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.

By the way, it looks to me like you really do have to take all the components into consideration. Right now I have a Metric Halo 2882 box hooked up with a MOTU PCI-424 card in an aggregate device.

Just for the heck of it I doubled a bunch of parts in the sequence I have open to see if more than two instruments would click, and they definitely don't.

So I have an Ivory Italian Grand going, and then the following VSL Preset Level 2 programs (the kitchen sink programs with everything): solo VLC, solo BSN, solo flute. That's all inside Logic, and all running through an Altiverb Phillips Hall (2.8 secs). Then I have two stand-alone V.I. Players running outside Logic, one running solo vln and one running solo bass (both Level 2 again).

When I bring the stereo outs of a slave computer into Logic I do get a couple of pops, but muting the MIDI part going to the slave eliminates them.

In the meantime that's three massive VSL instruments alongside the biggest Italian Grand program inside Logic, plus two massive VSL instruments outside Logic.

Now I'm going to close this browser and see whether that gets rid of the clicks and pops...

[returning]

...and either it did or closing Activity Monitor did - but it's on the edge, because the first time I played the sequence it clicked, then I turned off Altiverb and it stopped, and I turned Altiverb back on and it's now playing.

2x2.5 G5, 8GB of RAM. 256 sample buffer.

Oh, and I also turned off Remote Desktop Connection for the Windows slave. It's still getting MIDI Over LAN, however, so the gigabit ethernet connection is still live.

VSL guys (and Maya)[:)], your arguments are becoming pretty thin here... Are you saying that playing a single VSL patch, playing back 1-2 stereo voices at the same time, which causes random clicks when played for the first minutes, is more "complex" than hitting all of my white keys (more or less) on a chromatically sampled piano? So, playing back 30x44.100x2 samples per second, is less demanding than playing back 2x44.100x2 samples? C'mon...

I, like midphase am a LITTLE tired that you blame audio interfaces and harddrives, OS X etc., no matter if this problem occurs on a host of different hardware. I will give you this much, that I am currently using a firewire interface from m-audio. This might not be the most super pro interface and it does use FW (although you say that RME, firewire or not, would be fine), but doesn't it seem rather odd that all other sample playback engines work fine, despite my silly m-audio interface?

I will try this when I switch to a MOTU PCIe solution, and see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, OK, so your sample engine isn't working well with many soundcards, unlike Kontakt 2, EXS24, Synthogy etc etc. If it does, there is a problem with the Vienna playback engine across the board. Either way, something IS bad in the VI engine. I am not a programmer, so I don't have the faintest clue about what it is. Somehow, I suspect the "server" design concept to be the culprit here though. Your engine basically runs as some strange (??) daemon connected to an AU instrument in some way (feel free to explain the concept in detail, since I don't know much about it, I am just guessing from what I see in the Activity Monitor and how the "server" takes a long time to load the first instance).

You mention that other playback engines might use bigger buffer sizes. Well, if so, give us users the choice to increase the buffer size in the engine, if that is what does the trick.

simon, i'm under the impression you don't like the arguments and therefore reiterate some details divorced from context ...

from back to forth: increasing the preload buffer means higher usage of RAM -> expected immediate response: i can't load the instruments on my computer.

you mentioning you're not a programmer and i have to admit i'm a poor if not actually no C++ programmer, but i can assure you: the engine and it's design is pretty brilliant.

if you get another motu (possibly actually on a mac) hopefully the drivers are working flawless - something one can not say about all drivers for this devices.

please consider we are not blaming any sound card or operating system or method of connecting a harddrive - i just want to explain in words as simple as possible the context for performance of a computer for certain combinations you should prefer or avoid if you need or like a good audio system.

in a nutshell: average computers can play less articulations from less demanding libraries at a given performance, more demanding libraries with more articulations require more than an average computer.

there are a few, but often decisive factors a sample library producer can only influence up to a certain pont - an example is the newest *pro application update* from apple, i'd assume they wouldn't provide it if everything works also fine without it, another one the still applying limit of gigastudio to 1 GB, the limit of number of exs instruments, ect ... endless list

of course also VSL is continuously developing to provide the best possible performance for our users, but also i'm trying to shed some light on various other general conditions which should not be ignored.

christian

@Another User said:

there are a few, but often decisive factors a sample library producer can only influence up to a certain pont - an example is the newest *pro application update* from apple, i'd assume they wouldn't provide it if everything works also fine without it, another one the still applying limit of gigastudio to 1 GB, the limit of number of exs instruments, ect ... endless list

of course also VSL is continuously developing to provide the best possible performance for our users, but also i'm trying to shed some light on various other general conditions which should not be ignored.

christian

It just seems like it doesn't matter how much evidence you are provided from users which all have the same problems with very well equipped machines, the only reaction we get is: This is an OS X problem, the VSL player is flawless.

simon, we have a reference machine here almost identical to the one you mention, and it is actually in an extraordinary bad condition (regarding a clean system and the amount of applications installed) and it plays really huge performances flawlessly - so one SHOULD assume something else is in the game if a single instrument pops or klicks, right?

a single patch runs even on an old G4 1,25 (also somehow devasted softwarewise) without any problem.

so i really don't know what VSL had to admit - if you don't like to consider points from above, it is your decision, but then please don't blame VSL to be responsible for a certain state of your system.
christian

That's it, I give up...

Simon, the reason I double-checked and posted above is to establish that there's more to the story than just "something is wrong with the V.I. Player." I think that if my machine is working fine, there must be another factor causing people these problems.

Note that I was able to get my machine to click and pop as soon as I had the PCI-424 card receiving audio from a slave machine. It stopped doing that after I turned Altiverb off and back on again, but now I wonder if that couldn't have something to do with it.

It could just be a matter of breaking the camel's back too, and what makes it hard to track things like this down is that every machine will click and pop under a heavy enough load.

Nick, as we already have established, it is not a performance issue, since it can happen with any minor patch no matter the buffer size of your audio card and so forth. AND the fact that all other sample players don't exhibit this behaviour. And if a dual 2.66 Ghz machine with 5 GB RAM isn't enough for VI to play back one stereo stream, then something is seriously wrong[:)] There is something wrong with the VI engine - period. Just because this behaviour doesn't show on every single setup doesn't mean that there can't be something wrong with a piece of software. It may be a combination of software and hardware and drivers yes, but the thing still remains that this is a problem with the VSL engine only and not all the other streaming sample engines. I don't care if VSL coded the engine in the proper way, and that somehow all the other companies have found a workaround to make their engine work in OS X as it should, the fact is that there is a problem.

While I don't expect the VSL people to admit at once that there is something wrong, I DO expect a response more along the lines of "we will have our programmers look into it" instead of the response we are getting at the moment, which is so unlike VSL.

Simon, do you have Boot Camp with Windows on that machine? That would be an interesting test.

And I'm going to check the PCI-424 theory.

Nick, no BootCamp here. When I tried it back in september it didn't work very well with my bluetooth keyboard - ie. I ended up not being able to boot anything but Windows XP until I plugged in an USB keyboard to get into the Macs boot menu... So I am a bit anxious to do that again.

But why would that be interesting? The PC version of the engine may very well not exhibit these problems but that doesn't prove anything. Or it may have, and it wouldn't prove anything either, would it?

It wouldn't prove anything, other than that maybe you can run the PC version and not get clicks and pops on your machine. [:)]

By the way, the PCI-424 card isn't causing clicks and pops on my machine. Evidently it was just running out of horsepower that did it - which is understandable with all that stuff going on.

So the next question is why my machine isn't clicking and popping like the others in this thread. I know it's not because I'm smarter than anyone else, and Kays proves that it's not the California sun.

Hi all,

I posted all KNOWN reasons, why clicks and pops might occur on Mac, regarding unknown problems I already said:

@Another User said:

we are also investigating in order to find a solution

However this might take a while since the problems occur randomly.

Best,

Maya

@Nick Batzdorf said:

I know it's not because I'm smarter than anyone else, ...

Hmmmmmm, it seems you are... [;)]

Maya

Here is a word for those who have suffered from this problem with hopes that you will find relief as I did from JWL. Also I learned from my precious wife that any firewire device has to share the same built in firewire controller. Lesson-Only use one firewire device if it requires a large bandwidth. I am a very happy guy now.

Dear JWL:

We thank you for a suggestion that made sense. I did not know that because I had the Fireface 800 connected to the FW 400 port and the Rocstor HD with the VSL SE library connected to the FW 800 port that they shared the same bus and obviously VSL does not like to share. When I hooked the Rocstor up to the USB port and left the Fireface 800 alone on the FW 400 port, end of pops, and end of sound dropouts. Now I am kickin it. Many, many thanks. [:D] [[:|]] [H] [[;)]]

Power Mac dual 2.5 ghz with 4.5 gb RAM Rocstor ext HD USB port with VSL SE library and Fireface 800 on FW 400 port

Is that a USB 2 port for you external hard drive???

Tim