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greetings

i am just beginning to use instrument plug-ins and appeal to you all for some newbie-advice.

i am trying to run multiple (in this case, 3) instances of EK in one project, but ran into some problems with audio quality (namely, "broken-up" or "scratchy" sounding playback).

appealing to the general DP board, i was advised to assign different channels to the the MIDI outs and i have done so. however, i can't see how to assign MIDI ins on the EK instrument tracks themselves.

if i jam all three MIDI outs down "Electric Keys 1 : A-1", i can hear everything but the poor sound quality noted above is derived.

on the other hand, if i set the MIDI outs to "EK 1 : A-1"; "EK 2 : A-2"; & "EK 3 : A-3" respectively, instrument tracks 2 & 3 receive no input (while all 3 MIDI tracks themselves continue to happily generate data).

i've scoured around the MOTU site and my install discs for documentation but i couldn't find anything like a full manual. i've opened and scrutinized every parameter i can click on but so far i've arrived at nothing that seems to define a connection between EK instrument tracks and any particular incoming MIDI channel. (i thought perhaps that setting up a bundle in the instrument tab of the bundles window would do it but bundles doesn't seem to know about electric keys particularly.)

i'm using a reasonably robust system: mac pro (early 08) 8-core; 10Gb RAM; the EK library is streamed via firewire 800 from an exteral lacie quadra.

the advice i got about using separate MIDI channels makes a lot of sense to me; i think i'm just missing the boat on how to tell the EK tracks to look in the right place for incoming data.

any help warmly appreciated

O-2K

If you have three MIDI tracks and three instances of Electric Keys, assign the MIDI tracks to EK-1 A:1, EK-2 A:1, and EK-3 A:1. (Each instance of Electric Keys publishes 16 channels of MIDI input, but it only receives MIDI on channel A:1.)

thanks so much for getting back to me.

i can certainly use A-1; A-1; A-1 -- the only problem is that, when i do, i get some very nasty breaking-up, or "stuttering" sound quality from the EK tracks.

this track has very little going on so far -- just the three EK tracks (of which i'm only really using two) and BFD-2, which sounds just fine.

have you had success employing multiple instances of electric keys in any projects?

all the best, and thanks again for helping!

O-2K

If you have your Electric Keys soundbank files, BFD files, and your project on the same hard drive, you could be experiencing disk streaming issues. In Electric Keys, click the MOTU logo in the upper left to open the streaming settings, and try raising those values. There are no hard & fast guidelines for setting them, just experiment and see if it improves the situation. (Just be aware that raising those settings will increase the amount of RAM that Electric Keys is using.)

thank you, carrythebanner, i will be happy to try that bit of advice.

my BFD2 and electric keys libraries do share the same hard drive (external lacie quadra / firewire 800) , but i keep the projects themselves elsewhere (internal hd).

i'm beginning to consider the possibility of perhaps moving the BFD library to an internal hard drive which holds neither project files nor DP itself, if this persists.

i can't seem to find any actual documentation for electric keys, btw... not that much is needed as i guess it mostly "just works", but surely there must be a manual somewhere? (it doesn't seem to show up on my install or other discs...)

again, thanks for your generous assistance

O-2K

otalgia-2000 wrote:i can't seem to find any actual documentation for electric keys, btw... not that much is needed as i guess it mostly "just works", but surely there must be a manual somewhere? (it doesn't seem to show up on my install or other discs...)

A printed manual is included. It's thin — there's not all that much to say — but all new copies should have one.

just following up in case a drop in the "additional knowledge" bucket makes any kind of ripple:

to my surprise, adjusting the "streaming" settings hidden behind the MOTU logo in EK didn't seem to do much for me.

that got me to thinking, and i recalled that i had successfully used multiple EK instances in a project awhile ago. in that one, the instances used different sounds.

so i think i've identified the problem this time as being my use of the _exact same library sounds_ in both of the active instances. when i selected slightly different sounds, playback quality smoothed out nicely.

i realize now that i probably ought to have described my scenario as "attempting to use duplicate sounds in multiple instances", which might have saved you folks some trouble, but i'm very glad i learned about that little streaming-settings control panel all the same.

thanks again everyone for helping me out on this.

O-2K