Mach Five 2 bench tests

[bigwhitty]

I currently run 3 gigastudios, and East west Symphonic Gold libraries on 4 PCs mostly for orchestral scoring. I have recently upgraded to my mac to the 2.8 core machine with 10gigs of ram. I am wondering if anyone has a realistic idea of how many sounds at a time I can expect out of Mach5 2. If I could eliminate some of my PCs and keep it all on one machine that would be amazing!

If someone has an 8 core mac and test this out, that would be really helpful.

[bdr]

Hello Big,

I have the exact same setup as you and had hoped to be able to do everything in one box. But Mach V got very unstable for me pretty quickly. In fact the amount of sounds I could load up before crashing was so small I thought there was something wrong. Dave Roberts suggested spreading the load over more instances of M5 which I tried but that still didn't help much. I tried many many different combinations to improve matters but it didn't happen.

Since then I have learnt how to run M5 externally from DP and use interapplication MIDI and jack osx to move MIDI and audio between DP and M5 and , although fiddly, it works pretty well and I can load more sounds.

Brett

[monkey man]

That's just doesn't seem "right" Brett - how ridiculous!

I'd like to think that DP could handle a shedload of instances on that machine, take advantage of DP's prerendering features and be run as a MAS plug-in without a glitch. Surely something's amiss with your and bigwhitty's setups, eh?

Strange, IMHO.

[bdr]

It was a memory issue not a CPU issue, DP just ran out of memory very very quickly.

I spent days and nights (as we've all done) reinstalling, installing, hardware tests etc etc, activity monitor constantly open. I like Mach V a lot but the instabilty was killing me. Anyhow it's doing OK at present.

[bigwhitty]

Hopefully, this improves, that is a real disappointment to hear. I have Kontact, however I really am not a big fan of the interface. Printing 60+ orchestral intraments to the mac takes forever right now coming externally from giga. Wouldnt it be great to have every instrument on a buss and press record...Big time saver, hopefully they get it together.

If someone else has positive reaction to Mach 5 Id love to hear that as well. Many people use it as a loop player, with a few instraments, Im more looking for people who will use a lot of samples..

[Kubi]

I use MachFive v2 a lot and it is very stable for me - though I don't load a full orchestra's worth of samples, so this isn't the bench test you asked for... I find the interface is without equal, best combination of power and ease of use IMO.

Just a few notes that may be of relevance: Remember that M5v2 does fall under the 4Gig overall limit that every app is restricted to (so DP plus all plugs combined cannot exceed 4Gig total of RAM use.) Reportedly only Play somehow manages to create its own space, but I haven't verified that. Of course running MachFive or any other plug as standalone gets you around that limitation.

Also, remember that if you use DFD you better have your samples spread over multiple drives - in your 4 PC Giga setup, you had a minimum of four hard drives streaming simultaneously, so if you have all your MachFive libraries on one drive, you have just cut your performance to 25% or less (and upped your likelihood of dropouts, crashes and similar by a factor of 4.)

My only gripe with M5v2 is it's not sample accurate - if I record a simple track with no effects as audio and then play back the audio with inverted polarity at the same time as the MachFive/MIDI track, it doesn't null. Doing the same thing in Kontakt 3 does. I seem to recall hearing that running M5v2 as AU in DP6 it is indeed sample-accurate, not sure if I misunderstood or somehow made that up... Regardless, I find it disappointing that M5v2 is not sample-accurate as a MAS plug in DP5.13.

[monkey man]

It was a memory issue not a CPU issue, DP just ran out of memory very very quickly.

What a relief, Brett; you had me a little worried there as I've always planned to buy Mach Five... eventually.

Glad to hear you sorted it out.