Think twice before purchasing Eastwest PLAY

[quantum7]

2009 EDIT- PLAY has been working great for me now in 2009. Thank you EW for all the great updates.
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I have twice tried to post my troubles with PLAY on the Eastwest/ forum, but they refuse to let my post be posted.....and seem to keep deleting various other posts with negative comments on PLAY......thus I will have to take my complaints to every other forum I can as to make sure people who are considering purchasing PLAY at least have some warning. To top it off, I hate complaining about a product that shows so much promise, but there is no way I can be silent when I just spent good money on several PAY instruments that are not working as advertised.

All 3 of my PLAY libraries will not play within Cubase 4.5 without glitches and pops.....sometimes I can get them to sound OK, but as soon as I add 1 other VST instrument things go haywire. I also tried to use PLAY outside of Cubase with MIDI Yoke, but when I do PLAY either- 1) crashes, 2)my VSTi's do not sound, or 3) my audio has clicks and pops. Kontakt 2 works great via MIDI Yoke, btw. I have installed the latest November 17th update and have all the latest Cubase updates also. I tried phoning tech support twice in the past several days with promises of returning my phone call, but so far have not heard back from them.

My DAW is a Pentium 4 DualCore 3.0Ghz- with 3GB switch. ASUS P5LD2 MB, 4Gb O' RAM. 400G SATA HD's (x5), Win XP Pro- SP2. Everything on my DAW, other than PLAY, runs fantastic.

I had planned on buying all the rest of the PLAY instruments this month, but unless someone can help lead me in the right direction for a fix I would be a fool to spend another dime on PLAY. I feel foolish for not looking at all the other posts first about people having problems using PLAY in their hosts. You live and you learn. I just hope someone chances upon this post and reconsiders purchasing PLAY..........at least until they fix the problem.
Thank you all for letting me get that off of my chest.

[aug25]

+1

Same goes with FL Studio

[EricWatkins]

This seems to be an ongoing theme lately. From all the posts I have read, it seems that the only people that are having any luck with PLAY are Mac users and even then, it sounds like working with it is a compromise somehow.

I have had Platinum Play Plus sitting on the shelf ever since it came out because no one has reported good use of it from what I can tell. I would love to own all of thier new titles but there is no way I am going to spend money on a platform that is that shaky. I understand that it must be really difficult to make this happen for them but at a certain point, they should really hold off and stop acting like nothing is wrong and take care of the problems they have. I mean, just how many updates have there been to PLAY since it came out? It's just rediculous.

All that said, I own like 8 titles of thiers and I love them all. Of course, they all play on K3. I really look forward to owning more of thier stuff when PLAY is a working platform. I really do wish them the best, yet at the same time, I feel for all the people who have invested thier hard earned money into libraries they cant even hardly use.

Just my 2 cents.

E

[tradivoro]

So, Eric, are you saying that the workaround to actually use the samples is to use K3?? In other words, you're using the sounds provided you use K3, but if you use the play engine, then forget it about it?? Just wondering...

[EricWatkins]

You can't use play libraries with Kontakt. Play is completely proprietary. What I meant was that I already have several libraries by EWQL that were released in the Native Instruments format of Kompakt which are also useable by Kontakt. Platinum Play Plus is the only Play library I own but in Kompakt format I own EWQLSO Platinum XP, Choirs, RA, StormDrum, Colossus, Gold, Gold XP, and Vapor. They are ALL incredible libraries. If the new titles performed like the old ones, I'd be all over em. I just cant justify the "Spend now, play later" attitude. Once again, I dont despise East West at all. But I do think that thier priorities are a little off right now. I am sure that they are working hard on solutions to the problems and I am sure that it isnt easy. Unfortunately, in the meantime, they sometimes come off as if nothing is wrong. Sort of like the elephant in the room or the man behind the curtain kind of thing. I just think that being a bit more straight forward about the known issues would do a lot to help with consumer confidence in thier products. Gary updates people on progress constantly and seems very straight forward about issues about his libraries when or if those things arise. Eric P is the same way. Humbility goes a long way in my book. Hope this clarifies things.

Eric

[peter269]

PLAY was designed for 64-bit systems with at least 8GB of RAM.

ON THE PC
Sonar - 64bit
Nuendo - 64bit
Cubase 4 BETA - 64bit

ON THE MAC
Both Logic and DP are 32bit, while the Mac is 64bit. The best performance is coming from Intel Macs with a minimum 8GB RAM. I have a client who is successfully running QLSO PLAY on a Mac Intel system with 1 drive dedicated to each orchestral section.

With DP6 PLAY operates well in a multitimbral setup. With Logic, and this is a Logic issue, PLAY works best with individual instances. Initial tests have shown that 32 instances are possible.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
To avoid system integration issues, I advise clients to assign hard drives by companies, since each company streams off the hard drive differently.

If your system is not 64bit, or if you're mixing 32bit and 64bit applications then you're not going to get the performance you're looking for. This has nothing to do with PLAY. It has to do with computer systems and proper system integration.

[tfishbein82]

Originally Posted by peter269

PLAY was designed for 64-bit systems with at least 8GB of RAM.

ON THE PC
Sonar - 64bit
Nuendo - 64bit
Cubase 4 BETA - 64bit

ON THE MAC
Both Logic and DP are 32bit, while the Mac is 64bit. The best performance is coming from Intel Macs with a minimum 8GB RAM. I have a client who is successfully running QLSO PLAY on a Mac Intel system with 1 drive dedicated to each orchestral section.

With DP6 PLAY operates well in a multitimbral setup. With Logic, and this is a Logic issue, PLAY works best with individual instances. Initial tests have shown that 32 instances are possible.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
To avoid system integration issues, I advise clients to assign hard drives by companies, since each company streams off the hard drive differently.

If your system is not 64bit, or if you're mixing 32bit and 64bit applications then you're not going to get the performance you're looking for. This has nothing to do with PLAY. It has to do with computer systems and proper system integration.

Min. Requirements:
2GB RAM

Recommended:
4GB RAM
64-bit OS & host

I'm sorry, but if EW advertises the product like this, it should at least work in a 32-bit environment w/ 2GB of RAM. And it should perform well in a 64-bit environment w/ 4GB of RAM. This is clearly not the case for several people on PC.

[dpasdernick]

Originally Posted by peter269

PLAY was designed for 64-bit systems with at least 8GB of RAM.

ON THE PC
Sonar - 64bit
Nuendo - 64bit
Cubase 4 BETA - 64bit

ON THE MAC
Both Logic and DP are 32bit, while the Mac is 64bit. The best performance is coming from Intel Macs with a minimum 8GB RAM. I have a client who is successfully running QLSO PLAY on a Mac Intel system with 1 drive dedicated to each orchestral section.

With DP6 PLAY operates well in a multitimbral setup. With Logic, and this is a Logic issue, PLAY works best with individual instances. Initial tests have shown that 32 instances are possible.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
To avoid system integration issues, I advise clients to assign hard drives by companies, since each company streams off the hard drive differently.

If your system is not 64bit, or if you're mixing 32bit and 64bit applications then you're not going to get the performance you're looking for. This has nothing to do with PLAY. It has to do with computer systems and proper system integration.

Yikes! That's a lot of horse power! Do we get that much more from the Play engine than we were getting from the NI engine? I too own a lot of the older versions of East West software and can load up a ton of Gold Pro XP, Stormdrum patches etc and crank out some music on my humble P4 2.66 with 2 gigs of ram. I was hoping to add RA to my collection and should have bought it while the NI version was still available.

I understand that the devlopers keep pushing the envelope but sometimes I wonder how efficient their code is. Why does it take so much more to push the samples around than it did just a year or so ago. Is Gypsy, for instance, doing way more than the old RA was doing computing wise? If Platinum ran so well before for many people why can't the Play engine do the same? I'm pretty sure the samples are close to the same in the Play vs NI versions.

The VSL player kicks some serious butt in terms of what it is doing with all of the legato samples etc and works pretty darn well for me. If I'm going to have to invest in a quad machine with 8 or 16 gigs of ram then the new libraries better blow away the old ones in terms of playablity and sonic wealth. (or at least make me toast in the morning).

I wonder if EW reformatted the samples to work in Kontakt would they work better? In other words is Play a massive assault of real time playability with "angel trumpets and devil trombones" or is it just a playback engine that hasn't hit it's stride yet? I used to buy East West software like it was candy. I haven't made a single Play purchase beacause of threads like this one.

Darren

[kbaccki]

Originally Posted by peter269

This has nothing to do with PLAY. It has to do with computer systems and proper system integration.

Hmmm, sounds more like "proper software design" is at issue. Think about it: the same EW content that used to run fine on a 32-bit platform with 2GB and fast disks, now requires 64-bit and 8GB or more to run efficiently (or at all)?

Could the "requirement" to use fully 64-bit system have something to do with the ability to load 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. GB of RAM on those systems, thereby obviating the need for the playback engine to stream from disk efficiently? Or is that just a coincidence?


Based on symptoms and complaints described in threads like this recent one:
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/...t=63594&page=2

... and also based on comments such as "you should really be using 8GB"

... and also based on copy touting such benefits as "64-bit support** allows you to load many more instruments and voices, limited only by your system RAM" (http://www.[domain-that-will-not...php?pageid=192)

I can only connect my own dots and circumstantially conclude that the PLAY engine itself currently has some design and/or implementation deficiencies that:

a.) makes it less efficient than the Kontakt platform when running (essentially) the same sample content

b.) causes it to consume an inordinate amount of RAM

c.) causes a variety of performance issues in various hosts and on various systems resulting in rice krispies and other symptoms (as documented on various internet forums)

I have no dog in this, and I wish EW no ill will. However, I think passing off software/hardware/system issues as strictly due to "system itegration" (and therfore: the fault of the end user), is really passing the buck. Especially when circumstantial evidence would suggest otherwise.

[quantum7]

The funny thing is that PLAY doesn't consume that much RAM. It's just that PLAY doesn't like to play with other VSTi's (pun intended). It works fine most of the time by itself, but add anything else into the mix......even a reverb plugin....and things go haywire. Completely unacceptable!!! And to add insult to injury Eastwest/ attempts to silence negative comments about PLAY on their forum.