The betas. . .

[dum]

^^^

Cool,



tw1nstates I don't know who's advice you prefer, but 1.8gb of ram for 4 instances of altiverb is fucked up and there's a major problem somewhere. Normally 4 instances of large spaces only cost about ~450 mb.

[leedsquietman]

dum again shows all the intellect of Eric Cartman with his response, except Cartman actually is occasionally funny.

Again, 1.8 GB ram use of 4 instances of a reverb is not efficient. I hope Tw1nstates finds out what is causing the issue and of course, Altiverb is perfect because the all seeing, all knowing oracle which is dum, says so ...

I have used Altiverb 6 as described before and will agree it's much more efficient than some previous releases. It was also less efficient than Space Designer and SIR2 when I used them in Logic 8 recently. This was the opinion of the the other engineers at the studio. However, all of them said it was worth trading a bit of CPU power and memory for the quality of Altiverb's impulses. If your mileage varies then so be it, it doesn't make other's responses less valid.

[dum]

^^^ Vague blither. kudos for typing so much without saying a thing.
Years of practise I assume.


Anyways, back on topic: the numbers don't lie. Between me and tw1nstates we can safely deduce who's the culprit with his ram problem. or who's not the culprit, more to the point. The mileage doesn't vary that much.

edit: tw1nstates, change your subject to ''Altiverb6 users -- ram usage in Live?'' if you want some useful responses. Not sure what you were expecting with ''The betas...''

[Tone Deft]

post the .als file with the effect in it, all of you go try it with those settings and see what each of you get.

I imagine a reverb set to a quick decay takes less CPU than one with a long decay and the load is exponential.

[Machinesworking]

Not that impulse responses should do much to RAM/CPU but Altiverb uses 32bit impulse responses, while Space Designer uses 24bit.
Space Designer doesn't sound as good though, definitely noticeable difference in realism. Altiverb shouldn't be the problem, solid company and code.

Audio Ease make serious quality products, but their copy protection is some of the worst IMO... one license and if say for instance your logic/mother board dies, you must wait for them to 'unlock' another license for you. Took a week around Christmas for me! <--- yeah I will complain about that every time Audio Ease come up here, Speakerphone SHOULD be a live performance capable plug in, but relying on it would be foolish live with the CR the way it is now.

[leedsquietman]

If you can hear the difference between 24 and 32 bit files, then you have the hearing of a canine. It's not like the difference between 16 and 24 bit files where you get a huge boost in headroom which is mostly very noticeable. Protools HD, the industry standard recording machine cannot accept 32 bit files either (24 bit / 48 bit fixed point resolution). Most of the best drum libraries, i.e. Ocean Way Drums etc and Superior Drummer are samples recorded 24/96, not 32 bit. Good point though Machines, that 32 bit impulse responses are going to need more resources, although it's going to be fairly negligible given that most impulses are just short .wav/.aiff files.

Altiverb sounds better than Space Designer because it has better Impulses and they are proprietary (and more recent developments such as true stereo input mode). Audioease spent years and tons of money recording some of the best spaces with the best gear for the job. Also remember, Space Designer came out of the ark with Logic Platinum when it was still a PC product, it's a darned good freebie and there are people who have used Space Designer on many hit records. Load it up with some good impulses and it's fine - put in the freely downloadable Acousticas Bricasti M7 Impulses for example and you have something which sounds a lot like the $4000 Bricasti M7 hardware reverb.

[Machinesworking]

@leedsquietman
Saying that because Pro Tools cannot accept 32 bit files, and insinuating that's a good reason to overlook them is pretty silly.
Drum libraries etc... you're not going over any new information there. 99% of the libraries out there are 16 or 24 bit.
Audio Ease believe they sound better I would assume, they use them in Altiverb. They probably like the higher resolution the impulse response would have, who knows? Altiverb sounds better than Space Designer, period. I do not think it's available any more, but a guy at OSXAudio bothered to take the same impulse responses and use them in Space Designer and Altiverb and post them on his web page for a while. Altiverb very clearly sounded better.
One of the differences between them is 32 and 24 bit impulse resolution. I don't particularly care why it sounds better, could be stereo pan etc. but it does.
Space Designer was never free, it started off costing as much as Altiverb, then Apple bundled it with Logic Pro.

One reason why 32 bit 192khz isn't the new standard is simply resources and the fact that overall we're not going to be seeing 10Ghz single core computers any time soon. Every audio geek I know who's recorded at 192 loves it, but it's taxing. Live and other DAWs calculate the audio at 32 bit internally, and do not recommend bouncing files to 24 pre mix down, for optimum audio quality, you know all this, so basically you're just interweb debating I guess?

Again, very clearly you could tell in a blind test which files had Altiverb and which had Space Designer. Not a fan of their CR, but the products are great, and it's not all about the impulse responses. My archetypical three paragraph reply is done.

[tw1nstates]

my bad,

A quarter of a gig, or thereabouts per instance.

Anyway, just to be clear, I wasn't asking about Altiverb, i was asking about the Betas and their memory usage!

Thanks for the replies though. . .

[dum]

a quarter of a gig per instance still sounds a bit off. maybe for the first instance, but every subsequent instance after that should be around ~100mb ,,, I'm talking large spaces here.

At least that's how it is on live7.



anyways, you might be interested in the live8 betas memory usage - but you're query involves a variable. Altiverb. As I said, you'd get more useful info if you put a bit more thought into the thread title.

[dum]

Audio Ease make serious quality products, but their copy protection is some of the worst IMO... one license and if say for instance your logic/mother board dies, you must wait for them to 'unlock' another license for you.

Agreed, although I can't really single audioease out specifically - only every company who uses PACE. I wish my run-in with PACE disaster was as simple as waiting a week to be re-authorised.
I didn't have a logic board die or anything like that. I simply beta tested Live7, following the installation instructions meticulously of course, and one of the beta builds fucking corrupted the PACE copy protection scheme. Neither ableton, nor audioease, and especially not pace had a fix for that or any solution other than collectively shrugging their shoulders.

Of course, I did everything you can imagine to try and repair it between defrags, repairing permissions, re-installing extensions etc etc and every combination of installing/reinstalling/defrag/repair with no luck. A fresh OS install was not an option then, and I was effectively locked out of ALL my sets featuring altiverb, pluggo, or max patch. I was locked out of max too. Took a couple of months at least of pulling my hair out repeating the same processes over and over until it finally worked - only because, for some reason, I had a faulty external HD connected to my iMac at the time. weird. I made a clone of my HD straight away, and learned a valuable lesson in the process.



Still though, what I remember the most was the shoulder shrugging from all parties involved. I was pretty amazed actually. Didn't exactly fill me with consumer confidence. But ya, it was about time I started cloning my HD. Although I have a feeling Pace can still fuck you despite such measures. and if it does, no one is going to care.

and btw, your last post is on the money. but I have a hunch leeds is going to reply with more vague blither.

[locojohn]

Audio Ease make serious quality products, but their copy protection is some of the worst IMO... one license and if say for instance your logic/mother board dies, you must wait for them to 'unlock' another license for you.

Agreed, although I can't really single audioease out specifically - only every company who uses PACE. I wish my run-in with PACE disaster was as simple as waiting a week to be re-authorised.

Actually I pretty much dislike all these iLok, Synchrosoft and PACE copy protection schemes, because, frankly speaking I don't believe in that they bring more money to the companies employing these tools. In addition to potential disasters with configuration, certain protection algorithms, such as the one from Synchrosoft, for example, may slow down processing of plugins or applications by as much as 50%, depending on how these algorithms are used. Yes, I've heard stories that Cubase 4 had never been properly cracked, but I was wondering whether this is beneficial for the company in reality, if you think about it a little....

Personally, I avoid plug-ins and applications with dongle protection, no matter how much they are treated as "state of the art" tools.

Andrejs

[dum]

@locojohn


Ya.

I feel the same way. But I needed access to MAXMSP (pace protected), so what option did I have ? Once I was already involved with Pace, there was no reason to avoid Altiverb - and I'm a reverb (software/hardware) nut.

But I digress... the pace protection scheme has done nothing but punish me, a paying customer. If the software was anything less than spectacularly resource efficient with mind blowing results, I would have asked for a refund.


Lately, I've picked up some FX which are iLok protected, and demo'd some syncrosoft stuff. I allowed myself to do so because I'm already in bed with pace, and because I've been avoiding these fx for years because of iLok. So why avoid them if I'm already stuck with pace ? Anyways, the installation was fine - and they run fine. But now ableton is hanging approximately half the time I try to change a set, so I'm force-quitting more than I ever was. Which is annoying, but I'm grateful it's not happening while I'm in the middle of something. I'm hoping an upgrade to 10.5 might level some of these issues out...

I do see the use in dongles though, working in any kind of post-production environment or big studio where you might have to move from machine to machine etc - it's handy for that. Should be optional for those specific clients though.


The EU are trying to bring in better consumer protection laws regarding software, and hopefully it will have some affect on excessive copy protection.

[leedsquietman]

Space Designer hasn't been updated in years - this is why there is a difference. It still has mono input to stereo output, rather than stereo input to stereo output and I don't think it's been touched since Apple bought it. Altiverb has been continually improved over the course of several years.

People argue about whether there are any benefits between audio sampling rates of 44.1 over 88.2 and 96 Khz with some justification. Dan Lavry, the boss of industry standard Lavry converters himself has said he won't release 192 Khz versions of his converters because there is no difference between 96 Khz and 192. These are all different arguments.

Live recommends you use 32 bit resolution files because it calculates 32bit floating point values, but technically speaking, you are only hearing a difference at around -144dB or so. Most humans don't hear below -100 dB anyway. I've recorded at 32 bit float and 24 bit and do not notice the difference, so unless I'm doing something with tons of softsynths (where more variables exist with dynamic range) and little extra audio recording, I stick to 24 bit. You're correct that computer resources dictate this to a degree but on the other hand, if there are no increased results from using 32 bit, why bother wasting disk space and computer resources. Converters are 24 bit only anyway.

There are already devices around with ridiculous sample rates, SACD for example, which has 2822.4 Khz sampling frequency, but most audiophile agree DVD-A at 24 bit / 96 Khz sounds just as good.

[Machinesworking]

Space Designer hasn't been updated in years - this is why there is a difference.

Knew you would come back with that. This test I talked about was done when Space Designer was released. Altiverb sounded better, and years later it still does. You are definitely just interweb debating with people, and coming to conclusions that aren't based on anything at all but assumptions.

@dum Here's the BIG difference with Audio Ease VS Nomad Factory for example, Audio Ease Allow ONE installation, period.
You own a laptop and you're paying near full price for a second one, or you're getting an iLock. Both solutions suck ass in a live situation.
Nomad allow three installations, I installed a second full set of the Integral Bundle and emailed them to allow one more unlock as my logic board had died. THAT, is the way PACE in my instance can stay out of the way. That really sucks about PACE and the beta etc. Honestly knowing you, you've behaved pretty mildly about that, I would probably be spamming Audio Eases forums as well as this one about it until everyone was sick of hearing about it!

[leedsquietman]

Machines - You don't make that clear in your first description. We are also going on a subjective opinion from someone at Mac OSX audio several years back if this is the case. The rest of the stuff, such as word length and sampling rate is always up for debate vigourously at places like Gearslutz, where a person could argue for weeks ad nauseum. I don't plan on doing this debate here any longer, nor the merits of Altiverb vs Space Designer so I'm out.

Since neither of us have actually physically tested Space Designer against Altiverb with the same impulses (although we both have experience of using these programs seperately), I would suggest you're as guilty as I am of interweb debating and coming to conclusions based on assumptions. Bonne nuit