praise to nemesys

[chilcote.9]

I\'ve been using gigasampler 1.6 and have been one of earliest of adopter to giga at around march 1998. I just took another long involved look at gigastudio with the 2.01.36 update and it is now working for me. Sure it has some bugs, but I don\'t really here all that much praise for the radical evolution of this product. It does things that no akai,emu,yamaha, kurtweil, roland external hardware based sampler does and does it better. So let\'s start the lovin\'. I\'m willing to bet you the problems from here on out get solved, and it only gets better. It is true most of us have been testing guinea pigs with this toy for the past year, but praise the new standard. The truth is, I\'ve been using giga 1.6 for the past year. Now I feel that it is time for the gigastudio 2.01.36 or on to 2.2 from namm.

My systems: 4 of these
-processor intel pentium III - 800mhz - .18 micron\\256k cache
-Video-19 inch viewsonic gs790
-chipset intel BX at 100mhz bus
-abit be62-rII
-ram - 640 mb - cas2 (128 and 256k modules)
-hard drive - ata/eide---ibm 30 gb system\\2mb cache\\7200 rpm for system
-hard drive - scsi----18gb segate 15000 rpm cheetah (4mb cache) ultra 160 with 19160 controller
-sound card - m-audio/midiman delta 10/10 for monitoring and recording
-sound card - creative sblive for giga\\digitally spdif\'ed to 10/10
-standalone use - with cakewalk pro audio 9.03 and without
-video processor - nvidia tnt2 ultra 32mb or geforce mx-asus 7100 - mostly 1024x768
-BIOS settings - turn off everything you don\'t use
-Midi Input Card-10/10 and sblive
-hardware/software-recording system - cakewalk proaudio and sonic foundry vegas for mixdown, sonar when it comes out
-sequencing system - cakewalk proaudio 9.03
-polyphony-gigasampler-64(?) and gigastudio- around 140
-click/pops in Giga - rarely
-sound quality - sblive 7-8
and 10/10- a 9 or so
-midi performance-fatar controller-88 weighted keys-roland jv-1000
-other problems-resolved
-comments/suggestions-purchase quality components and take the crap off your system, do a clean install and make music, quit messing around with crap shareware/freeware/demos

comments?

[Jerry Kahn]

chilcote.9:

I just checked out your website-- pretty cool. I was surfing on the internet, and somehow stumbled across it when searching for \"gigasampler\".

I have just realized that in my stupidity I did not include the category \"version of Gigastudio or Gigasampler\" in the survey.

I agree that it is a great product, even though I have not yet purchased it.. I have only heard raves about it. It bugs me however that they claim to provide 160 voices, but noone seems to be achieving that. It also bugs me that there seems to be too many potentially wrong turns that can be easily taken on the road to a good hardware platform for this product. I do not blame Nemesis for this, necessarily. It is probably due mostly to the nature of the PC platform in general. Too bad they didn\'t make it for Mac..oh well.

I am doing all this snooping now simply because I want to be sure what hardware to buy and what to expect from the product. And also because I am currently in a \"saving up $\" phase and also I have nothing better to do with my time.

In any case, rock on-- and I would love to hear some of your work someday.

rgds,
jk

[Jamieh]

I am getting 160 voices consistently. I went out and bought a new 1GHz Athlon from Micron specifically for GigaStudio.

1GHz Athlon Processor with 200 MHz front-side bus

512 MB 200MHz DDR SDRAM

2 Big IBM Deskstar 7200 RPM drives

M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card.

Win 98 SE

You can get all of that for somewhere around $2500.

[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-07-2001).]

[Jerry Kahn]

Jamieh:

glad to hear that 160 is achievable. maybe you have one of the Ferrari systems that I have been hearing rumors about.. at least in theory.. do you ever get clicks/pops?

Not to get too personal, but what would be your chipset?

--jk

[Jamieh]

Yes, my machine is pretty powerful. Micron was the only one offering the 200MHz front-side bus when I got it. Now they have the 266MHz front-side bus. I would have liked to wait, but I needed a machine right away. My only regret is that I was cheap and only got a 1GHz instead of the 1.2GHz.

It is running on the AMD 760 chipset.

Yes, I actually had very consistent clicks and pops periodically every few minutes, but I don\'t think it is a performance issue with my machine. It didn\'t seem to be related to how many notes were playing, or even what was necessarily going on in GigaSampler--it just happened every 2 minutes or so. I turned off my virtual memory and now I get very few clicks--maybe one or so every twenty minutes. It only seemes to start happening after I had been using GigaSampler for a few hours.

Sorry, I should have posted my specs on your other thread. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-07-2001).]

[gigagagga]

Jamieh,

I just purchased the same system you purchased from micron!

MY SYSTEM


AMD Athlon DDR 1.0 Ghz

Windows Me

AMD 760 Chipset (200 MHz system bus)

128 Meg of DDR SDRAM

20 gig ATA 100 EIDE hard drive 7200 RPM 9.0 Seek Time (for applications)

40 gig ATA 66 IDE hard drive 7200 RPM for GIGS

Soudblaster Live 5.1 Platinum sound card

CDR

I would love to know how you have set your system up to optimize use of Gigastudio 160
I know i have to get a different sound card to get the true 160 voices and i am going to do that soon! I am really new this stuff and can use any help I can get.

I have had quite a few crashes and am working through it to find out what the problem is. Is your system working well? I seem to get the blue screen of death whenever i quit Gigastudio and then try to shutdown Windows Me.

Also, sometimes for no reason the machine will just shut down without warning.

thanks,
Gigagagga

[Jamieh]

Hey gigagagga.

The first problem I see with your setup is you gig specific drive. If at all possible, you want an ATA-100 drive for this task. It is going to give you better performance. I don\'t know if you just bought the additional drive, but if so, see if you can swap it for an ATA-100 drive. I recommend the 45 GB IBM Deskstar 7200 RPM. I picked it up for about $180. The speed of your application drive isn\'t all that important. It is the speed of your GIG drive that is critical. I\'m not saying an ATA-66 drive won\'t work, but since your machine has an ATA-100 controller, it makes sense to put an ATA-100 drive in there.

The second problem is probably your memory. It really depends on what you are planning to do with GigaStudio. I got 512MB and I could really use more. I would say you need to have at least 256MB. These Microns take special memory, but you can get it reasonably cheap at www.crucial.com. (\"http://www.crucial.com.\") In fact, they sell it for less than half of what Micron will charge you for it! I\'ve found that GigaStudio runs better when your memory isn\'t maxed out. Of course, that doesn\'t stop me from maxing it out all the time, but I do orchestral stuff and I need tons of instruments loaded.

One thing that ended up helping me a bunch was disabling virtual memory. Right click on My Computer, go to Performance->Virtual Memory, and turn it off. Note that this isn\'t good for other applications though, which is a pain. That is another reason why having a dual boot system is good.

Another thing that may help performance is to make your GIG drive a primary device. The IDE cables the machine came with were not long enough for me to do this because they couldn\'t stretch from the hard disk to the DVD drive, so I had to go buy longer IDE cables (cost me about $30). But I don\'t know how critical this was. If I hadn\'t been trying to troubleshoot my popping and clicking problem (which I mostly solved by turning off virtual memory) I probably wouldn\'t have messed with this. But Nemesys did recommend it.

As for crashes, yes, I have had lots of problems with Windows ME. That is why I installed Windows 98 SE for GigaStudio. I actually have a dual boot system (using Partition Magic 6.0) so that I have a separate boot for Gigastudio. It isn\'t tough to set that up, but it isn\'t beginner stuff either. I\'m actually considering going back and installing Windows 98 SE over ME so that I have it on both partitions. It may be one of the programs that Micron sets up to load on startup, but my Windows ME boot just tends to bluescreen without warning. My Win 98 GigaStudio boot however has only crashed once, and that was about about 5 or 6 hours of heavy use. I don\'t know if it is a difference between Win 98 and Win Me, or the fact that I\'m not loading all the extra programs in Win 98 that the Micron Win Me boot is.

I also have an SB Live (I believe it is a value addition) card in there, but I disable it in my GigaStudio setup and use the Audiophile 2496 card. The Audiophile card seems to work fine for GigaStudio, though I have some problems with Cakewalk that I need to look into.

Good luck with your system. I know that it can produce good results, because I am even running Cakewalk on the same machine (for MIDI only, no audio recording) and I\'m still getting good performance. I still get very occasional clicks in the audio (very infrequently--maybe once or twice an hour) and after I run for several hours with memory filled up the pops and clicks start coming more frequently, but for the most part things work really well.

[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-08-2001).]

[gigagagga]

Jamieh,

thanks for getting back so quick, you must visit this forum alot (like me) anyway I appreciate the input.

when I purchased this machine the guy from Micron said that the DDR in the name of the memory was for \"Double Data Rate\" and that this memory should operate twice as fast as normal memory. I thought that one of the things that Gigastudio was supposed to do was not need alot of expensive ram, that the hard disk streaming was to take the place of having to have all of that RAM? Nemesys\'s ads say that an optimal configuration for 160 voices is to have only 128 meg of RAM, i guess thats just a bit unrealistic huh?

I am going to try to go back to windows 98 and do a dual boot configuration but I think I will need help to pull that off! I was trying to hook up PC McLAN tonight so I could share files with my DVD iMac and I couldn\'t even do that!

Thanks again
gigagagga

[Jamieh]

Yeah, I\'m probably up here more than I should be. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif

Yes, the Micron\'s that you and I have do have really fast memory. I am actually surprised that it is as cheap as it is. It looks like you could pick up another 128MB for only $61! And www.crucial.com (\"http://www.crucial.com\") currently has free shipping. At that price, you can\'t go wrong.

Yes, Gigastudio uses the hard disk and not memory for streaming. You can absolutely get 160 voices with just 128MB, no problem. HOWEVER, if you need to have lots of samples loaded as I do for orchestral work, you quickly find out that the way Gigastudio works is that it stores the first part of every sample in memory, so that it can play it back instantly while it is seeking the file out on the hard disk. Quite clever actually. But the end result is that if you have tons of instruments loaded, it takes up a lot of memory. Especially instruments that have multiple attacks or articulations, as each one has to have some part pre-loaded into memory.

If you aren\'t going to do orchestral stuff, or don\'t think you will need many instruments loaded, you may not need the extra memory. However in order to get a full orchestra in I take up almost all of my 512MB. Of course, I am loading several different playing styles for some of the instruments. And I am running Cakewalk on the same machine, which takes some of my memory away. I have noticed that whenever my memory usage gets up really high (aka I am running out of free memory) that is when Gigastudio seems to have the most problems. Which of course, makes sense.

Yeah, the dual-boot scenario is great once you get it to work, but it is a bit tricky to set up. Partition Magic has a decent tutorial on how to do it, but even I had to stop and take some time to read it and make sure I understood what was going on. And I\'ve been dealing with PC\'s since the early 80\'s!

Good luck!



[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-09-2001).]

[gigagagga]

Jamieh,

Thanks for taking time to explain some of this basic to stuff to a \"Mac Guy\" I learn alot form these forums.

Do you have a favorite piano sample that you are using? (anyone may answer) I just got the Steinway B from East West and it sounds great just wondering if you or anyone else has tried any of the samples like \"Holy Grail Piano\" or the \"Trachtman\" piano

Thanks again,

Gigagagga

[Jamieh]

Yeah, I\'ll do the full form when I get a chance. I don\'t know how much the 200 MHz front-side bus helps out, but I do know it is fast memory. They have 266MHz busses now. They weren\'t selling them yet in December when I bought my machine.

[Robert Kral]

Jamieh,

I am very interested in your troubleshooting the clix and pops problem. I noticed you said to turn off virtual memory. Do you need to set up that dual boot scenario (etc) in order to run windows 98 with virtual memory off?

I\'m a mac guy so it all kind of new to me. I notice that when you try to switch off virtual memory the PC warns and warns again against it. Please enlighten me as I\'d like to try it, I\'m getting tired of the pops myself.

Thanks!

[astrt4]

Just thought I\'d put out what little I know about the FSB and memory issues.
One of the strengths of the AMD Athlon series has been its double-pumped front side bus. Whereas Intel\'s Pentium III\'s have been utilizing either a 100Mhz or 133Mhz fsb, AMD\'s Athlons (the durons, \"athlons,\" and thunderbirds) have all been using a technique to push two instructions across the MB at a time as compared to only one for its competitors. This effectively creates a 200Mhz bus. Chipsets with this bus speed support included the AMD irongates (PC-100 RAM), the Via KX-133 (PC-100 or PC-133), and the Via KT-133 (PC-100 or PC-133). The distinguishing factor for the KT-133 is that it supports the Thunderbird series of Athlons. Now we have the Via KT-133A, AMD 760, and Ali Magic 1 chipsets which introduce a 266MHz fsb (133 * 2). To take advantage of this you need a new processor designed for them. AMD just released this new series of Thunderbirds. One thing to be careful about... whereas with the 200MHz style chipsets we could use memory of a different speed (not a multiple... ex. PC-133 with a 200MHz bus), at least one of these motherboards, the AMD 760, will not allow asynchronus operation. So if you buy PC266 RAM(PC2100) to use with a processor designed for a 200MHz bus, you will not be able to take advantage of the extra speed from the memory as it will only clock at 200MHz.
The AMD 760 and the Ali Magic 1 chipsets are designed to take DDR RAM (Via KT-266 is coming soon). If you are interested in purchasing a cutting-edge system, this is a good place to start, but there are some things to watch out for. Some versions of these motherboards only support the 200MHz bus (and thus only the PC-200 RAM, not PC-266). I\'ve seen several benchmark results which suggest that whereas a 266MHZ FSB system with PC-266 RAM performs quite well, a 200 MHZ FSB system with PC-200 RAM performs about the same as a 266MHz FSB system with PC-133 RAM (a setup which is considerably cheaper). I\'m not saying that the people here who have bought these PC-200 systems have made a mistake (I believe your computers have a Gigabyte 7A-DX chipset which supports either FSB speed). But it is something to watch out for when the time comes to upgrade as some motherboards don\'t support both speeds, and the extra money spent on PC 200 RAM offers little to no performance gain over PC 133 RAM.
DDR RAM differs from normal RAM in that it delivers data bursts on both the up and the down swings of the cycle. This essentially boosts the bandwidth by a factor of 2. The memory isn\'t actually quite twice as fast, in part because of slightly slower access time (or so I\'ve read). In a well designed system utilizing PC-266 RAM (which is called PC-2100), benchmarks suggest the user can expect an overall increase in system performance from between 10% and 20%. What does it mean for Gigastudio? I doubt much. I think RAM with this software is primarily used as a bridge to help cover the gap from when the sample is first called to when the HDD can actually begin streaming. As such the access time should be the important factor. DDR RAM doesn\'t help much here as its benefit should lie primarily with bandwidth. However, I could see where the increased FSB speed could help as it allows the memory to be accessed more quickly. Furthermore, the fsb improvement could lead to better data transfer between the IDE and the PCI buses as well - another factor that could improve GigaStudio.

[Jerry Kahn]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jamieh:
Yes, my machine is pretty powerful. Micron was the only one offering the 200MHz front-side bus when I got it. Now they have the 266MHz front-side bus. I would have liked to wait, but I needed a machine right away. My only regret is that I was cheap and only got a 1GHz instead of the 1.2GHz.

It is running on the AMD 760 chipset.

Yes, I actually had very consistent clicks and pops periodically every few minutes, but I don\'t think it is a performance issue with my machine. It didn\'t seem to be related to how many notes were playing, or even what was necessarily going on in GigaSampler--it just happened every 2 minutes or so. I turned off my virtual memory and now I get very few clicks--maybe one or so every twenty minutes. It only seemes to start happening after I had been using GigaSampler for a few hours.

Sorry, I should have posted my specs on your other thread. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-07-2001).]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Jamieh -- could I persuade you to do a quick paste up of your full specs on the other thread? I think that you seem to have one of the better setups and I am especially interested in documenting this whole \"front-side bus\" thing that no one seems to have mentioned.

Sorry to make more work for you, but I am convinced many besides myself would greatly appreciate it.

Regards,
Jerry

[Jamieh]

Robert, here is the deal. Turning off virtual memory is normally a bad thing. It will reduce performance in other Windows program that you want to run, especially if you are running lots of programs at once. So there are really only two scenarios where it will help you.

1) Running on a dedicated GigaStudio machine
2) Running on a dedicated GigaStudio dual-boot setup

If you are using one boot for both GigaStudio AND other programs, you can do it, but it can hurt performance of other stuff, especially if you don\'t have a lot of physical memory in your machine.

Virtual Memory is Windows way of letting you have more memory than you actually have in your system. Say you have 128MB in your machine and it is all in use, and you try to load a new program that needs 30 MB. Windows will take 30MB of memory that you aren\'t currently using (perhaps in a program that isn\'t doing anything right now) and write it out to your hard disk. It will then take the new program and put it in the 30MB of memory it cleared out. If you switch back to that other program, it will go back out to the disk and get that memory back, swapping it in and moving some other memory out to the hard disk. It does this into a file that is called the \"swap file.\" (This is a slightly simplified explanation)

Normally this whole process is good for the user because it allows you to run more programs than you could if you were limited to just physical memory. The problem with GigaStudio is that you don\'t want Windows doing ANYTHING behind the scenes if at all possible, because it can interrupt the Hard Disk streaming that GigaStudio is doing ever so slightly, and that can cause clicks and pops.

Now if you are getting constant clicks and pops whenever you play notes, this probably isn\'t your problem. From what I have read, that is more likely to be a processor speed, or sound card driver, or something else. I was getting periodic clicks and pops every few minutes that didn\'t seem to be related to what I was doing with GigaStudio, and I\'m pretty sure that is what I cleared up by turning off virtual memory. I still get some pops, but usually only when I have memory loaded up over 70-80% and I\'ve been using the system for a few hours.

I hope that helps some!

[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-10-2001).]