exs dropout

Ok, I took a shot at it and after an entire day i've replaced all my EXS sampler instruments with an equal and in some cases Better replacement using Kontakt. Now I haven't had the problem happen where the streaming of samples drop off, but what's happening now is that I'll be playing and the audio will suddenly Drop out for a second or two and then come back. I've watched my memory and cpu and they are not spiking at all when this happens. I have some patches that have more than one instance of Kontakt running on 1 preset, ex White Grand piano and Philharmonik strings. I'm gonna look into this on the kontakt forum, but so far it looks like it hasn't provided me with a functional solution.

This is very interesting --- I have sometimes (very rarely) noticed that if I play some notes, each note would start fine but then would be abruptly cut off. Is that what you have encountered?

This used to happen to me with the Real Guitar AU and very occasionally with Kontakt. I haven't seen it happen lately, but one thing I did recently was to move all my samples to a second and faster hard drive that I installed in my laptop.

I don't know if that'a coincidence.

I had something similar last night with my MainStage pianos, after a couple hours of playing. Brand-new MBP 2.0 GHz quad-core, 4G RAM. Brand new MainStage 2, which, by the way, seems inexcusably unable to open my many MS1 files without having to reset all my controller assignments. Back to the drop-outs, I would play a chord and the notes would cut off after a second or so - not all together, but in a random flurry. Playing a single note fared no better. Switched to my GSi VB3 Hammond and other patches, they seemed OK. A restart made everything OK. I also had no spikes in CPU or memory usage.
I am determined to use MainStage only onstage, but wish I could do so confidently. I am considering returning to MS1 for now, until I can sort things out. In fact, I thought I was doing a custom install (hoping to avoid many duplicate files, jam packs,etc.) of it last night. But, when finished, could not find it! Anyone else have both on their machines?

interesting, as I just recently added Real Guitar AU to my setup. What I find odd is that much like the EXS problem, the drop outs using Kontakt don't happen right away, they will happen after playing for 10-15 minutes or so. So what the **** is going on that this problem occurs in one form or another using either EXS or Kontakt player? The EXS issue is most definitely a streaming issue in that the initial first 2 seconds of the sample will always play, but the streaming of the remainder of the sample will not, however the Kontakt setup is COMPLETE AUDIO LOSS of All sound for 1-2 seconds, and this occurs while the CPU and Memory meters are nowhere close to spiking or even remotely moving while playing the keyboard.

Back to the drawing board.

what you are describing is pretty much the issue we are all having. What you are hearing is Mainstage playing the sound of the initial first 2 seconds of the sample, and then sound drops off. So it's a FIFO scenario. If you play an arpeggiated chord, the first notes played would be the first notes to drop off, which is why you are not hearing them all drop off together. I have both MS1 and MS2 on my laptop, and I have been using Only MS1 since it has never given me any problems whatsoever.

I have even gone as far as booting the MBP in 64 bit mode by holding down the 6 and 4 key while booting, and am running MS2 in 64 bit mode, still no change.

Hmmm, when you say you get complete loss for 1-2 seconds, are you saying that the sounds restart by themselves? In my case, a sound will stop abruptly and then I can hit a key and it will play again and stop abruptly --- that will happen a few times and then it's all normal again.

Well, MS1 had its own set of problems that made it unreliable. In my case, the MIDI routing capabilities are critical to my live rig so I'm not in a position to revert to the older one anyway.

Yes exactly complete loss and then the everything is back, But when it's back, it's fine again for a few minutes or so until I get complete drop out again, and then again everything is back.
This is not as bad as the issue I was having before with the EXS sampler where I would be forced to restart the app to temporarily correct the problem, but it is still an Un Usable setup. I used this new setup with the Kontakt replacing the EXS on Sat night at a gig and a backing track sample just Cut out in the middle of the song, and the pianos and other instruments every now and then would completely drop off like somebody tapped MUTE on the board for a second and then Un Muted.

what sort of midi routing limitations?
One thing I hate about MS1 is that It does not recognize the names I give my midi devices. Example, I'm using 2 novation Remote SL controllers, one is a 61 and one is 37 keys. In Audio/Midi setup they both come up as simply "Remote SL" , but I can rename them, which is what I do, I call one remote sl61 and one remote sl37. MS2 will show the controllers in Layout mode the way I renamed them, MS1 does not, so I have to relearn which keyboard is assigned to which keyboard in the layout at the start of every show.

@Irizzo

That's a major gripe for me. There needs to be locking of the setup. Mapping things during setup for a live show is a bit stressful.

@All
We also used EXS24 for a backing track player before PlayBack came out. It would also stop playing at random points - pretty rarely, but it did happen once during a show.

Message was edited by: sam squarewave

MS1 did not have support for external MIDI synths. I use MS to route my keyboards to various external MIDI synths, leveraging stuff like layering, splits, and so forth.

That mostly works extremely well although I have run into a couple of glitches, one of which I'm about to post a new question about.

"If you play an arpeggiated chord, the first notes played would be the first notes to drop off, which is why you are not hearing them all drop off together."
No, then I would not have mentioned it. I was playing 5-6-note block chords, not arpeggiated, yet the notes dropped off in a somewhat random manner after a second or so. This had not happened before or since.

interesting, were these exs sampler patches? Is it at all possible that some samples cut out later than others because the sample might have been stretched across a range of notes, which would cause the lower notes to play longer. just making sure this isn't a completely different situation.

It was an ordinary EXS24 piano patch.

then it could very well be what I was talking about regarding lower notes taking longer to die out because of stretching out samples along several notes.

One thing I noticed was that even a 4 minute aiff file of an entire backing track would cut out after 2 seconds, which kills my theory that the EXS would play the initial part of the sample and drop off at the point of streaming or the point where the sample would loop for sustain.