Well....much to my resisting the idea....yesterday I plunked down a few hundred $$ to double my computer's RAM (I have nothing against buying more RAM....I just hate dumping money on a system I know I'll be replacing in a few months).

I don't know if this will solve the clicks and pops but I'll keep everyone posted as I'm sure everyone is so damn curious about what happens next.

If low RAM is the culprit (I don't really consider 3 gigs low) then hopefully my issues should go away.

I am getting some pops and clicks too with my VI. But do you hear them whem you record the music on a cd?

Same for me, more clicks and pops than before, very strange, and this is not the case when I load an old VSL instrument.
Please VSL team, could you show up a little bit more on this subject ? Anytime someone is speaking about this kind of problems you seems absent [[;)]]

Dear customers,

about Mac OSX RAM Management:

as explained before by chriskard, physical memory is paged to the so called Swap-file (in 4096k blocks), whenever physical memory is being over subscribed. The swap file is located somewhere on the system HD (its estimated size is shown as VM = virtual memory). Continuous swapping will affect the system performance and the performance of all applications - errors might occur "without cause".

The situation will become worse when it happens that sample data is swapped! The access time of an internal HD is way too slow in order to play back audio samples smoothly (that is why the beginning of the samples is loaded into RAM - - the rest of the sample is streamed from HD). Result: samples won´t play back properly anymore = clicks and pops will occur.
(There is a mechanism called memory protection for data that should not be swapped, but to my knowledge this protection can be overruled by the OS).

Since excessive swapping makes an impact on the performance it is necessary to install more RAM to avoid it.

The actual number of page out´s is displayed either in activity monitor OR in the last line of the header in Terminal when entering the UNIX command <top>. The UNIX command <vm_stat> provides more detailed information about the swapping activity of OS X.

Moreover OS X RAM Management tries to allocate free memory ideally, it will analyze which data is used frequently and give important data a higher priority (as chriskard already mentioned). This behaviour explains why VI and other applications appear to perform better with increasing time of usage and it also explains why OS X will require almost all RAM, no matter how much is installed.
Apparently Mac OS X RAM management is not optimized for RAM intense realtime operations which need to handle a large number of very short files.

@chriskard said:

I got the information from an Apple engineer that the more RAM you have installed the better, because when physical RAM is still free, the Swap File Technology starts to use this free ram for its page file. So the samples are just moved from the Real memory of the thread "VSL-Server" to another area in the physical RAM.

Yes!

Some customers said that problems with clicks and pops would not occur with EXS. But most EXS programs aren´t as large as Vienna Instruments matrices or presets can be! Therefore significantly less RAM is needed and its rather unlikely to run into swapping problems. We did some tests with EXS where we forced the system to swap data from EXS and it showed the same behaviour like VI does when physical memory is overwritten (clicks and pops).

The only solution_at the moment_is to add more RAM (if possible). Hopefully the situation will change with upcoming operating systems and improved memory protection- and we are also investigating in order to find a solution (which might however reduce the possibilities in VI to load many samples).

It is also recommendable to use VI as efficiently as possible and to create your own customized matrices and presets out of the patches you really need for your arrangement and to remove all unused (!) playing techniques. The factory presets are extremely "RAM intense" and therefore they are not always the best choice - but they are great examples for showing the keyswitch-possibilities and functionalities of VI programs.

Besides all of this we mentioned that VI does not perform as good in Digital Performer 5.12 as it does in Logic Pro 7.2.3 or Cubase 4.

Best regards,

Maya VINSON

Thanks Maya for all you valuable informations "-)

Two questions:

1 Why didn't you provide the perf legato patch p & f separated ? sometime we want to play piano, sometime louder, why can't we load only the desired p or f
(as discuted in this post Herb said the computers can handle that, the fact that you can load it as separate on the VSL was only a matter of slow computer)
http://community.vsl.co.at/viewtopic.php?t=11000

2 What are the pops craks plips heard on some sound files even if there is only one instrument loaded, plenty of ram and a super fast computer ?
http://community.vsl.co.at/viewtopic.php?t=11252
it sounds like a looped click every 1.7 secondes.

Maya,

what do you mean, VI doesn't perform as well in DP 5 than in Logic? What kind of performance boost is there in loading VI in Logic instead of DP? Is there a big difference?

Thanks,
Jerome

@chriskard said:

I got the information from an Apple engineer that the more RAM you have installed the better, because when physical RAM is still free, the Swap File Technology starts to use this free ram for its page file. So the samples are just moved from the Real memory of the thread "VSL-Server" to another area in the physical RAM.

Yes!

Some customers said that problems with clicks and pops would not occur with EXS. But most EXS programs aren´t as large as Vienna Instruments matrices or presets can be! Therefore significantly less RAM is needed and its rather unlikely to run into swapping problems. We did some tests with EXS where we forced the system to swap data from EXS and it showed the same behaviour like VI does when physical memory is overwritten (clicks and pops).

The only solution_at the moment_is to add more RAM (if possible). Hopefully the situation will change with upcoming operating systems and improved memory protection- and we are also investigating in order to find a solution (which might however reduce the possibilities in VI to load many samples).

It is also recommendable to use VI as efficiently as possible and to create your own customized matrices and presets out of the patches you really need for your arrangement and to remove all unused (!) playing techniques. The factory presets are extremely "RAM intense" and therefore they are not always the best choice - but they are great examples for showing the keyswitch-possibilities and functionalities of VI programs.

Besides all of this we mentioned that VI does not perform as good in Digital Performer 5.12 as it does in Logic Pro 7.2.3 or Cubase 4.

Best regards,

Maya VINSON

maya,
thanks for your explanations.
what you point out may be the reason for the problems that some people experience (who work with large arrangements and really stress their system). however, it cannot be the reasons for the problems i (and as it seems also others) have.
to sum it up once more:
i experience these dropouts loading a single matrix (20mb!!!) and having according to activity monitor 1.5 gb free! ram. i have checked this in the meantime and activity monitor shows 0 poge-outs while these dropouts occur!
it definitively has nothing to do with the size of the instruments either since i can run _much_ larger exs instruments than the simplest vi matrices which already cause problems.
since the vienna instruments apparently work fine for most users it must be a more specific problem (maybe some software-incompatibility, ...). i would be happy to provide you with information to figure out what cuases this. but this requires that you take our input seriously and don´t go on presenting possible causes that evidently contradict our experience.
best regards
kai

@Kai said:

since the vienna instruments apparently work fine for most users it must be a more specific problem (maybe some software-incompatibility, ...). i would be happy to provide you with information to figure out what cuases this. but this requires that you take our input seriously and don´t go on presenting possible causes that evidently contradict our experience.
best regards
kai

@ Laurent & Jerome: I will answer your questions as soon as possible

@ Kai:

We take every input seriously. Fact is however that we were unable so far to reproduce the issues you mentioned on our test machines here (iMac PPC 1.8 GHz/2 GB RAM and Motu 828 FW interface, Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 Ghz/9 GB RAM with an Apogee Rosetta 200, G5 PPC 2.5 Dual/6 GB RAM and RME Audiohardware).
Vienna Instruments are also used intensely in 3 different recording studios in Vienna and I contacted all of them in order to find out if they experienced similar problems. But nothing.... everything runs smoothly there.
We do our best to offer an efficient support and to solve the problems of our customers but neither do we have the (wo)manpower nor the responsibility to test every possible hardware/software-configuration on the planet. Sometimes a problem is simply not reproducible.

We can help you to find out what might cause a problem on your setup by sharing our experiences with you:

I remember at least 3 cases where Vienna Instruments showed a similar behaviour (playback errors with only one or a small number of patches loaded) and the cause was a broken RAM stick in each case.
RAM sticks of different manufactures might also have an impact of RAM usage and the overall performance. In another case this was the reason why errors occurred randomly on this setup, mainly in combination with VI and other samplers (understandably since VI is extremely RAM intense).

Regards,

Maya

Hi,

I also have a problem with VSE crackles and popping. I just got it on Friday, and I've tried all of the different buffer settings I could think of. Any time I play more than two instruments at once the problem starts.

My specs:
G5 2.0 ghz dual processor, 4 gigs RAM
OSX 10.4.8, Logic 7.2.3
The samples are on a seperate hard drive

I haven't yet tried reinstalling yet, so I'll give that a try and see if it works.

One more quick note, after reading this thread I switched Logic's audio drive over to built in audio and everything worked perfectly... So perhaps it's an interface issue. I have a Presonus Firebox and I've never this issue with K2 or EXS...

Same here. I am also using a Presonus product (Firepod). I can only use VI if I switch to internal audio. Presouns says it's Vienna Instruments issue and VI says it's presonus issue. Bottom line.....I can't use this software with my interface. And just last night....my patches and matrixes disappeared. ( In all fairness this last issue could totally be my fault). I am totally frustrated but I love the potential of this product if I can get everything to work right on my system.

Tim

IMac G5 2.0
1.5 gig RAM
presonus firepod
250 gig la cie
160 gig la cie

Maya, thank you for your thorough explanation. But the bottom line is still, like Kai pointed out, that the Vienna Instruments exhibit this "pop" behaviour with just about every patch, until the patch has been "run in", whereas I can run a 10GB Synthogy Ivory or Native Instruments Akoustik Piano, without ever running into this problem. This means that this is not an OS X issue, but a Vienna Instrument streaming engine issue... [*-)]

It isn't a catastrophy, because so far I have always been able to make a perfect render, either with offline or online bounce, but still, I think it is something you need to look in to.

simon, i've pointed out earlier that one had to compare the number of (loaded) samples (not the GB of the library) and obviously other libraryies use a different size for the perload buffer. IIRC total number of samples was 2000 and preloadbuffer 348 KB, whereas a single loaded legato patch has 3000 or more samples and a preload buffer of 64 KB
christian

Just out of interest, the samples are already bundled together into one file, right? I know they are as far as we're concerned, but Andrea's routine to consolidate the EXS files made quite a difference, and I'm just wondering if the OS sees the samples the same way.

What about when you just play the piano and the harp from VSE? I still get clicks and pops with only the piano pedal up and normal harp patches loaded. Even when I tried the ram management feature I still get the same clicks and pops.

On more quick question: Have Mac users using other VI collections been complaining about these issues or just people using SE?

nick, one of the reasons to *bundle the files* was to avoid the high amount of filehandles (in the sense of one for each .wav files in exs instruments) which has roughly the same effect as the merged instruments.
christian

tgfoo, i know it can be annoying to locate the culprit, but there are audio interfaces working very well (eg. apogee, RME) and others which don't.
althogh the RME fireface (as example) works in most cases even if chained with a harddrive i would not recommend it. if i read your post correctly, you already confirmed the issue dosn't show up with internal audio.

i've formerly posted some comments to firewire in general and connecting certain devices - every device connected to a firewire controller is sending a request for bandwidth, so does your harddisk and your soundcard (and the controller itself of course).
the Vienna Instruments player requests data from the operating system, the OS from the drive. if the drive does not get enough bandwidth now there is nothing VI can do to change this and it's up to the respective drivers to allow smooth side-by-side operation of various devices.

eg. firewire video cameras announce themselves as *live devices* and receive all bandwidth they need, all other devices on the bus now have to use what remains ...
christian

Deal Vienna guys (and girl),

I think that so far all you've been doing is blaming the problems on everyone else except yourself.

While I'm glad you show pride and confidence in your product, all that we're asking is that you ackowledge that there is the possibility that something might be up on your end and that you have your software guys look into it seriously.

There are several of us chiming in here, and probably a much larger number of users who simply don't post or check this site, and that silently deal with the issue.

The fact that these issues do not appear in any other soft sampler (EXS24, Kontakt2, HALion, SampleTank etc.) regardless of the size or complexity of the instruments seem to indicate that VSL VI (and particularly something within VSL SE) might be to blame.

So please....look into it! I really don't care if your local studio guys are not reporting any issues....I assure you that the problem is very real and very annoying.

Thanks guys (and the lovely Maya).

midphase, apologies ...

@Another User said:

The fact that these issues do not appear in any other soft sampler (EXS24, Kontakt2, HALion, SampleTank etc.) regardless of the size or complexity of the instruments seem to indicate

neither *regardless of the size* (of what?) *or complexity* is a valid statement.
clearly Vienna Instruments Libraries are the far most big and complex sample libraries around.
you can easily receive similar or even the same effects with a huge amount of VSL exs libraries loaded, but of course you cannot know this, because you don't have some.

i'd ask you to take all components into consideration including but not limited to hardware, software and the overall system before indicating something without knowing the whole story.
christian

@Another User said:

nick, one of the reasons to *bundle the files* was to avoid the high amount of filehandles (in the sense of one for each .wav files in exs instruments) which has roughly the same effect as the merged instruments.

Understood. This was the successor to the Evyn Evans hack to increase the restriction to the number of open files in OS X 10.3. But Redmatica's Consolidation routine also had some other benefits if I remember right. I assumed that you've done the same thing in the V.I. Player, but I was just checking.