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Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



Ended up returning the laptop as it was just too drat noisy. On top of that I realized that I will never have a laptop with enough ram for the orchestra stuff I'm doing. I'll just use remote desktop with an air or something.



That's from loading 2 drums, 2 violins, 2nd violins, a viola, a cello, a cello section, 2 trumpets, and a french horn. So 11 instrument patches. And I still need to add in pretty much the entire lower end of contrabasses, trombones, euphoniums, and tubas, not to mention woodwinds.

So I ended up ordering 128 gb of ram.

Additionally, I stumbled across this: https://ddramdisk.store/. It's explained in the link but they're taking cheap and plentiful ddr3 ram and have added a pcie interface. Incredible thing is that because they're using many more lower density memory modules, the random read/write speeds are incredibly fast. As in 10-100x faster than nvme m.2 drives. They say at the bottom that they're working on an 8x pcie version and it's twice as fast. I think I may reach out to them to ask about that as it's pretty awesome.

Also gently caress windows. I wanted to clone my 1 tb m.2 to the new 4 tb one I got, and it turns out that windows had managed to create some horrible amalgamation of both GPT and MBR partition tables. Removing either one caused the data to be unreadable. I spent around 5 hours messing with parted magic trying to get it clone-able but ended up having to just reinstall windows. At least I made a backup of all the data. Just finally finished reinstalling everything.

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Laserjet 4P
Mar 28, 2005

What does it mean?
Fun Shoe
by default the only computer that has one disk has all nukable content and while it would not really be nice to put everything back nothing would be lost because everything i make gets put somewhere else

i guess what i’m saying is that c:\ should be treated as a drive you can jettison at any moment and not lose irreplaceable work

also let kontakt use streaming from ssd, it’s usually fast enough

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP

Laserjet 4P posted:


also let kontakt use streaming from ssd, it’s usually fast enough

i was on a page for some ~~~ ddr4 ramdisk on a pci-e card ~~~~ product the other night and they posted brag CrystalDiskMark screenshots showing a read speed of....7 GB/s

my gen4 main drive clocks 6.5 GB/s all day long. It's Time.

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



Yeah I have things I don't care about on two drives, and things I do care about on 3-4. There's a reason I still have every picture I've ever taken since 2003 still.


Jonny 290 posted:

i was on a page for some ~~~ ddr4 ramdisk on a pci-e card ~~~~ product the other night and they posted brag CrystalDiskMark screenshots showing a read speed of....7 GB/s

my gen4 main drive clocks 6.5 GB/s all day long. It's Time.

The advantage of ramdisks isn't the sequential read/write tho, it's the small non sequential stuff, where they drop from 7 GB/s to 700 MB/s to 70 MB/s.

I've tried cutting down ram usage to ~half with streaming and I still get pops once I start hitting around 400 active voices, which is 7-8 instruments playing concurrently. and that's streaming off of 2 separate m2 ssds, one for opus and one for kontakt. at a 1024 buffer at 44.1 khz. you can see kontakt bouncing around from 20% disk to 100%. it's already cut that 40 GB of ram useage down from a few hundred GB

Tayter Swift
Nov 18, 2002

Pillbug
i just got my $600 gavin bux, what the hell do i do with it

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



you can send it to me ip

i'll probably just save it though

Zam Wesell
Mar 22, 2009

[Zam is suddenly shot in the neck by a toxic dart; Anakin and Obi-Wan see a "rocket-man" take off and fly away, and Zam dies]

Tayter Swift posted:

i just got my $600 gavin bux, what the hell do i do with it

well, what do you need?

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


Woolwich Bagnet posted:

That's from loading 2 drums, 2 violins, 2nd violins, a viola, a cello, a cello section, 2 trumpets, and a french horn. So 11 instrument patches. And I still need to add in pretty much the entire lower end of contrabasses, trombones, euphoniums, and tubas, not to mention woodwinds.

So I ended up ordering 128 gb of ram.

i understand that i probably have no idea about what is going on with modern high quality classical music emulation or vsts or whatever it is you use, but what the hell!?

i have a roland xv 5080 rack unit with up to 32 instrument patches, 128 notes of simultaneous polyphony. its from 2000 so i would imagine that you could easily get something comparable to run your virtual orchestra

not sure if it is possible for you to run your sounds in some kind of degraded mode? or even render/flatten your stems? if you are composing by writing notation then you don't really need real-time low latency sound, right?

sorry if this is actually something that classical composers have to put up with and there is no easy way out. requiring 100+ gigs of memory is still firmly in video/3d artist realm for me

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010
if my maths is right 40gb of raw audio at 32-bit 96khz stereo is like 16 hours or so so yeah something seems to be wrong

a modern-ish ssd should also be capable of streaming bajillions of channels of audio direct off storage with acceptable latency without any issues

but I got no idea about modern orchestral sample libraries so who knows

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



so it gets really complicated really quickly for orchestra instruments, because people know/expect the sound that the instruments make

take for instance 2nd violins, which in a modern orchestra is 14. because they do not sit on top of each other, they each need their own sample played for spacial/reverb differences. to accomplish this, there's multiple microphones that are used for recording. the samples i use have 5 position recording. so for a single note with a single attack variation there's 70 samples that are being played. this is reduced a bit during the sustain as not as much audio information is needed to keep it convincing.

on the low end a modern orchestra will have around 80 players. so around 400 samples being played if they were all to play a single note. there are also samples for every chromatic pitch, with most instruments having a 3 or so octave range. that means for a single attack type with no variations built in there's ~16,000 samples. then there's the attack velocity, of which there's usually 3 or so sampled, as a note played at ff sounds much different than one played at mp.

then there's different articulations. this is especially a source of bloat for string instruments, as they can have 20+ articulations.

so you can see how the numbers inflate very rapidly

on top of all that there's reverb, which means at any time you could have 5+ notes still reverberating (although that's hard on the cpu, not on memory speed)

so it's very easy to have thousands of samples being pulled, since the voices incorporate multiple samples to model the different attacks, sustains, releases, etc, which you switch through constantly even for the same bar of music

this all adds up to a huge amount of small packets of data that need to be pulled for every note played

pcie 4 ssds are insanely fast. when all of the data is in a sequential order



however, as that order begins to shift around, as you have for something like instrument samples that are pulled from tens of thousands for specific needs, you get in to random territory where the queue depth is much lower. at that point, an ssd can be as much as 100x times slower. so now instead of grabbing data at 6 GB/s, it's pulling it at 60 MB/s.

RAM on the other hand, doesn't suffer so greatly from this. it can maintain ~20x more throughput for small random reads than an ssd can.


Penisface posted:

not sure if it is possible for you to run your sounds in some kind of degraded mode? or even render/flatten your stems? if you are composing by writing notation then you don't really need real-time low latency sound, right?

i am currently using asio with a 1024 buffer (max) as correct, I dont need real time latency. i use different plugins for some different instruments so they start to desync with other inputs using larger buffers. https://audiogridder.com/ may be a solution to this as it can adjust for latency of different plugins based on the midi signal itself.

i spent way too long writing all this out but it's an interesting problem at least which makes me interested in it.

i am however going to need a new cpu at some point as my i7-9700k isn't cutting it, even with all cores running at 5 ghz. i dont want to upgrade until the zen 4s come out hopefully late next year though as ddr5 is going to allow for much larger module capacities.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
woah


ok
what about rendering the song down, does that work ok?

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
ive just bought a dual MIDI cable so I can hook up the circuit tracks and hydrasynth, so the circuit can play the hydra and i can record the playing of the hydra on the circuit. can in effect do MIDI looping

shame I don’t know how to (easily) record midi tracks to the synth channels on the circuit. oh well

also decided I need to learn to live with this setup. absolutely learn and exhaust it before getting anything else. time to mega focus on the music

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



echinopsis posted:

woah


ok
what about rendering the song down, does that work ok?

yeah it does, and like video games or w/e, you can change the quality of them to use less ram or less cpu at the cost of quality. i'm just usually messing with stuff so I want to know what the end product is going to sound like, which means pay to play. sample sets like these are really designed for professional use in movies and poo poo. so its not like they care if they have to buy a few mega servers with TBs of ram or whatever, it's a rounding error in the end

speaking of video games, finally finished the remake of my fav super metroid track

https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/sm-lb

didn't want to be lazy so it was all done from scratch. the drums took by far the longest part to get how i wanted them. used a 6 band eq, bitcrusher, and some fuzz, since it's really a field drum

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
is it a vst or something different..

it sounds convincing regardless :)

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



echinopsis posted:

is it a vst or something different..

it sounds convincing regardless :)

oh i meant that i wrote it out in notation instead of just finding a midi file of it, then used sampled instruments. i did about 99% of it from memory and added a few extra things to give it more fullness

Zam Wesell
Mar 22, 2009

[Zam is suddenly shot in the neck by a toxic dart; Anakin and Obi-Wan see a "rocket-man" take off and fly away, and Zam dies]

echinopsis posted:

also decided I need to learn to live with this setup. absolutely learn and exhaust it before getting anything else. time to mega focus on the music

hell yeah, that’s a good approach

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010

Woolwich Bagnet posted:

so it gets really complicated really quickly for orchestra instruments, because people know/expect the sound that the instruments make....
whoa, that's absolutely nuts, and actually a really interesting problem to solve

echinopsis posted:

also decided I need to learn to live with this setup. absolutely learn and exhaust it before getting anything else. time to mega focus on the music
100%

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


toiletbrush posted:

whoa, that's absolutely nuts, and actually a really interesting problem to solve

most classical music has been written without a computer at all, you just had a piano and a pen and some pieces of paper. assistants if you were lucky. iirc the composer only gets to hear the real thing at the rehearsals IF the material is interesting enough to be picked by some orchestra

I guess it’s a luxury that we can even get to a point where you can hear your composition with a 1 second delay instead of years of waiting and shilling and sucking up to some conductor

i wonder what setup hans zimmer uses for the sound

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



toiletbrush posted:

whoa, that's absolutely nuts, and actually a really interesting problem to solve

100%

yeah. it's kind of akin to the uncanny valley issue with digital art. because, for instance, the sound that a trumpet makes is generally known, it's jarring when it's off by a bit, but when it's so far removed from what the instrument sounds like it's no longer an issue, like for synths. so to make it convincing you have to get past that gulf, which i think has been very much done.


Penisface posted:

most classical music has been written without a computer at all, you just had a piano and a pen and some pieces of paper. assistants if you were lucky. iirc the composer only gets to hear the real thing at the rehearsals IF the material is interesting enough to be picked by some orchestra

I guess it’s a luxury that we can even get to a point where you can hear your composition with a 1 second delay instead of years of waiting and shilling and sucking up to some conductor

i wonder what setup hans zimmer uses for the sound

i believe he uses cubase (or more likely nuendo now) and pro tools. as far as samples go spitfire audio has some collaborations with him, but i'm sure he has just about every sampled orchestra under the sun at his disposal (and ofc actual orchestras) since they each have unique qualities, and a ton of synths. but im also sure he has a bazillion assistants that can smooth over any roughness he has with working with them, and is more interested in getting the pitches down until it's actually played.

no clue what he uses for comp hardware but i'd imagine it's around 'the best currently available'.

it really is a luxury to write a note and immediately hear it as the instrument it was intended to be played by.

Ruffian Price
Sep 17, 2016

Penisface posted:

sorry if this is actually something that classical composers have to put up with and there is no easy way out. requiring 100+ gigs of memory is still firmly in video/3d artist realm for me
it's easier to run a full-scale mockup on a single machine now but having multiple slave pcs running vienna ensemble to handle individual orchestra sections is the standard for pros. you edit your arrangement on your main workstation but get audio back from all the other ones, kind of like working with rack modules. I guess you could compare it to a real-time render farm

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP
christ, at that point i'd just hire the fuckin' orchestra.neat breakdown

Laserjet 4P
Mar 28, 2005

What does it mean?
Fun Shoe

Penisface posted:

i wonder what setup hans zimmer uses for the sound

he was one of the first to have a massive server rack with a whole bunch of computers, each running a gigasampler instance. this probably didn't change, except for the fact that if you're hz you can just sample your own orchestra instead of buying kontakt w/ spitfire like a pleb

before that, composers would buy a stack of 32 e-mu ultras or so, maxed out on ram and hdd, and load those up with one instrument at a time

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP
i appreciate that level of dedication to the craft but i also wonder how much of it aaaaaactually comes through after you get the standard compression, limiting, and oh a shitload of explosions overlaid for the final product

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
reminds me of the scene in that dewey cox walk hard movie where he’s trying to create new music with a whole orchestra and he can’t nail the sound

Kernel Sanders
Sep 15, 2020
finished selling all my gear and restarting with a clean slate with just a novation circuit tracks.

haven’t had this fun with music in years!

Tayter Swift
Nov 18, 2002

Pillbug

Zam Wesell posted:

well, what do you need?

i went straight to detroit modular and bought new modules to interface my bass :twisted:

then this mornin i realized what i really need is to git good and cancelled my order. if it werent for the pandemic i'd go snooping around for bass lessons.

there is however a bass compressor on deep discount at a local shop tho...

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Kernel Sanders posted:

finished selling all my gear and restarting with a clean slate with just a novation circuit tracks.

haven’t had this fun with music in years!

yeah so a circuit tracks is half of my rig, the other half being a fully fledged polyphonic synth, and i’m trying to use the midi sequencer on the tracks to drive the synth too.

I just put in an sd card. looking forward to loading up a whole lot of variety in the packs

the biggest shame is that you can’t real time hear editing the synth patches

because I think the synth has a lot of possibility but compared to the hydrasynth it’s far more difficult to dial in sounds

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



Jonny 290 posted:

i appreciate that level of dedication to the craft but i also wonder how much of it aaaaaactually comes through after you get the standard compression, limiting, and oh a shitload of explosions overlaid for the final product

yeah for real. i mean i just like making stuff that i want to hear or is stuck in my head. dont think i could ever do it for a living because then it sucks the joy out of it. not that i'd ever be able to anyway.

thanks others too for the info about the servers and whatnot. that's uhh, way too extreme for me obv.

i did however go out and buy a ryzen 5950x or w/e and new mobo today because it'll prob be a year and a half before i can get a zen 4 or whatever without paying $Texas to scalpers. might just throw the i7-9700k in my server comp since it's using a hilariously outdated i3 from like 5 years ago

my ram got here, and half of it didn't work (one package of it). idk if it was a manufacturing defect or something but the edge of the pcb on the bad sticks was a muddy brown compared to light green of the good ones, but maybe just different pcb sources

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP
well that's good (on the cpu) and bad (on the bad ram). memory is kinda fucky and weird these days. I got lucky with mine which, thank god, i didnt want to have to be rma'ing a fistful of 32g sticks. 5xxx ryzens are amazing processors

Beve Stuscemi
Jun 6, 2001




echinopsis posted:

also decided I need to learn to live with this setup. absolutely learn and exhaust it before getting anything else. time to mega focus on the music

this is a good approach. it’s easy to fall into the “my music will definitely sound like I want if I just buy this thing” trap where you do it over and over and over.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
my music won’t be any better but my bank balance will thank me


now I just need to go do some piano lessons.

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



Jonny 290 posted:

well that's good (on the cpu) and bad (on the bad ram). memory is kinda fucky and weird these days. I got lucky with mine which, thank god, i didnt want to have to be rma'ing a fistful of 32g sticks. 5xxx ryzens are amazing processors

yeah, the replacements have already arrived, but i'm too tired to mess with more comp stuff today. hopefully it works on my current mobo and then i get to take that out and put in the new one. should get around 2-2.5x the performance going from 8 core no HT to 16 core HT. it's nice that the main plugins i use both support as many threads as they can throw at a cpu. my cpu is screaming with the current piece ive been working on for the past week or two. it hits ~1300 simultaneous voices at it's peak.

still need to really sit down and work with dorico as it has a lot more integration features that sibelius lacks like a play view that had a piano role and midi CC envelopes etc. it's on sale for a couple more days where I can get it for something like $200 as a competitive crossgrade from sibelius.

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

this is a good approach. it’s easy to fall into the “my music will definitely sound like I want if I just buy this thing” trap where you do it over and over and over.

the amount of synths, sounds, etc is just completely overwhelming. more orchestra type music has been really good for me as there's a finite number of ways each instrument can play a note, and i already know what instrument and articulation should be used to achieve that. being able to hear something in your head and write down the pitch and rhythm is imo most of the battle.

then you can loop a section you're interested in and just mess with the sounds until you like it, then move on to the next, etc. sometimes I'll spend a decent amount of time getting the pitch and rhythm just right for what i want, then listen to it in context of the rest of the piece and immediately cut it and put it in my future ideas files.

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP
I am a loving sucker for processing hardware, but i could not give less of a poo poo about hardware synthesizers or samplers. I did my time. But an analog comp or eq is going to be realtime and I do like twisting the knob there. "hehe twisty knob filter open up" is boring to me but when you can ride comp ratio and thresholds to find that sweet spot, it's a good feeling.

Woolwich Bagnet
Apr 27, 2003



i should build a box of nothing but knobs to control midi stuff with a little screen for each one to show what they are controlling

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP

Woolwich Bagnet posted:

i should build a box of nothing but knobs to control midi stuff with a little screen for each one to show what they are controlling

I bought one of these to drive my big rear end midi pedalboard and god drat it i wish somebody would resurrect it (or a similar thing) it was perfect

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10531

Tayter Swift
Nov 18, 2002

Pillbug

Jonny 290 posted:

I am a loving sucker for processing hardware, but i could not give less of a poo poo about hardware synthesizers or samplers. I did my time. But an analog comp or eq is going to be realtime and I do like twisting the knob there. "hehe twisty knob filter open up" is boring to me but when you can ride comp ratio and thresholds to find that sweet spot, it's a good feeling.

i spent like 20 minutes the other night twiddling the ratio of a compressor on like a snare drum with reverb and it's really goddamn hard to tell the difference. like even switching between 4 and 20 on an 1176 emulation i cant seem to find the ear for it

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005




[ASK] me about OS/2 WARP
the more poo poo that's going on, the more effective it is. think of a compressor as the salt in a pot of soup. if there's nothing but water and potatoes in there, it's fairly one dimensional and hard to gauge. but once you get the salt pork and the carrots and the celery and the herbs in there, you start to balance how everything comes out.

I'm not really big on "slap an individual comp on every drum channel" type approaches. that just kinda wastes cpu and patch cables. but a comp on the drum mix/bounce and then another one on the master? now you're cookin

Tweezer Reprise
Aug 6, 2013

It hasn't got six strings, but it's a lot of fun.

Woolwich Bagnet posted:

the amount of synths, sounds, etc is just completely overwhelming. more orchestra type music has been really good for me as there's a finite number of ways each instrument can play a note, and i already know what instrument and articulation should be used to achieve that. being able to hear something in your head and write down the pitch and rhythm is imo most of the battle.

i feel this way but with forms/other large structures. i've struggled a lot with figuring out what it is i even want to make, and when i don't have a clear mental model of that it's hard to fall back on an extant one without it feeling extremely contrived. ideas are cheap, it's how you arrange them that counts

Grum
May 7, 2007

Tayter Swift posted:

i spent like 20 minutes the other night twiddling the ratio of a compressor on like a snare drum with reverb and it's really goddamn hard to tell the difference. like even switching between 4 and 20 on an 1176 emulation i cant seem to find the ear for it

Phase invert the dry signal and mix it in after the compressor. This is the audition button that some plugins have built in

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4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


Woolwich Bagnet posted:

yeah, the replacements have already arrived, but i'm too tired to mess with more comp stuff today. hopefully it works on my current mobo and then i get to take that out and put in the new one. should get around 2-2.5x the performance going from 8 core no HT to 16 core HT. it's nice that the main plugins i use both support as many threads as they can throw at a cpu. my cpu is screaming with the current piece ive been working on for the past week or two. it hits ~1300 simultaneous voices at it's peak.

still need to really sit down and work with dorico as it has a lot more integration features that sibelius lacks like a play view that had a piano role and midi CC envelopes etc. it's on sale for a couple more days where I can get it for something like $200 as a competitive crossgrade from sibelius.

the amount of synths, sounds, etc is just completely overwhelming. more orchestra type music has been really good for me as there's a finite number of ways each instrument can play a note, and i already know what instrument and articulation should be used to achieve that. being able to hear something in your head and write down the pitch and rhythm is imo most of the battle.

then you can loop a section you're interested in and just mess with the sounds until you like it, then move on to the next, etc. sometimes I'll spend a decent amount of time getting the pitch and rhythm just right for what i want, then listen to it in context of the rest of the piece and immediately cut it and put it in my future ideas files.

you ever considered getting a 2nd hand server blade and sticking it where it can make noise and running your heavy audio lifting on that? audio over network is fast these days

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