Calling knowledgeable Mac people!

[kouly]

I'd forgotten she is using an iMac. It is still not a machine I would recommend for a serious producer. My advice is to get a Mac Pro asap. Easier said than done Im sure. Just make sure to fill it with 10K or faster drives. So just to afirm it is probably your hardware that is causing you problems, (your asking too much from it). I hope you get something going soon.

[mazz]

It would seem that the drives can spit out the samples as fast as they like but at some point the CPU is going to not be able to handle all that information. I'd be willing to be that the throughput on these drives can outrun a slightly less modern CPU.Mazz

[nickbatzdorf]

Kouly, you don't need to use 10K or faster drives. They can't hurt, but as I said, they don't make as much difference as one would expect from the faster seek time specs. Splitting the library among a couple of drives is a better idea - and not in a RAID 0, because throughput isn't the issue even with FireWire 400 or USB 2; seek time is what makes the difference. Mazz is right that there's more going on.Also, there's nothing wrong with that iMac - it'll run a certain amount no problem. You just need additional machines to load a whole orchestra in real time.

[rlcmusic]

Thanks again to everybody who posted on this thread. Rachel

[zircon]

Nick, when you say 2gb isn't enough to run 16 EWQLSO instruments, I do hope you mean "instances". Not "instruments". I have been able to easily load 50+ INSTRUMENTS across 3-4 instances with no real problems, and I've been using 2GB of RAM. Realtime playback isn't perfect but renders are fine.Remember, EWQLSO came out what.. 5 years ago? It might be demanding but the Silver and Gold versions aren't THAT bad considering they've been in use for years now on far weaker computers than we have now.

[nickbatzdorf]

I didn't realize you were running Silver. That's different, since it doesn't have any release trails and the voice count is probably 20% of Gold or Platinum as a result, plus the programs are smaller and there are fewer articulations to load.And three or four instances is 24 or 32 instruments, not 50. I can probably load between 24 and 30 Platinum instruments on a tweaked out custom 2.8GHz P4 slave I have, but that's really pushing it, and with it that full they tend to click and pop. That machine has 2GB in it, but I'm not running a sequencer on the same machine, and those aren't all the big keyswitch programs. Your iMac may have a little more power, but not much more.

[nickbatzdorf]

The subtext is that Pentium 4 machines were less powerful than the multi-processor machines now, but the Kontakt player doesn't take advantage of all those cores. And I'm not sure the iMac has a Core2 Duo?

[mazz]

Hi Nick,I'm pretty sure the machine in question in the original post is a G5 iMac. That certainly changes things a bit.

[nickbatzdorf]

Ah. Yeah, G5 iMacs are somewhere in the same ballpark as the P4 2.8, but probably not quite as powerful - at least not with the software we're running.You know, a lot of this depends on the combination of things you're running. If I combine VSL and Kontakt on my G5, for example, things slow way down.