Mainstage with sampled pianos (sampletekk) is giving me hell

**devyes** · 04-08-2012, 02:19 PM

Hello!

I recently sold my awful sounding NORD and go the VAX77 (it's sweet) so that I could have more control and quality with my sounds. I lead a piano driven pop/jazz band and was sick of always using the NORD rhodes patch.

Anyways, I've been experiencing a lot of problems. First I began with the Alicia Keys piano, and it runs great in Kontakt, and with nothing running I can run at 256 samples without any latency or sample size problems (kontakt says it's about 14ms which sounds fine by me). Only problem was, it was TOTALLY crashing mainstage half way through performances once I started performing with mainstage. Who knows, but truth is, I'm okay to leave it behind for now because the piano sound was just a bit too muddy and not punchy enough for the music I play.

So I got the Sampletekk "The Small One" thinking that this would solve my problems seeing as it's 1/3rd the size. But I was soon greeted with all sorts of problems in EXS24. At least it doesn't crash mainstage I guess, but it keeps giving me the mainstage error "disk too slow" basically. I have a 5400rpm drive on my 2009 MBP unibody with 4 gb of ram and over 100 gb free on the HD.

Not only this, there is all sorts of popping coming out of the LEFT channel only... Very strange, and very very annoying. I download the Mult.24 file from the sampletekk website but it's just not functioning well. Also, some notes just won't play every once in a while as if the computer just couldn't find them.

I've "exported the sampler instruments and sample files" so that they are hosted within the application support folder. I've tried changing my buffer size, messing with memory settings in preferences, etc. NOTHING gets rid of the popping in the left channel. It's funny -- the AK demanded 383mb of memory and this needs about 290mb -- significantly more considering the difference in sample size. Furthermore, I just don't think the EXS platform runs as smoothly as Kontakt so maybe that makes it ultimately more taxing.

If you could offer any advice as to how I could improve my experience with the TSO piano, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Best,
Devon

UPDATE: check out a video example of an unresponsive note here: http://youtu.be/zj8Ba6x2CGs -- in fact I've only ever experienced it with this note in particular... strange!
As for the pops and clicks, I only had the right channel amplified but I promise you they are there! Especially when I play large amounts of notes.

Thanks again

**jimmymio** · 04-10-2012, 12:07 AM

sorry I can't give you any specific advice but i can say that I've been using Sampletekk pianos in EXS for several years. I have several including TBO, 7CG etc. and I never had problems with my old G5 or my newer Mac Pro.
JP