Nedim stated in another post:

"I loaded the Super Solo Piano in RAM and that was it
i couldnt load anything else cuz it was full."

Nedim, Say it aint so...

That is the most ridiculous thing ever i've heard in a while,

This RAM, or lack of it, needs to be addressed...

there needs to be a RAM chip replacement, upgrade, an AUDYA2, something

no reason that the AUDYA (one of the most expensive arrangers ever) should not have AT LEAST 1GB RAM

Free Ram is listed as 47104 kb,

if you load the stereo grand which I think is the biggest sound, you have 11776 kb left free

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www.AudioworksCT.com
203.876.1133

Frankieve and gang,

so let me see if i understand this:

free RAM is: 47104 kb,

with stereo grand loaded,
free RAM is: 11776 kb

so this stereo grand takes up 35328 kb

so JUST 1 sound takes up EXACTLY 75% of the AUDYA's RAM,
leaving you with a WHOPPING 25% free ??

say it aint so...

All the other sounds are much smaller; you can load several at once. However the piano is HUGE, and takes up all the room. It's great that there are several other really good pianos to choose from.
DonM

And it ain't a fraction of the size of some of the GIGA pianos, or Ivory...

ROM piano in the G70 is 64MB uncompressed... You want good quality four way pianos, it takes at least that, IMO. Just got the KSounds Vol2 piano for our K2500's http://ksounds.com/html/volume_2.html (check out the demos ) and it takes about 16MB per layer. BTW, you can get this in Triton format (as well as some others), so perhaps it is compatible with the PA2X?

What are we talking about....

Top of the line sampled piano's are several Gigabytes..

So what kind of Sound development/ miraculous compression does Audya have to keep up with these piano's ?

it's just sad that 1 sound takes up 75% of AUDYA's memory

so with the remaining 25%,maybe you could squeeze in another 3 or 4 sounds, WOW

don't know about you guys , BUT i use MORE than 5 sounds when i play

and for $5,000 i want to be able to have AT LEAST 20 sounds loaded/available if not more

what i'm saying is:
64MB RAM is PATHETIC !!!

Yes, i dont wanna get into details...
1 SAMPLED SOUND AND AUDYAS RAM IS GONE!

And no, with the remaining MBs you cant squeze $hit, i tried loading the trumpet and sax and
thats it, it wont load them, they are bigger then 11 MBs...its sad. And on the other hand it
was stated that AUDYA has 64MB RAM but the Audya
i know has not even 48 but 47 something MB.

[This message has been edited by Nedim (edited 08-19-2009).]

48 MB for SUPERSOLO and 16 Mb for LiveGuitars

Hello Leezone.

For now the ram is not enough in my opinion , last mounth when i where in Italy at Ketron Labs i talk about that to Sandro.

But no worry , because they told me that the Ram will be upgrade soon.
They are thinking in 265Mb , but i told Sandro that is better 512Mb or 1GB.
Let see what they will do.

The last Audyas came with the Slot in Soundboard to put the Ram Upgrade , in the first audyas , when the Ram will be avaiable , must change soundboard to the new ones with the Ram Slot.

The Supersolos Sounds are BIG , and now we only can put 1 or 2 Supersolos each time in RAm , and if 1 of the sounds are the STEREO PIANO , forget because no space for other Supersolo sounds.

Must Upgrade RAM , and they will do that as soon as possible , and in Release 3.0 they will also upgrade the Soundbank with more Preset Sounds , and new features , like the Piano banks , the Guitar Banks , the Drum Banks , the User Audiodrums and the PC / MAC software , Audya Style Compiler 2009 , to create the Styles with the new features direct in PC.

Best Regards

F.C. www.fcmusica.com www.ketronaudya.wordpress.com

Does anyone know what kind of processor is inside the Audya

Building a system with anything different then an X86 system inside is cost inefficient for over 5 years.

If you base your system on an X86 structure under the roof ((running on VX-works (real time OS))) you can develope your system and then in the last minute possible choose your hardware, that way you'd have had tons of memmory available at the current prices.

And the heart of any current soundsystems is nothing less then a processor.


I have no words for the fact that the Audya must have been build on ages old hardware (As also inicated by the USB 1.0 port)

Upgrading the hardware just before release would have been cheeper and would have made the system more upgradable. Audya was allready old before release.

I guess the age old hardware will never support anything else above 256 MB max 512 MB

[This message has been edited by Bachus (edited 08-20-2009).]

F.C.

thanks for info

AUDYA desperately needs AT LEAST 1GB,
256MB will not cut it,
with 256Mb you can have about 5 or 6 SUPER voies....wow !!!

it should be like a computer, we buy chip and install a 4GB chip,

RAM is dirt cheap as compared to years ago

F.C.
i will be going to Portugal tomorrow,
if i'm in Lisbon i may have to stop in your store

Just on a practical note, has anyone timed how long it takes to load the Supersolo Piano? In other words, what is the speed (in MB/sec) that the RAM loads up..?

1GB RAMi is all well and good, but the T2 showed that, if it takes forever to load (and even longer to save, if you edit) it really doesn't matter how much you have... it's how much you can USE practically that really counts...

Anyone?

28.44 seconds for the Stereo_Grand, which I believe to be the biggest size

------------------
www.AudioworksCT.com
203.876.1133

Most top of the line (software) samplers don't load samples into RAM anymore, they just directly stream them from hard disks..

This will even be better and faster when the static disks reach their new performace levels somewhere later this year.

Diki, but say you have 4GB RAM,
you load ALL your sounds (say 20 super voices) before you start playing

it takes a long time of course, but they load once before you play,

and they are then immediately all available to you throughout the gig, no more loading, RAM is full

then you pick any choose, change any 20 super sounds

or is this not the way it is?

so i dont see why the load speed is THAT critical

maybe im missing something???

Well 46MB in 28 sec. Let's make it simple and say 2MB/sec, roughly. Not bad. But only twice as fast as my 15 year old K2500.

But let's say you actually GET that 4GB RAM you say you all need... At probably the BEST it could do, not taking head seek times and the like into account, that's somewhere between 34 to 40 minutes to load up the memory.

You GOT that long before a gig? Not to mention, you had better have a pretty good UPS on it, in case the power dies or browns out, or it's "Sorry, folk, the power flickered for a second there, I'll be back in 40 minutes..! "

it takes me 1hr to setup with my band,
at the quickest 30 minutes,

so just setup keyboard first,
turn on AUDYA,
load the 4GB RAM (in our dreams of course),
and add a UPS to the AUDYA in case of power failure :-)

by the time the 4GB is loaded, all my wires, mics, lights, etc, should be ready to go



[This message has been edited by leezone (edited 08-20-2009).]

Shouldn't be a problem, then. Of course, from having done this with a pre-load on my K2500 years ago (and only about a one minute load or so), you really have to trust that nothing EVER goes wrong with the load up, otherwise, you get to the end of setting your band up, only to discover that the load failed for some reason, and you still have the 40 minutes load time to do again.

The thing for me is, having found pretty much everything in a G70 to be adequate to do the gig (I've got a 64MB piano in ROM already! ), I don't find sample loading to be all that important. And, from listening to the Audya demos, you might find that, as far as the audience is concerned, neither do they. I thought the Audya piano pretty acceptable, myself. As are most of the other sounds. Me, I'd try gigging without any sampled instruments for a while before you hook yourself on what seem to be pretty RAM inefficient sounds that make a quick setup pretty tough to do.

Just curious, but does the Audya even allow you to specify a pre-load of multiple different sample sets, and make sure they always go to the same PC# addresses?

Having gone down this route before, albeit at a smaller level, I can tell you that, while in theory this is doable, there are often slip ups that make it a lot more touchy. Two minutes or so was not a big deal to do over. But 40 minutes? That's scary. I'd want to be absolutely SURE of the bombproof nature of the pre-load mechanism before I trusted that on a gig...

Yes...and then the Power goes off for some reason (happened to me many times with Triton
and Motif) and then you announce:
Dear Guests...may i please have 30 min to load samples...see ya then.

Nedim,

that's why i said to use a UPS

When I owned the X1, they had the Super Solos also, which would be loaded from the ram card. I have to say I was always content with the right hand sounds of he X1 and I never used the Super Solos.

If the power goes off for some reason then your stuck having to load sounds again. I have to say the my audiences will never really know whether I'm using the keyboards standard voices or Super Solos!

It happened to you MANY times on the Triton and Motif?

Ye Gods! It happened to me ONCE, and I had a UPS hooked up the next day...

No DIKI, on Audya you always have to address where it goes, it doesnt load by Sets.

-The problem with the long loading times is that these musicall instruments don't use the latest state of the art stuff..

You could create an instrument with static RAM, that way your ram sounds keep loaded in case of powering off and powerfails.

And then boot the OS from Turbo ROM, its almost instant start-up, no loading times.

But then.........


Why isn't any of the top arranger developers using nowerdays processing technollogy.... Its almost as if they don't want to keep up with the software instruments....

Only PA2X and PA800 do that.

Static RAM is very expensive. I couldn't even think what 4GB of that added to an arranger would cost.

Put it this way... if it was cheap enough and effective enough, every computer in the world would boot from it instantly, instead of using the same kind of RAM an arranger has.

Dream on...

[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 08-20-2009).]

what is CHEAP is regular RAM,

so no excuses KETRON,

let us expand this AUDYA to what WE need,
which is a WHOLE LOT MORE than 64MB,

1GB min, but let us install more

As said before, regular DDR2 ram doesnt come in 64 MB size. So Ketron must be using a very old or an obscure type of RAM, and those will be much more expensive then the regular DDR2 or DDR3 Ram used in current day computers.

If as said before the hardware even supports more then 256 MB.

i hate old/outdated hardware

A new board takes a good 2 – 3 years to develop, (Sometimes longer) with the hardware chosen first; therefore they will always be using old technology compared to the current that is available when the board is released.

This is a bad thing...

With current hardware compatibillity, they can eassily and affordable update processing hardware during the design of a system..

So when i started out developing 4 years ago on Pentium 4 and 256 MB i would have ended up with a 3ghz Quadcore and 4GB RAm in the end. All the hardware is compatible.

Only the digital analogue soundhardware would be 4 years old at the end of the development. This would be no problem as this hardware has a much longer lifespan then the processing powers...

Your beloved Wersi is a very good excample of how it could be done, they even let you upgrade the hardware after release...

If developers choose smart and wise they would never end up with old and obsolete hardware.

You know, you guys should REALLY open up your arrangers and take a look inside, every now and again...

You keep confusing the fact that it has an Operating System with the fact that it is a full computer. Just because it has the former has nothing to do with the latter. Pretty much all arrangers short of the 'open' ones run on custom RISC chips, designed specifically for the job. And, because a) our industry is tiny, and b) the arranger market is even tinier, there isn't the money to go out and completely redesign these things constantly to try and keep up with the ever-changing PC peripheral hardware.

You can't swap out motherboards, change I/O components, upgrade RAM types like you can in a computer. There's probably ONE chip to handle all these subroutines, and it would cost a fortune to re-tool and design a new one.

Don't forget, USB3 is on the horizon. No doubt, as soon as it appears, you will all be groaning that your arranger ONLY has USB2, when the move to USB3 wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to how it works...

I agree that, when designing something more 'open', like the Audya, planning ahead for your users' needs in RAM capacity should be a given, but it is likely that much of the subsystems from the Audya still use SD-1 componentry. What RAM did that one support? Yep, thought so

The fact that Ketron say that they are working on a RAM expander should be cause for celebration, not misinformed grumblings that it isn't everything a PC is. Just be happy it is coming...

And open up your arranger, and try to see how different it is from a computer...

Comparing and Arranger to a Computer is like comparing Apples and Watermelons, they have
NOTHING alike...its just funny how far we can
stretch sometimes...really funny.

You clearly missed my point...

Thats exactly where i think these developers go wrong. They use underperforming expensive hardware... where standard PC hardware would be much cheeper and outperforming the old risk hardware...

As an OS they could for example run a version of VX-works which is an OS espescially develloped for real time processing..

A processor is a processor... memory is memory, motherboard is motherboard... and all you need to do is program the correct interface to all other hardware and compile your programs for the chosen system.


These statements are based on my experiences in the software industrie where i work for a company that developes technical solutions for the industry. And to me technically keyboards are nothing else then just a machine with a special purpose

Bachus is absolutely correct,

but it is obvious (and disappointing) the few monopolizing companies controling this small market do not see a vested interest in breaking these glorified boomboxes down into smaller, lighter, faster, expandable, integrated, compatable components that allow the user to pick and choose the desired features.

IMHO the only difference between a computer and an arranger is a piano keyboard or a querty.

best wishes all,
razoo

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Sorry guys, but until someone makes a computer based system that is as dependable, bombproof, easy to operate as a hardware arranger and does it for no more than a current TOTL (or MOTL) arranger costs, you can't sit around moaning...

My arranger gives me 128 notes. No matter WHAT else it is doing. No matter whether it is loading a style or playing a sequence. No matter WHAT effects routing and type they are. No matter whether it has the B3 engine engaged in or not.

It came loaded with hundreds of gig ready styles, OOTB. It came with a mature OS that doesn't crash. EVER...

Look, you want an arranger that is computer based? Stop whining, and buy an MS, or a Wersi. One costs a fortune, but works adequately (if you can get past the dated sound of most of its' ROM sounds and styles) and the other is cheaper, but an uphill battle to get working well, reliably, and you have to do most of the style development yourself.

But, these things come with problems. We have already heard what a nightmare it has become for users to change out motherboards (the very feature you are asking for) on MS's, as the core OS has to be re-written and debugged every time you do this. Where is the profit for the manufacturer to do this, if YOU change out the hardware yourself? He doesn't even get a piece of that pie, and now he has to completely troubleshoot a new OS so that you can slap a new piece of hardware in

Sure, it would be GREAT for us if they made it all software and PC based. But try to think of where the MONEY for the manufacturer to keep doing this is going to come from... Piracy will chew up his profits, and he faces a never ending cycle of OS debugging, just so you can change out the innards with cheap replacement parts...

I don't imagine anyone could stay in business for long like that, not to mention, what happens to the reliability of your arranger while the new hardware is being debugged (for free, apparently!)? Software OS's for computers need to ship in the tens of MILLIONS before the continual evolution of the software to account for new MoBo's and peripherals is cost effective. Arrangers ship in the few THOUSANDS... there simply isn't the money in it that the cost of continual OS development would not dominate the bottom line.

The fact is, on any closed arranger, there is a RISC chip that handles all the voice generation. Probably another one for effects. Probably another one for I/O. Another one for harmony generation (if your arranger has it). Move to a computer system, and ONE CPU has to do all of that, AND run the OS, and do it all without a hiccup. The Wersi is a hybrid system, with some of the sound generation and OS done in older RISC chips, and the OAS being taken care of by the computer. And it costs a fortune.

The MS tries to do it all on the CPU, and suffers from the continual development and hardware cycles that happen in the computer world faster than the arranger world can cope with. And it pays the price with erratic behavior and an underdeveloped sound and style section.

In the meantime, my G70 ticks on, sounding good enough for me and my audiences, and if I absolutely HAVE to have some VSTi's for the studio, or even stage, I can carry a laptop, and get them from a piece of hardware that the manufacturers can AFFORD to continually upgrade and develop for....

No matter what everyone says, Diki is dominating the thread, and for a good reason. He has a point.

PC's are designed to do many things. To do something specific, dedicated hardware is the way to go.