then:



From this, I can only conclude that you really weren't interested in knowing what the load time was at all, except perhaps to simply 'stir the pot'.

Nice, streaming data is definitely the way to go! In addition to streaming, I wish Yamaha would support Akai & VST samples. Unfortunately Yamaha only supports its own proprietary format.

Quote "From this, I can only conclude that you really weren't interested in knowing what the load time was at all, except perhaps to simply 'stir the pot'."

Yep !!

So Ty4 will take about a minute longer to power up. But once the boot up is over (and until it is switched off again) the voices based on that gigabyte will be immediately available whenever required to be played. So it seems (to my simple logic) there's no practical difference between the 2 methods ie. streaming or not. Is that a valid viewpoint or am I missing something?
I'm not trying to promote one over the other, just am interested in a bit more detail in the thinking behind the questions.

john

Hi John.

Lets take the Tyros first....
Basically the Tyros loads the data at around 570KB/s the first time, which means it takes upwards of half and hour to load your sounds. That's half an hour you have to sit there loading sounds one by one to create that 1GB bank. After that point then everything is instantly available, minus the 1 minute it adds to to the bootup time. So, not all that bad other than the fact that if you want to unload, replace or add a new sound, it's going to be very slow at doing it.

Now to the Mediastation,.
Streaming is a very different animal altogether. The upper limit to how much data you can load is very much so unknown because the system does not have to load the entire sound to RAM ever. Look at it this way, let say I load a 4GB Piano sound, that does not mean 4GB of memory is needed. Only a few MB from each sample that makes up the entire sound will be loaded to RAM. This allows the RAM to provide the sound instantly when you press the key, and give enough time for the hard disk to find the rest of the sample and stream that data just in time as you play in realtime.

So, just how much data you can load is very much so unknown but you can be sure it's many many times the 1GB limit the Tyros has. I have 4GB of RAM in my mediastation which is shared memory between VSTi's, the OS and everything else. That 4GB of RAM also serves my 15GB sample library I use. So as you can see, it's not really possible to work out what the upper limit is.

Loading times for adding new sounds and unloading sounds is likley to only take milliseconds.

I uploaded a video to YouTube a few months ago you should check out. You really get to see how fas the Mediastation is at loading sounds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwqnVgNO4bQ

Regards
James.

James thank you for the demo & explaination on loading sounds.

James,
Yep good way to do it...BUT, anything, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobody's fault (Quote from a movie!) that crunches the CPU during live play...enough that the CPU can't get the sound into RAM...and...Dropout happens.
The OS and complete system must be optimized and have safeguards to try to prevent this.

But, it can happen in the right situation.

IMHO, with Windows this is more concern than Linux? The CPU speed and all other aspects must be way overkill to hopefully prevent this.

Then, what about very heavy polyphony????
And who can really predict how many notes may need to go at the same time?

Lee S.

Hi James,
Many thanks for taking the time to explain the above and illustrating the other issues involved. Appreciate it

Regards, john
from a cold UK and you are probably in a far snowier Ireland.

Lee, I NEVER had any issues with dropouts, or timing glitches when streaming with the MS.

In some Combo patches (multi-instrument patches) I had up to 4 VST's/Giga samples streaming, and playing two-handed chordal patterns. No problems at all.

And these were being played over the top of audio/midi backing tracks....

To give you deeper info, the CPU I had was a 2.6 g dual core AMD chip, with 6 gig of ram. So nothing out of the ordinary.

If a user of an MS REALLY wanted to go heavy on streaming, they ALWAYS have the option of increasing the CPU and RAM on any given MS system.

An option NOT available on any "fixed hardware" keyboard.

Truly, dropouts and audio glitches just don't happen on the MS

Dennis

Hi Lee



It's more like down to your own doing than anything else. There are no unexpected spikes in CPU usage under linux as it's not going to start running processes in the background like Windows does all on it's own.

So really any drop outs you experience are caused by your own doing and the fact your running far too much at the same time for the resources you have.



About the only thing you can tweak is the latency buffer. There's nothing else that can or needs to be optimised. But your right, drop outs can happen in the right situation. For example, Spectrasonics Omnisphere would bring the best of PC's to their knees.

I guess it's a matter of getting to know the system and know it's limitations. If you find your the type of user that's running into problems, or the VSTi's you prefer are all hungry ones. Then an upgrade of the resources would be needed to work efficiently and without drop outs.

Take Domenico for example. His personal keyboard is running on the Asrock 770Extreme3, 6 Cores, DDR3 and he's got RAID with two 10,000RPM HHD's. lol.... power junkie.



Yes, totally. As I mentioned above, Linux runs very flat, there's nothing unexpected. The only increases in the system resources are your own doing and what your running.



If all your running are samples, then your poly count will be hundreds of notes. It's far far beyond any closed workstation or arranger, that's for sure.

Regards
James