the severity of this issue, the apparent disinterest of EW as a company and that only a month or two ago SOS gave a great review to EW Pianos on Play. How on God's name did that reviewer not encounter this issue? It must have been the most superficial of tests.

Kevin.

Kevin, you can't pin ALL the blame on SOS. A lot of car magazines gave rave reviews to the Ford Pinto until, much later, Ralph Nader exposed a disturbing tendency for the fuel tanks to explode.

What do you think SOS is, when you demand stress testing on multiple platforms? It's a little cottage industry with a handful of full time employees. 99.9% of readers want to know about new products quickly and in as much depth as is reasonable - not 18 months after they've been launched to suit your desired "scientific peer-review" standard.

If something works OK for a reviewer on his own platform, is he really supposed to say "something wrong, surely"?

I'll concede however that in the light of widespread experiences such as this thread reveals, it might well be worth another article, underpinned by some searching questions to EW's management.

--------------------
Dynamite with a laser beam...

I have to agree though, I doesn't seem like asking too much from SOS, when we expect a major piece of software - and an expensive one at that - to get tested thoroughly on the only two universally prevalent platforms: PCs and Macs. I thought that's what we are paying our subscriptions for? If I wanted to read sales blurb, I could go to the company web sites. No, honestly, that's not good enough for "The World's Best Recording Magazine". If I had bought PLAY and couldn't get it to work on my system, I'd be fuming too.

Rousseau, is there really a file labelled "Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130"? I never knew. Strange name, though, doesn't bode well for PLAY's stability, does it. I'll give it a go later when I'm back home.

Quote Steve Hill:

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A lot of car magazines gave rave reviews to the Ford Pinto until, much later, Ralph Nader exposed a disturbing tendency for the fuel tanks to explode.

---

The difference is that (presumably) the exploding fuel tanks were not a common feature of chat on the web.

It would seem reasonable for the recent reviewer to have done some background research on the forums and to have been aware of the stability issues.

I'm finding SOS reviews to be less and less helpful. Reading a typical review (not the obvious slatings) will suggest that there may be a few issues but as far as general quality is concerned the purchase will be a good investment.

As an example consider the microphone reviews. A typical review of a 'budget' microphone will read much the same as a review of a high end system except that it will say things along the line of 'much better than the cost would suggest' or "not quite as good as the really high end but you'd have to pay a lot more to get a small increase in performance".

They never say, this microphone is ok for starting out but after you've been recording for a few years you'll wish you'd bought quality right from the start.

Increasingly the reviews have to be read 'between the lines' and opinions sought out on these forums (fora??)

J

Quote Setter:

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Quote Steve Hill:

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A lot of car magazines gave rave reviews to the Ford Pinto until, much later, Ralph Nader exposed a disturbing tendency for the fuel tanks to explode.

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The difference is that (presumably) the exploding fuel tanks were not a common feature of chat on the web.

---

No internet in those days. However, it cause a major controversy not least to due to the now infamouse "Ford Pinto Memo" which basically stated that it was cheaper to pay off any resultant law suits, arising from a fatality, than implement the fuel tank redesign. Perhaps EW have decided it is cheaper to take the heat and the criticism rather than fix the issue?

Edited by thenaturallevel (08/12/08 11:08 AM)

Quote thenaturallevel:

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No internet in those days.

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Just testing

I should have done some background research first.

J

Quote Tui:

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Rousseau, is there really a file labelled "Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130"? I never knew. Strange name, though, doesn't bode well for PLAY's stability, does it. I'll give it a go later when I'm back home.

---

There is Tui and thanks that'd be great.

Quote Setter:

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Quote Steve Hill:

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They never say, this microphone is ok for starting out but after you've been recording for a few years you'll wish you'd bought quality right from the start.

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err... isn't that what's implicit when the words "good for the money" , or "better than cost implies" and paraphrases thereof , appear ANYWHERE in a review?


reality = you get what you pay for.

it always has, and it always will
.

re: toothless SOS reviews - all credit to the management for letting a thread like this develop in its less than complimentary direction. If this was the EastWest forum, it would have been spiked by the second sentence of the first post.

As for 'reading between the lines' which seems to be the default excuse for the limp nature of most SOS reviews - that's all very well if you've some kind of insight into the MT world, but if you're a sixteen year old kid about to splash all your cash on your first mic / interface / bit of software, you don't want to be subject to the sophistries (oooh I love that word) of some been-round-the-block reviewer. Have some balls, risk offending a manufacturer and earn the respect of your paying readers - if a mic is just another Chinese bag of bolts with a new name on it, say so. If a piece of software doesn't function as advertised, say so.

Or is ad revenue always going to be king?

So many times I've read reviews of software only to think "dang, I wish I had the review version rather than the one I bought".

A case in point is Cubase SX. Early versions were PLAGUED with bugs that even a two minute use of the program would highlight, yet none of them ever seemed to affect the review machines. And these bugs were apparent on ALL systems as they were major bugs in the software, not in the system configuration.

ad revenue as king....

yeah right....

not at SOS it isn't , it never has been, and as long as Ian Gilby owns it, it never will be either..

Rousseau, I had a closer look at PLAY on my system. Some more info:

Mac Pro-8 3GHz, 8GB Apple RAM, OS 10.5.4, clocked via BNC from an Apogee AD into the Digiface.
Logic 8.0.2, I/O Buffer Size 512.
SD2 version 1.0.044. Play component version 1.0.056. PLAY preferences: Engine Memory 240 MBytes, Max Voices 256, Prime Buffer 320 kBytes, Play Buffer 384 kBytes, Engine Level 2.
Samples streamed from two software-raided Lacie FW800 d2.

For the test, I brought up a jingle I did recently. Stereo, 44.1/24. Plug-ins by Apple, Flux, PSP, URS, Schwa, Voxengo. The file has, open and loaded, 11 instances of PLAY, even though the actual tune features only the "Nepalese Two-Headed Drum" preset. Voice Limit is 16, the same as on the other, unused presets. Result: No problems, except for the GUI that turns almost entirely white when I enable Logic's window-linking feature and select a different channel. Annoying, but no big deal. This might have been fixed in a recent update.

To see if PLAY falls over or does anything strange, I added some voices - 8th and 16th notes - to all previously unused instances of PLAY. The instruments used:
Nepalese Two-Headed Drum
11 Bowl Gongs
Brake Drums
Chinese Cymbal
Finger Cymbal 1
Finger Cymbal 2
Finger Cymbal 3
Finger Cymbal 4
Giant Buddha Bell
Gongs 24inch to 35inch
Gongs 7inch to 22inch
Again, no problems, except for the GUI strangeness I mentioned earlier. To be sure, I soloed and grouped all 11 instances of PLAY, to listen for any glitches. There were none.

Now the file you mentioned, "Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130", which appears on my screen as "Glitch Ma XXXitch 44 130.ewi". I loaded it, in addition to the other 11 instances of PLAY. Everything seemed well, and I got different instruments on different midi channels, as expected. For the test, I was just about to record a simple drum pattern on channel 4, when... Logic crashed. Whoooooooooooooops!

So, I re-launched Logic by loading up the same tune again (I also had to re-launch Drumcore, since it is a Rewire client). I loaded "Glitch Ma XXXitch 44 130.ewi", and recorded a few burping-type noises on channel 1. No problems, they played back in sync with the rest of the tune. I then tried to record some drums on channel 4, this time without problems. They played back in sync, no glitches. Logic held up as well, 100%.

I then loaded "130 bpm glitched drone.ewi", replacing the previous multi. No problems. It played in sync with the tune, no glitches.

There you have it. On my system, with a version of PLAY that is probably outdated (I haven't checked for a while), I only encountered serious issues once with the multi you mentioned (I didn't try other multies, since I generally don't use them). However, individual presets seem to always load and play OK.

Quote Tui:

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Bummer. That's really bad.

Now, can you do the same with one of the Macs? That simply has got to work. When I said I never had a problem with my two Intel Macs, I honestly meant it. Up until this thread, I was unaware of the massive problems some (many?) people seem to encounter.

---

To which effect I earlier said:

Quote Redleicester:

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PS - For my detractors amongst those who know me, I should also be at pains to point out the Macs are not mine.

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'Fraid not chap - I'd probably wreck some warranty, scare myself or trigger the wrath of the Job's Deity if I dared open a Mac, and the MacPros I have seen die are not mine, they're at colleagues studios...

Quote Tui:

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Rousseau, I had a closer look at PLAY on my system. Some more info:

Mac Pro-8 3GHz, 8GB Apple RAM, OS 10.5.4, clocked via BNC from an Apogee AD into the Digiface.
Logic 8.0.2, I/O Buffer Size 512.
SD2 version 1.0.044. Play component version 1.0.056. PLAY preferences: Engine Memory 240 MBytes, Max Voices 256, Prime Buffer 320 kBytes, Play Buffer 384 kBytes, Engine Level 2.
Samples streamed from two software-raided Lacie FW800 d2.

For the test, I brought up a jingle I did recently. Stereo, 44.1/24. Plug-ins by Apple, Flux, PSP, URS, Schwa, Voxengo. The file has, open and loaded, 11 instances of PLAY, even though the actual tune features only the "Nepalese Two-Headed Drum" preset. Voice Limit is 16, the same as on the other, unused presets. Result: No problems, except for the GUI that turns almost entirely white when I enable Logic's window-linking feature and select a different channel. Annoying, but no big deal. This might have been fixed in a recent update.

To see if PLAY falls over or does anything strange, I added some voices - 8th and 16th notes - to all previously unused instances of PLAY. The instruments used:
Nepalese Two-Headed Drum
11 Bowl Gongs
Brake Drums
Chinese Cymbal
Finger Cymbal 1
Finger Cymbal 2
Finger Cymbal 3
Finger Cymbal 4
Giant Buddha Bell
Gongs 24inch to 35inch
Gongs 7inch to 22inch
Again, no problems, except for the GUI strangeness I mentioned earlier. To be sure, I soloed and grouped all 11 instances of PLAY, to listen for any glitches. There were none.

Now the file you mentioned, "Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130", which appears on my screen as "Glitch Ma XXXitch 44 130.ewi". I loaded it, in addition to the other 11 instances of PLAY. Everything seemed well, and I got different instruments on different midi channels, as expected. For the test, I was just about to record a simple drum pattern on channel 4, when... Logic crashed. Whoooooooooooooops!

So, I re-launched Logic by loading up the same tune again (I also had to re-launch Drumcore, since it is a Rewire client). I loaded "Glitch Ma XXXitch 44 130.ewi", and recorded a few burping-type noises on channel 1. No problems, they played back in sync with the rest of the tune. I then tried to record some drums on channel 4, this time without problems. They played back in sync, no glitches. Logic held up as well, 100%.

I then loaded "130 bpm glitched drone.ewi", replacing the previous multi. No problems. It played in sync with the tune, no glitches.

There you have it. On my system, with a version of PLAY that is probably outdated (I haven't checked for a while), I only encountered serious issues once with the multi you mentioned (I didn't try other multies, since I generally don't use them). However, individual presets seem to always load and play OK.

---

Interesting. Why 11 instances of Play? Why not use one multitimbrally as it's designed to do?

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

What I meant was, can't you get hold of a spare HD, install OS X and your DAW, then PLAY, to see if it still doesn't work? No need to open any boxes - us Macoids never do such scary things anyway.

Quote redleicester:

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Interesting. Why 11 instances of Play? Why not use one multitimbrally as it's designed to do?

---

11 instances, because I thought I was going to use the sounds from those presets for several ethnic-type jingles. Basically, I worked from a self-made template. In the event, I only used that Nepalese drum sample in PLAY, and all other percussion sounds came from Drumcore and Kontakt. So, 11 is a rather arbitrary number.

You say that PLAY is designed to be used multitimbrally. I'm not sure about that. I remember reading on their forums that EW actually advises against using multies, but encourages their customers to use individual sample banks whenever possible. I forgot the exact reason, something to do with memory allocation, or something.

Also, I don't like it when software tries to make composing and sound-design decisions for me - I'd rather pick and choose the sounds myself, thank you!

Quote Tui:

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Quote redleicester:

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Interesting. Why 11 instances of Play? Why not use one multitimbrally as it's designed to do?

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11 instances, because I thought I was going to use the sounds from those presets for several ethnic-type jingles. Basically, I worked from a self-made template. In the event, I only used that Nepalese drum sample in PLAY, and all other percussion sounds came from Drumcore and Kontakt. So, 11 is a rather arbitrary number.

You say that PLAY is designed to be used multitimbrally. I'm not sure about that. I remember reading on their forums that EW actually advises against using multies, but encourages their customers to use individual sample banks whenever possible. I forgot the exact reason, something to do with memory allocation, or something.

Also, I don't like it when software tries to make composing and sound-design decisions for me - I'd rather pick and choose the sounds myself, thank you!

---

Doug and Nick have indeed on several occasions espoused using multiple instances, which rather defeats the object of their marketing it as a multi-timbral instrument!

So you load a single instance of Kontakt per sound you're going to use too?

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Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.