VSL Revelation...

[A_Sapp]

I got my Perfomance Set today and loaded legato patches from the variety of instruments it includes. Guys, this is it. The search for expressive performances is over.

It was really hard for myself to believe that THAT many intervals for all the notes were recorded. Well folks, it is true, and it shows with \"flowing,\" colors.

I played with the legato trumpet section, and you can hear the intervals between each of the notes played. No need for keyswitching at all, which was an incredible joy.

The grace-note legato patch on the oboe made my mouth drop. You can perform virtuosic passages with brilliant ease, and the outcome is equal to that of a professional instrumentalist.

I can go on and on about how great this library is, but I\'d end up writing a novel. The price is steep, ( I should know ) but it is worth every penny a hundred fold. If you have to sell the kids, do it. There is a catch to the aesthetic quality achievable by these samples, and it\'s how much memory it takes up.

Each of these patches take up massive amounts of memory, but it is a small price to pay. Purchasing another gigamachine for this library is recommended, and would be well worth it. I\'d take advantage of the first edition prices now to access the VIP prices besides spending double that if you were to buy the pro edition new all-together.

If you\'re sick and tired of messing around with tweaking performances, get VSL. From now on you can concentrate on the music, which is a pleasant contradistinction to the constant worry of the realism of samples.

And no, I don\'t work for Ilio.

[PeterRoos]

4 kids here, thanks for the tip, Aaron images/icons/grin.gif

[MartinL]

Originally posted by A_Sapp:
If you\'re sick and tired of messing around with tweaking performances, get VSL. From now on you can concentrate on the music, which is a pleasant contradistinction to the constant worry of the realism of samples.<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">This is exactly what I was looking for... My order is on its way. Can\'t wait to get it!!! images/icons/smile.gif

[esperlad]

It\'s good to have the entire set. I have heard that the scale material is quite extensive and that in the symphonic cube, we shall have tons of material to work with. I have yet to hear about the harp glissandi. I really like what I have, but they only move in an upward potition. I want my glisses to go down too.

[Rob Elliott]

Hi Aaron,

As I will not be able to get everything ($$$), how far can I get by with just the Performance Set (and an additional computer to go with it)???

What say ye?

Thanks

Rob

[A_Sapp]

The Performance Set is a must, and another computer will only help. I was skeptical with the price/quality ratio, but after messing with just a FEW of the samples, it is well, well worth it. I knew this library was extensive, but that is an extreme understatement.

[A_Sapp]

Yea, Sharmy, help me out on that. I hear that many use Win 98 for gigastudio. Is it really that much better? I use Win 2k, and it seems to work just fine. Will Win 98 reduce ram? Is it that much better?

[KingIdiot]

esperlad, use the mod wheel to change from up to down glissandi

[A_Sapp]

So am I able to have my current computer right now running win2k, and my dedicated giga machine running 98 without any compatibility problems?

[SyQuEsT]

I know that Giga 3 will release ... when ? around october (I thing)

[esperlad]

Thanks King! Thou hast saved the day, once again.
How may I repay thee, my lord.

As for the scale material. Herb said that they have recorded all types of scales with various lengths and such, but that they will not release the different variants until the symphonic cube is released. They are waiting until Giga has more dimentions. Some scales are included now, but there is very little control in terms of tempi.

[timzydee]

If every interval has been recorded, why do we need pre-recorded scales? Wouldn\'t it sound just as real playing them manually and saving another $5,000 down the road?

[Simon Ravn]

Aaron, it should be pretty clear to regular visitors here that, yes, you get more available memory for samples with Win98SE.... images/icons/smile.gif And yes, of course there are no \'compatibility issues\' when you run different OS\'es on different machines. All you need is one machine to be able to send out MIDI and another to receive. Should be fairly simple.

[Jan]

you get more available memory for samples with Win98SE.... <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">I remember previous posts stating there was an issue with going over 1 Gb RAM under WIN98?
I never ventured beyond 1 GB, so I haven\'t tried it out. If there really IS a 1 Gb limit, is this due to WIN98 or GS?

[MikeGraybill]

Originally posted by Jan:
</font><blockquote><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><hr /><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\"> you get more available memory for samples with Win98SE.... <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">I remember previous posts stating there was an issue with going over 1 Gb RAM under WIN98?
I never ventured beyond 1 GB, so I haven\'t tried it out. If there really IS a 1 Gb limit, is this due to WIN98 or GS? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">There are people here far more capable of answering this question than I, but the short answer is, yes, Win98 will require some tweaking if you want to try to get above the 512-1gb range. My machines actually wouldn\'t run more than 512 at all on 98, something to do with adressing. Got 1.5GB working great on XP tho, and I won\'t look back. And despite what I\'ve heard about this being difficult, I am looking at a GS machine telling me ram is maxed out at 98% on a 1.5gb ram system right now.

Seems like it\'s using all 1.5 to me, and I know Win98 can\'t handle 1.5gb ram. So, even if 98 handles it\'s 512-1gb (apparently it IS possible, but everyone I\'ve ever seen build a computer struggled with that 512mb barrier on 98) I still don\'t see how well managed 512MBish equals the same or better than xp-managed 1.5GBish.

I\'ve read many a post (think there were some good ones on the VSL site a while back) discussing this, but none ever cleared that up for me. I\'m gunna see what happens when I install VSL in a few days, but unless something really freaky\'s goin\' on, I don\'t see how 98 would be a step in the right direction here.

[A_Sapp]

What sort of tweaking is needed on a Win 98 machine to run a gig of ram?

[Thomas_J]

GS is the bottleneck here. The programming of GS set some kind of limit with regards to ram and it is not possible to fully utilize more than 1gb of ram with GS under any OS, including w2k and XP.

I see no reason why you wouldn\'t want to run Win98se for your Gigacomputers. For gigastudio it is just as stable (even more stable in some cases) than XP. It also handles ram in a less greedy way than XP.

Giga 3.0 should address this issue, although I can\'t say for sure.

For other software platforms such as Kontakt, sky is the limit for ram (well realistically the mobo is)

If you\'re running Gigastudio on seperate computers, stick with win98se until giga 3.0 comes along.

Again I see no reason why people would want to run XP on their standalone giga comps.


Thomas

[Jan]

I wish Tascam would release an interim update on GS addressing this 1 Gb limit, it would be very helpful when you’re using a library like VSL.
God knows when GS3.0 sees the light, it could be soon, but then again, it could be around Christmas time.

[Bruce A. Richardson]

Originally posted by timzydee:
If every interval has been recorded, why do we need pre-recorded scales? Wouldn\'t it sound just as real playing them manually and saving another $5,000 down the road? <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">In general, the scales are designed to address tempos that are on the edge of playability, although some are slower than that. The idea is that the character of tone and response at those tempos differs from more playable tempos.

Also, there is a theoretical break where the legato-grace note performances won\'t respond fast enough (although in the case of the grace note performances that\'s pretty darn fast). In those cases, you can fall back on the scales to build complex lines. To me, fall back is the key phrase. The scales are just another tool in the box to get you past otherwise difficult sequencing tasks with viable realism. In practice, you can play almost everything note for note. When that doesn\'t yield fast enough response, you move on to the scales and build your line from those. Because you can vary the mode and starting note, in theory, you can construct any sequence of steps and leaps to realize a line.

[Simon Ravn]

Win98SE can\'t address more than 1GB of RAM, so no reason to stuff more than that into your machine. To make it use more than 512/768MB properly you should make sure to have some VCache settings, or Windows can - and in my experience WILL - freak out during installation of gfx drivers, have a lot of random crashes and weird behaviour. As long as you set you vcache settings there is no problem.

Michaelangelo: It is possible that you can get your GS memory meter to show 99% under XP, just like I can under Win98. The question is though, how much GS is able to load until it reaches this limit. So far all comparisons I heard about shows that you can always load more under 98SE... But if you really want to investigate, you could try testing this in case you have a dual-boot setup and see if a perfomance maxing out at 99% on your XP system can load under 98 and vice versa. In that case with 1,5GB RAM, you\'d have to insert another line in SYSTEM.INI to make 98 only see the first 1GB, or it will freak. It sounds like a lot of trouble and I guess it is:)

[csduke]

Originally posted by Thomas_J:
Giga 3.0 should address this issue, although I can\'t say for sure. <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">One Near-term Solution: Giga 3.0, XP and the new Asus P4SDX motherboard.

\"The P4SDX Deluxe supports dual-channel DDR design up to 4GB high speed PC2700/2100/1600 SDRAM memory for superior performance during the most memory-intensive tasks.\"

Be prepared

[Jan]

I have read different messages on this forum about the RAM limit.
If WIN98 is cannot recognize more than 1Gb RAM, then there is a distinct advantage in using XP, since it does not seem to have this problem, and although it absorps more memory than WIN98, it WILL allow you to use more RAM.

But, in another thread (\"http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=004380;p=2\") I read that GS2.5 cannot recognize 2Gb RAM, so what is true? Maybe both?

[Thomas_J]

Sounds interesting Csduke images/icons/smile.gif

Jan, READ what I just posted:

\"GS is the bottleneck here. The programming of GS set some kind of limit with regards to ram and it is not possible to fully utilize more than 1gb of ram with GS under any OS , including w2k and XP.\"

For win98se you need to set the Vcache (as Simon just wrote) to 16k or more.


Thomas

[Jan]

Sorry Thomas, I read it but apparently my memory buffer needs resetting images/icons/wink.gif

[tonylombardi]

Just a suggestion:
Can we please stick to the topic? I clicked on this thread thinking there would be more discussion on VSL. Instead I got an entire new page of RAM issues.
Couldn\'t this have been made into a new topic? This kind of stuff happens all the time, but lately it\'s starting to annoy me much more.

Anthony Lombardi
www.mp3.com/alombardi (\"http://www.mp3.com/alombardi\")

[Simon Ravn]

There was this movie on TV yesterday called Grumpy Old Men....

[MikeGraybill]

Thomas, Simon, yeah I see what you\'re saying now. For the time being I can see 98se being the way to go. I probably won\'t go back (I\'ve promised myself that I would never tweak a vcache setting again... ever. images/icons/wink.gif ) But that\'s only until 3.0 gets here then.

But yes, back to topic. Aaron, I\'m finally ordering my copy of the performance set tommorrow, are you running this on one machine currently? or spreading it out a bit? I guess I\'m just curious as to what all instruments you can have available to you at a given time using the performance set on one or two machines. (I\'m already working on adding a machine for it, I\'m just wondering how this\'ll work for me when I first get it.)

Thanks
mike

[csduke]

Originally posted by Thomas_J:
Sounds interesting Csduke images/icons/smile.gif
<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Actually, Simon metioned that board to me in the HW forum and may already have it.

If GS 3.0 allows you to control instrument buffer size and you have 3.75 GB of dual channel DDR RAM available ... Then there is the new serial ATA HS protocol ... Could be interesting.

[Haydn]

Lee,

I\'ve read the same thing myself regarding the OS kernel only being able to use 1 GB of memory.

Here\'s something I found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

This behavior is by design. Windows currently uses 32-bit addressing for memory. This only allows for 4 GB of addressable RAM, which must be divided into various sections of virtual memory. The kernel only has 2 GB to divide up and, in this distribution of addresses, paged-pool memory is allocated a maximum of 192 MB. This is a restriction of the 32-bit addressing.

It looks like Giga has to fight for memory with the kernel, drivers, virtual memory, etc.

It also appears from other articles in the Knowledge Base that all programs are limited to 2 GB of memory unless the /3GB switch is used in the boot.ini file.

I\'m wondering if Tascam is rewriting the program for user mode instead of kernel mode that it currently is in. This will get them past the 1 GB limitation but means a total rewrite of the program. Maybe this is why 3.0 is taking so long.

[gabriels]

Aaron,
Would you say that the performances could provide flexibility and expressiveness when used real time (given an instrument with wind control and several other real-time continuous controllers, or is it designed more with sequencer-driven mode in mind?
Gabriel

[Bruce A. Richardson]

Originally posted by gabriels:

Would you say that the performances could provide flexibility and expressiveness when used real time (given an instrument with wind control and several other real-time continuous controllers, or is it designed more with sequencer-driven mode in mind?
Gabriel <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Definitely realtime playable.