Tutorial: Multiple standalone PLAY instances with Logic 8 for dummies from a dummy.

[rimskykorsakov]

Cool !!!
Thanks for sharing this detailed instructions , Mellotron !

I'm actually using SOUNDFLOWER , but now I'm gonna check out JACKPILOT too.

And maybe the usage of JackPilot solves the problem , that I can't use both Kontakt and PLAY
as standalone apps on my Mac ( G5 ; OS Tiger ), because
PLAY(standalone) is always going crazy when Kontakt(standalone) is open.


best wishes

Gerd



P.S.:
Furthermore , dear gentlemen and gentlegirls , let me tell you that I've actually learned a new english term here :
" It's all fine and dandy ..." . Love this term ...

[MellotronGhost]

Originally Posted by A.Leung

I'd like to find the time to go through this and try it myself with JAck and see if I can streamline this for you or not. I am able to get good results with Soundflower and IAC so thats the only thing causing me to hesitate. But Perhaps I'll take the plunge!

I would love to hear what you can find out. I also would like to know why Soundflower get nauseous on my System. Jack also allows to route to individual audio channels so you can create separate audio tracks for each instance which might help for mixing but I have not tried that out yet.

Maybe some streamlining could be done with the instruments in the environment. It will be a lot of clicking and the result will contain like 60+ and more instruments set up there if I have to make one for each channel connected to each multi. But I do not know enough about the environment to think of any possible simplification.

It will also be interesting to see how the overall performance and stability will turn out with a template full of loaded standalones vs. a template of Plugins that take Logic's virtual memory just to the point where the Console does not yet complain about instability.

Originally Posted by rimskykorsakov

I'm actually using SOUNDFLOWER , but now I'm gonna check out JACKPILOT too.

And maybe the usage of JackPilot solves the problem , that I can't use both Kontakt and PLAY
as standalone apps on my Mac ( G5 ; OS Tiger ), because
PLAY(standalone) is always going crazy when Kontakt(standalone) is open.

Yes, you did a great tutorial on the topic as well. It was a helpful starting point for my experiments, but on my particular setup it did not work since SoundFlower did not let me use multiple instances. So I was forced to search for an alternative.

I have not yet tried to have a standalone Kontakt instance open along the PLAYs. That I should try soon too.


Re: P.S. Man lernt eben nie aus...! :-)

[rimskykorsakov]

Originally Posted by MellotronGhost

Re: P.S. Man lernt eben nie aus...! :-)

LOL ( ... That's a good one ... )

[nft]

I just finished a TV series using DP with 2 instances of Mach V and one of Kontakt 3 running externally as well as a bunch of stuff running inside DP (3xSuperior Drummer, another Kontakt, and VI's), all using JACK to route the audio back into DP.Mac Pro 2.8 8-core, 10GB ram.
I have to say once I got it working (which was a bit of a bear) it was fantastic. I had well over 20 channels of audio coming back into DP. I have to say, looking at your Logic tutorial, that DP seems much more straightforward to get this setup.

Drawbacks that I found:
-you better keep detailed notes of your audio routings because it can get very complex pretty quickly.
-if you have a crash in any of the elements you have to restart the whole shebang. And (not that this is a drawback) you need to do things in the right order..JACK, DP, then external.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to try PLAY as it will not open for me in standalone, and am still waiting for tech support to solve my issues.

[givemenoughrope]

How easy/hard would this be to do for Cubase 4 or PT8?

[ssendman]

Let me first say thanks for the detailed instructions. Second, I have lost some functionality in my DAW LP8 and would appreciate some help getting it back. I all the audio to route back into Logic however I have lost all of my outputs and inputs from my Apogee Symphony system. I only have two ins and outs. Because of my setup this renders my studio useless i can't even hear any audio coming from logic. I assume this is because i now have Jack set as my audio device in Logic Preferences. Which begs the question how to set Jack to have all 32 ins and outs that i used to have in Logic. Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.

[MellotronGhost]

An addition:

I now created a test template comprised of

1 instance of PLAY Gypsy standalone
11 instances of PLAY EWQLSO standalone
1 VSL Ensemble v2 with 3 instruments inside.

Each is routed with an IAC into Logic and I created 3 stereo inputs for Logic which simply means Gypsy, EWQLSO and VSL are routed back to Logic into separate Audio channels which allows me to individually adjust those with panning for Gypsy (I use the solo violin) and extra reverb in the case of VSL before any mixdown.

On the way I ran into some weirdness and from that I wanted to add that it is highly important in which order everything is being started.
This is now how it works on in my setup:

1. Start Jack server by launching the JackPilot and start the engine.
- Do not autostart Jack in the startup items.
- Do not at this point load any preferences in the connections manager

2. Open connections manager. Start all standalone instances one by one. Each time one has started you need to click into the window of the connection manager and see the freshly loaded instance being added. Only then start the next instance. Watch them all being added. If not, Jack Audio's connection manager may "overlook" some and you will not get your setup to work
All standalone instances that were initially part of the setup when you saved it in the connection manager must be loaded and must appear in the connection manager. It is too bad that they do not retain the file name so they appear as PLAY, PLAY01, PLAY02... Certainly something to improve for the makers of Jack Audio.

3. Start Logic. Load your template song. (Make sure your audio settings have JackRouter as Audio Device.)

4. Load Your preferences in the Jack Connection manger.

Now you can load instruments in your instances (You can actually do this also when you start them)

Remember that PLAY does not save MIDI settings properly when saving instruments (I made a multi for each instance so I can quickly load everything). You will most likely have to activate the correct IAC in the MIDI preferences of each PLAY instance by hand.

Now we are good to go. Soon I will fill my instances and will see how far I can get before I have to use my other computer as slave. I will most likely outsource the vienna samples there since PLAY does not support network yet, but Ensemble v3 does incl. audio stream, which might get interesting when I decide to get some more of their strings.

[stevie1234]

This Tutorial is exactly what I was searching for - thanx Mellotron.

I built me a setup with Logic, PLAY, KontaktPlayer2 and Kontakt3, each one single instance, each sending 8 outs to logic. I came across 3 issues:

1. While K3 and KP are working fine, PLAY dies whenever I try to load more than 1 (sometimes 2) instruments - no matter if K3/KP are running or not. Someone similar experiences?

2. I wonder why we need several instances of one VI, when we can deal with more than one IAC-Buss inside on single instance?

3. And how do you guys deal with the additional latency? Pre-delay on the MIDI-tracks? What is your Buffer Size (in Logic and Jack)?

Best,
Stevie

[MellotronGhost]

Update: I have created a template which so far is running all on one single machine:

With the methods described above I am currently running:

98 articulations of EWQLSO spread over 11 standalone instances.
2 Keyswitch articulations from Gypsy, the violin master and the Legato Mod.
3 instances (2 articulations each) of VSL through Ensemble

All of this including system and Logic is taking up 9.8GB on my system.

So far I do not encounter any sluggishness, no slow GUI or anything.
The processor however idles around at 21% though while nothing is playing I wonder what there is to calculate...

It is so far the best way I could figure out on how to get the most out of PLAY. I feel it should be in the manual. Especially warning that in PlugIn mode you can't do what I just did with the standalone solution. I thought at first it must be possible with PlugIns because "I got the RAM" but by that I did not take Logic's shortcomings regarding virtual memory into account.

[erikjamesmusic]

I can't thank you enough for this workaround. I have been struggling to find a good way to realistically incorporate PLAY into my working system in DP. I have a MacPro 8-core, 10g RAM, multiple Harddrives, etc...and this seems to be the answer! I will try it tomorrow for sure.

This should be a chapter in the PLAY manual for us users who want to use PLAY to it's fullest potential on 1 very fast and able MacPro.

Thanks, Mello.