Veerrrry slooooww saaaving and an over-large DP file.....

[csansom]

This was sort of covered in another thread two years ago, but it doesn't quite apply to my situation.

I have, admittedly, a large file, but so far it's all MIDI - no audio files at all yet. It's an orchestral project with 62 MIDI tracks and 10 instrument tracks, some of which are fairly heavily populated instances of Kontakt and Play (EastWest Hollywood Woodwind). There are 240 bars of, mostly, 3/4 - and it's comparatively simple music, no masses of 16th and 32nd notes or fiddly tuplets, nothing shorter than 8th notes so far. There's a fair amount of continuous data, but nothing I'd regard as excessive.

So far, the DP project file is 45.7 MB on disk, which seems far too much to me. I have an older, considerably bigger project (in time, complexity and number of tracks), which is only 43.3 MB plus loads of audio files. This current project is consistently taking between 1:45 and 2:00 minutes to save, which is madness. The file is in my Home user folder, which is on an external USB 3 drive, brand new, just set up in the last couple of weeks for my new Retina iMac. It's a 2 TB drive with about 1 TB used so far, and Disk Utility tells me it's fine.

This is scary because I've hardly started this project! So far there's 4 minutes of music, but the whole thing is likely to be about 50 minutes, and I'm wondering how the heck I'm going to manage it.

[Dwetmaster]

I found that large VI sample libraries add to the saving time. Don't know what DP has to save everytime but it does. I moved my sample librairies to Bidule or any other external host and everything is back to normal...

[FMiguelez]

Agreed.

If you use stuff that works similar to VSL, DP saves ALL its data in the project, so it can transmit it next time it connects to VE Pro. This, IME, accounts for around 80% of the size (in the Finder) of my empty template, which currently, is around 25 MBs.

You can test this yourself by deleting, from a copy, all VIs and everything except the MIDI data (don't forget to flush the undo history before saving it to see the leaner resized version in the Finder)

[csansom]

Thanks for the tip, Dwetmaster, and I understand the principle behind what you're saying. However, I've had a look at Bidule on the web and it looks like total overkill for my purposes. You say 'any other external host' - any suggestions? This is entirely new territory for me and I'm not even sure what to search for (I tried 'external plug-in host for DAW' and got nowhere).

[csansom]

I don't know about VE Pro, FMiguelez, having no experience of any of the Vienna stuff, but you're right about VIs in general: I made a copy, then deleted the instrument tracks and saved, which it did very fast but to my horror the file size had gone up to 72 MB! However, I then flushed the Undo history and saved again... 731.1 k! That's more like it.

So it's back to the 'external host' question, as in my reply to Dwetmaster...

[csansom]

Ah - I was going to try Bidule out of curiosity, but the plug-in version (which is presumably what I need?) only works for registered users. I don't want to shell out £75 for something I'll use only to the barest minimum, or might not even work for me at all. I don't do this as a profession, you understand!

[mikehalloran]

It shouldn't take so long to save a file that small. The speed you are describing is closer to USB 2 than 3. There are some very slow mechanical drives out there and housings that do not take advantage of USB 3 -- which should be faster than the max speed of any mechanical hard drive.

An SSD would speed things up considerably -- over Thunderbolt even more so.

In the mean time, you should test the raw speed of your setup. This is pretty easy. Transfer a 2G file from your Mac to your external over USB 3 and time it. Now swap a USB 2 cable and time it again. There should be a huge difference.

[csansom]

Thanks, mikehalloran, but I honestly don't believe that's the problem - I think the delay is all happening within DP. See my response to FMiguelez: when the file size had gone up to 72 MB (before I flushed the Undo History) it saved more or less instantly. When it was doing the slow saves, I watched the activity light on the Drive (a new WD My Book) and it only flickered very occasionally during the delay, then there was a slightly more concentrated bout of flickering just before it finished. So it looked as if there was actually very little HD activity for most of the time.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The plugin ver of Bidule never really worked as well as the stand alone for me. It can be very confusing to setup in any case, but once you get the hang of it, it is a beautiful thing.

[csansom]

Well, from a quick tinker with the demo of bidule (and after taking a little while to get my head round the basics - yes, it is confusing to set up!), I have to say I'm impressed and can quite see the possibilities - and I don't need the plug-in. So thanks, both, for the suggestion.

That said, does anyone know of a cheaper (or even free) alternative, when all I want to do is simply host my VIs? At this stage I'm really not concerned with the myriad of other doubtless impressive things bidule can do!

[csansom]

OK, well I'm afraid I'm throwing in the towel here and going back to hosting everything in DP. I tried Bidule, I really tried, but I had so many crashes, glitchy playback - or none at all - that I decided to put up with DP's huge files and slow saves.

Thanks for the warm words about Bidule - I can definitely see it's a powerful tool for some purposes, but it doesn't seem to do it for me.

And still, if anyone knows of any other alternative, I'd definitely be interested.

[DanielCoe]

How much memory is in your system? Where are your samples--on a drive other than the program drive?


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