written by: mikemilton
FWIW, I have the same experience with AU's being less than reliable. I really do not think this is EigenD-specific except to the extent that there is some underlying incompatibility.I've been trying to use Kontakt 4 from inside EigenD and have found that Kontakt 4 does not quite behave properly. For example, if one deletes a loaded sound from the rack, it can sometimes take minutes for it to fully disappear and Kontakt to become responsive. Under MainStage, Kontakt responds essentially instantaneously all the time.
Can you please say which version of EigenD you're using?
EigenD automatically 'disables' audio units when they're not actively being used by the instrument (idle). This allows the entire system to conserve resources. When an audio unit is disabled like this, GUI updates can be sluggish and unresponsive for that audio unit itself.
There are two ways around this:
* use the instrument by playing on the Eigenharp or playing back a recording from the scheduler with it
* increase the audio unit's tail time, which is the time that EigenD waits before it disables it after the last usage. This is done through Belcanto with this command: "audio unit 1 hey tail time to 60 set". You can find the list of audio unit numbers on the wiki (note that increasing the tail time can aversely affect your system's performance)
Hope this helps,
Geert
Eigenlabs Software Department
I am using the 1.1.11 version, one of the test releases.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by EigenD disabling audio units. I'm talking about fundamental operations to configure a sound, i.e, load the BRASS instrument into Kontakt or delete the VIOLIN instrument after I'm done using it. Those operations can sometimes take minutes. Such things are essentially instantaneous when Kontakt is being hosted by MainStage, Logic, Digital Performer, or any of my other DAWs that I use.
dhjdhj, yes I understood that you meant that. EigenD disables audio units after the tail time has expired by stopping to render their UIs. We ran into audio units that were consuming a lot of resources during rendering even when they weren't actually doing anything. You can prevent this from happening by using any of the two methods I described above.
Hope this helps.
Neither of these options seem reasonable. Seems like usage of all AUs is being punished because a few don't work well. No other daw or au host that I use has any problems with AUs and they certainly don't disable their GUIs from working properly
dhjdhj, when you put the tail time to the maximum, they will behave as in any other daw. However, I have to disagree with you about audio unit stability, I've had numerous problems with several audio units in Logic, Reaper, Ardour, Bidule, ... They usually take the entire application down.
We'll be looking at some other approaches to make the handling of this more intuitive sometime in the future.
Take care,
Geert
Eigenlabs Software Department
I'm curious as to what AUs have caused you problems. I routinely use a wide spectrum of AUs from native instruments, aas, modartt, Arturia, spectrasoft, musiclab and a few others) in live performance with mainstage as well as with logic and digital performer and even some homebrew hosts I've built (with Juce) in my home studio and have not had any problems in at least a year (mainstage used to give me lots of grief but not any more.
It seems bizarre to have to adjust eigenD to make AUs respond normally.
Off the top of my head, I've had Kontakt, Guitar Rig, StudioDevil AMP, PSP Vintagewarmer, FabFilter Twin, Softube, ... routinely crash on me or stuck into a permanent CPU drain situation.
With what hosts?
The ones I mentioned above: Logic, Reaper, Ardour, Mixbus, Bidule, AULab, ...
Well, my instinct suggests that there's something else going on in your environment that's responsible for this (perhaps audio drivers). I think if there were general crashes going on in all AUs, it would be widely acknowledged (and addressed).
Honestly, no, this is a really vanilla system with rock solid drivers and no cruft, dedicated to live music playing. I'm not the only one I've seen reporting this and I've talked with people on forums having trouble like this with audio units. Like any other software, they have bugs and they're sometimes so difficult to reproduce or track down that it can take a very long time. I've also heard numerous times that Snow Leopard made these problems worse for many people, including me.
Of course there can be bugs but the argument for how EigenD supports AUs is predicated on AUs being generally buggy. I don't think that follows.
Indeed, based on my own experience, my position is that it is EigenD that is buggy, not that AUs. Why else would all my AUs work perfectly fine with the other hosts I use and yet have problems with EigenD, particularly given that AUs have been exercised by many people but EigenD is still in its early days with a small community.
I also ran into some problems with SL but updates for both hosts and AUs arrived quickly and everything has been fine.
Since people are more likely to use forums to find solutions for problems, those who have no problems don't make so much noise (like me!) so one would expect to see a distorted ratio of working to broken, indeed for ANY product.
@dhjdhj, I never said that EigenD was perfect, just that there are AUs that are creating problems and that I still now personally have problems with these AUs in other hosts also. These are indeed being resolved over time and I see that even DAWs like Logic and Reaper aren't handling them perfectly either. My personal experience is not that everything is fine outside EigenD land either, it's improving over time, just as EigenD is. When SL just came out and Logic 9 was available, I couldn't even run it stable for an hour, now that's reduced to a few crashes per day. Reaper is more stable and I switched to it, but once in a while it crashes with Omnisphere, Softube, Guitar Rig or Studio Devil AUs. Bidule was crashing with Guitar Rig 3 for months last year, I couldn't trust it to play live anymore and had to revise my entire setup and do my guitar sounds with other software. With the amount of data that EigenD is streaming out, different problems occur with AUs that are probably not being seen with regular MIDI usage.
We're investigating how to improve things in this regard. For now, I suggest that you set the tail time of the audio unit slots to their maximum, save that as a setup and use that as your base setup.
Best regards,
Geert
ok --- I guess we'll just have to differ on this one --- I use Omnisphere all the time and it works wonderfully. I don't use Guitar Rig but I do use AmpliTube 2 (actually 3, now), again with MainStage and have seen zero problems.
No question there used to be grief --- indeed I used to use a Muse Research Receptor to relieve the "strain" on my laptop for live performance and I used to use the trick where I ran Bidule as a separate app and had it load AUs which I then routed through MainStage over IAC for MIDI and SoundGarden for Audio --- that method worked perfectly fine although a bug in Bidule that didn't allow the same IAC port to be used more than once made it very awkward.
I can see how data rates for the EigenD could cause grief but again I would hope that the EigenD host would thin the data appropriately by default. By the way, I'd love to see OSC support (grin)
It's probably the case that I'm just going to stick with MIDI Out mode and I look forward to having easier access to configuration for that stuff through a nice GUI :-)
@dhjdhj, EigenD does thin the data by default, but even so there's a lot of expression sent along through the Eigenharp 3D keys and other controllers than what usually travels over MIDI. There's also the typical case of using MIDI channels for polyphony and multi-timbral playing. These sometimes trigger behavior that's rarely seen with the traditional use of AUs. We might have been too conservative and careful in our handling of problematic AUs by reducing the tail time parameter as I mentioned before. I'll see if I can track down which AUs this was related too and investigate if there might not be a better way to handle it.
The other feature requests you're mentioning are being worked on. It's good to get your input and it will be nice to get your views on the testing releases once we'll be making them available.
Take care,
Geert
Eigenlabs Software Department
Yeah, I realize there's a ton of data being sent out --- that of course is a consequence of how those keys work and how those keys work is WHY I bought the Alpha !
I do look forward to having (with easy usage) more control over exactly what gets sent out from the Alpha....such things as having different MIDI channel for each column (guitar string!) and the ability to auto-NoteOff a note on a column if another key further down the same column is pressed.
Hell, just give me a graphic picture of the Alpha keyboard, let me select each key separately and define what it will send out in each dimension (including NoteOn in one channel and other CC events on different channels) and I will be a very happy camper.
FWIW, I have the same experience with AU's being less than reliable. I really do not think this is EigenD-specific except to the extent that there is some underlying incompatibility.
Also, It strikes me as a great advantage to have a host that reduces load where possible. I really want to move the alpha onto a MINI later this year so I can go to a few gigs.
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