Ableton Forum

For anyone using East West Play VST 3:

A few months ago I purchased Ableton Live Standard edition & subscribed to East West composercloud. I’ve been learning both & yesterday I tried to export a project. The resulting wav & MP3 stuttered badly. The stuttering occurred only when the sounds from East West Play’s library came in. I tried adjusting a few settings but the results were the same. My son had done a project as well & when exported he had no problems. We couldn’t figure it out until I realized that he had used the Play VST & I used the Play VST 3.
When I took the same project & copied the exact tracks, sounds & automation using just the Play VST, everything rendered fine.
Note: when I searched for the answer I did come across another solution that worked:
Rendering in real-time :
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... -real-time

Yeah it's probably Play...

I have had so many issues and gripes with the play VST, it's just so... yuk. I found some problems with some clicking in some of their looped samples years ago along with some other issues and wasn't greeted very well about it at the time and that was the exact point I decided to switch to anything else from EW especially after $1600 of instruments, the lack of customer care at the time was terrible.

I've had other issues like that where you render out and on playback some of the sustained notes get cut or some of the velocity settings appear to be completely different which is a real issue when you hear a very distinct difference between certain points of a bot or something and work hard to make sure it doesn't hit too hard then it sounds like a mess on render.

I think at the time I had to add an external instrument device and set it to receive input from my audio card as a "dummy" device to force Live into rendering at real time.

I've had the same issues testing in Maschine too where sometimes notes just don't play at all.

No idea if these issues are fixed, I only use the vocals now, I don't bother with the string or horn libraries. One case where the subscription service would have been a benefit, I could have ditched that before loosing so much on it.

Not thrilled with Play either. Bought the RA library a few years ago thinking I'd get the Kontakt version.
Found out it's only available with Play.
After a day of working with it I quit.
I didn't have the same problems you are but I got disgusted with PLAY's severely limited controls.

Sorry you are having a hard time with it.
Hope you get things smoothed out!

Hey hey - thought I'd chime in here, too.

Sorry for all the frustrations, OP - like the other guys here, I can concur that Play is a POS. It's unstable and wonky which is a shame because composer cloud is a great offering.

While I still have a sub, once it runs out in Jan I won't be renewing...I've moved over to Spitfire (Albion One, Albion NEO, solo violin and the AMAZING FREE Labs stuff). They run in Kontakt...and work flawlessly.

Shift Gorden wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 3:50 pm

Hey hey - thought I'd chime in here, too.

Sorry for all the frustrations, OP - like the other guys here, I can concur that Play is a POS. It's unstable and wonky which is a shame because composer cloud is a great offering.

While I still have a sub, once it runs out in Jan I won't be renewing...I've moved over to Spitfire (Albion One, Albion NEO, solo violin and the AMAZING FREE Labs stuff). They run in Kontakt...and work flawlessly.

Well, I’m hoping East West will fix the issue because I do like having access to so many sound libraries without breaking the bank. I have a ton of free plugins including all the Spitfire ones & my next big purchase will be the full version of Kontakt.

Thanks for the input everyone!

I've purchased Ableton Live 10 Standard (now using Live 11 as I got the free upgrade promo) and also I have an annual subscription to EastWest libraries.

I've to say that EW Libs works perfectly fine for me as long as I record midi tracks. But now I'm mixing some audio effects and I'm noticing certain audio dropouts sometimes.

If I start a brand new project without loading any EW library, audio works fine, but as soon as I load some midi libraries, audio tracks sound weird sometimes, they loose power and have audio dropouts. It's really anoying.

I don't think it's a problem of resources ... possibly EW play plugin is the one to blame. I have to dig more about this.

CPU: i7-7700k
RAM: 48Gb
Working on SSD disks
Don't have audio interface. Using ASIO4ALL

Just check in the Play engine options, Streaming TAB that "Max Voices" is set to the highest setting to force it to load as much as it can into RAM. Play doesn't seem to deal well with streaming samples from disk and this can be a real problem when you render a track that sounded perfect when producing but suddenly has notes cutting short or not playing at all when rendering. This isn't limited to Play (tho it is so much worse with this plugin) as I have had the same problem with MusicLab real guitar and even Kontakt instruments.

jestermgee wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 11, 2021 10:34 pm

Just check in the Play engine options, Streaming TAB that "Max Voices" is set to the highest setting to force it to load as much as it can into RAM. Play doesn't seem to deal well with streaming samples from disk and this can be a real problem when you render a track that sounded perfect when producing but suddenly has notes cutting short or not playing at all when rendering. This isn't limited to Play (tho it is so much worse with this plugin) as I have had the same problem with MusicLab real guitar and even Kontakt instruments.

I've done that, yes. I also tried increasing the Cache Level to maximum, so RAM will be used instead of disk ... it doesn't work.

It's really weird. I've exported it to a WAV file, you can see how bad it is. It's a riser, and you can appreciate how it seems to be changing its pitch 3 times.

https://soundcloud.com/andres-giuffre/d ... 1iEQxxLXWh

When you play the original wav file separatedly or in a new project without using plugins, you can hear it perfectly fine.

Also try toggle the option in the hamburger menu (top left) "Stream From Disk"

As counter intuitive as it sounds, I have a feeling I managed to fix my issue by enabling the stream from disk option. Either there is an issue with Play streaming from RAM when rendering or that option is incorrectly labelled but pretty sure that fixed one of the issues I had.

jestermgee wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:26 am

Also try toggle the option in the hamburger menu (top left) "Stream From Disk"

As counter intuitive as it sounds, I have a feeling I managed to fix my issue by enabling the stream from disk option. Either there is an issue with Play streaming from RAM when rendering or that option is incorrectly labelled but pretty sure that fixed one of the issues I had.

Ok ... you'll surely think I'm an idiot after what I'm going to say but .... in case someone is facing the same issue:

When you add the WAV file into the Audio Track, check the audio BPM matches your project BPM. I had my project at 100 BPM and the audio file at 115 BPM, that explains the dropouts. When I set the audio at 100 BPM, everything sounds wonderful now

jazcan wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 7:01 pm

For anyone using East West Play VST 3:

A few months ago I purchased Ableton Live Standard edition & subscribed to East West composercloud. I’ve been learning both & yesterday I tried to export a project. The resulting wav & MP3 stuttered badly. The stuttering occurred only when the sounds from East West Play’s library came in. I tried adjusting a few settings but the results were the same. My son had done a project as well & when exported he had no problems. We couldn’t figure it out until I realized that he had used the Play VST & I used the Play VST 3.
When I took the same project & copied the exact tracks, sounds & automation using just the Play VST, everything rendered fine.
Note: when I searched for the answer I did come across another solution that worked:
Rendering in real-time :
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... -real-time

I'm finding rendering will just not play some notes in a Play instance. All is fine when doing normal playback, but rendering just skips some notes. I'm upgrading to Opus tomorrow.