Hi guys.
What are the loading times for samples on the Tyros 4?

How long for example would it take to load 1GB.

Regards
James.

James I'd like to know this info myself, but I have a feeling it's not going to be quick.Especially compared to the mediastation.

[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 12-18-2010).]

I asked an experienced Tyros 4 user and here's what he told me:

Tyros 4: 1 GB Sample Load Time

Initial Load: approx. 30 minute
Subsequent KB Bootups: approx 1 minute

* once a sample is loaded into the T4, it remains in memory after you turn the KB off.

Unless you have flash RAM installed

Thanks for that.
That's not too bad in the grand scheme of things.

Regards
James

How long does it take on the Mediastation to load a 1 GB sample?



T4 does use flash ram, so once the sample has been initially loaded, and when T4 is subsequented rebooted (turned on) it takes a couple of secs for it to access the flash memory. For a large 1 gb sample around a minute, but yamaha samples are far smaller so subsequent load time is usually only a few secs depending on memory size stored.

With all the great sounds on these arrangers why do you need samples?....
I dont get it ...I have never used a sampler in any of my arrangers...I just want top play using whats on board..
Less tweeking more playing I say

Donny,
Well, let's say you wanted a KILLER Steinway grand...
Can be done using samples.
Lee S.

Believe me I understand that's.... but for what I use an arranger for you couldn't tell a Steinway sample in a mix of the style anyway

......I'm a singer who backs himself up with an arranger KB...there are more then enough great sounds in these units & besides that you can still tweak those if you need to. Maybe an instrumentalist could use samples more proficiently although I don't know why after spending 4k-5k already then you need to by even more programs!... For just home playing in a living room I feel its not needed....for commercial use recording, etc, ......and if your that serious about the sound & the music to sell it use the real instruments, as no matter how you cut it although pretty good ...it's still an arranger KB trying to emulate the sounds.

About 2 seconds because it streams the data.

Regards
James. 

then:



From this, I can only conclude that you really weren't interested in knowing what the load time was at all, except perhaps to simply 'stir the pot'.

Nice, streaming data is definitely the way to go! In addition to streaming, I wish Yamaha would support Akai & VST samples. Unfortunately Yamaha only supports its own proprietary format.

Quote "From this, I can only conclude that you really weren't interested in knowing what the load time was at all, except perhaps to simply 'stir the pot'."

Yep !!

So Ty4 will take about a minute longer to power up. But once the boot up is over (and until it is switched off again) the voices based on that gigabyte will be immediately available whenever required to be played. So it seems (to my simple logic) there's no practical difference between the 2 methods ie. streaming or not. Is that a valid viewpoint or am I missing something?
I'm not trying to promote one over the other, just am interested in a bit more detail in the thinking behind the questions.

john

Hi John.

Lets take the Tyros first....
Basically the Tyros loads the data at around 570KB/s the first time, which means it takes upwards of half and hour to load your sounds. That's half an hour you have to sit there loading sounds one by one to create that 1GB bank. After that point then everything is instantly available, minus the 1 minute it adds to to the bootup time. So, not all that bad other than the fact that if you want to unload, replace or add a new sound, it's going to be very slow at doing it.

Now to the Mediastation,.
Streaming is a very different animal altogether. The upper limit to how much data you can load is very much so unknown because the system does not have to load the entire sound to RAM ever. Look at it this way, let say I load a 4GB Piano sound, that does not mean 4GB of memory is needed. Only a few MB from each sample that makes up the entire sound will be loaded to RAM. This allows the RAM to provide the sound instantly when you press the key, and give enough time for the hard disk to find the rest of the sample and stream that data just in time as you play in realtime.

So, just how much data you can load is very much so unknown but you can be sure it's many many times the 1GB limit the Tyros has. I have 4GB of RAM in my mediastation which is shared memory between VSTi's, the OS and everything else. That 4GB of RAM also serves my 15GB sample library I use. So as you can see, it's not really possible to work out what the upper limit is.

Loading times for adding new sounds and unloading sounds is likley to only take milliseconds.

I uploaded a video to YouTube a few months ago you should check out. You really get to see how fas the Mediastation is at loading sounds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwqnVgNO4bQ

Regards
James.

James thank you for the demo & explaination on loading sounds.

James,
Yep good way to do it...BUT, anything, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobody's fault (Quote from a movie!) that crunches the CPU during live play...enough that the CPU can't get the sound into RAM...and...Dropout happens.
The OS and complete system must be optimized and have safeguards to try to prevent this.

But, it can happen in the right situation.

IMHO, with Windows this is more concern than Linux? The CPU speed and all other aspects must be way overkill to hopefully prevent this.

Then, what about very heavy polyphony????
And who can really predict how many notes may need to go at the same time?

Lee S.

Hi James,
Many thanks for taking the time to explain the above and illustrating the other issues involved. Appreciate it

Regards, john
from a cold UK and you are probably in a far snowier Ireland.

Lee, I NEVER had any issues with dropouts, or timing glitches when streaming with the MS.

In some Combo patches (multi-instrument patches) I had up to 4 VST's/Giga samples streaming, and playing two-handed chordal patterns. No problems at all.

And these were being played over the top of audio/midi backing tracks....

To give you deeper info, the CPU I had was a 2.6 g dual core AMD chip, with 6 gig of ram. So nothing out of the ordinary.

If a user of an MS REALLY wanted to go heavy on streaming, they ALWAYS have the option of increasing the CPU and RAM on any given MS system.

An option NOT available on any "fixed hardware" keyboard.

Truly, dropouts and audio glitches just don't happen on the MS

Dennis

Hi Lee



It's more like down to your own doing than anything else. There are no unexpected spikes in CPU usage under linux as it's not going to start running processes in the background like Windows does all on it's own.

So really any drop outs you experience are caused by your own doing and the fact your running far too much at the same time for the resources you have.



About the only thing you can tweak is the latency buffer. There's nothing else that can or needs to be optimised. But your right, drop outs can happen in the right situation. For example, Spectrasonics Omnisphere would bring the best of PC's to their knees.

I guess it's a matter of getting to know the system and know it's limitations. If you find your the type of user that's running into problems, or the VSTi's you prefer are all hungry ones. Then an upgrade of the resources would be needed to work efficiently and without drop outs.

Take Domenico for example. His personal keyboard is running on the Asrock 770Extreme3, 6 Cores, DDR3 and he's got RAID with two 10,000RPM HHD's. lol.... power junkie.



Yes, totally. As I mentioned above, Linux runs very flat, there's nothing unexpected. The only increases in the system resources are your own doing and what your running.



If all your running are samples, then your poly count will be hundreds of notes. It's far far beyond any closed workstation or arranger, that's for sure.

Regards
James

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yep good way to do it...BUT, anything, anything at all, your fault, my fault, no body's fault (Quote from a movie!) that crunches the CPU during live play...enough that the CPU can't get the sound into RAM...and...Dropout happens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's more like down to your own doing than anything else. There are no unexpected spikes in CPU usage under linux as it's not going to start running processes in the background like Windows does all on it's own.

So really any drop outs you experience are caused by your own doing and the fact your running far too much at the same time for the resources you have.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The OS and complete system must be optimized and have safeguards to try to prevent this.
But, it can happen in the right situation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the only thing you can tweak is the latency buffer. There's nothing else that can or needs to be optimised. But your right, drop outs can happen in the right situation. For example, Spectrasonics Omnisphere would bring the best of PC's to their knees.

I guess it's a matter of getting to know the system and know it's limitations. If you find your the type of user that's running into problems, or the VSTi's you prefer are all hungry ones. Then an upgrade of the resources would be needed to work efficiently and without drop outs.

Take Domenico for example. His personal keyboard is running on the Asrock 770Extreme3, 6 Cores, DDR3 and he's got RAID with two 10,000RPM HHD's. lol.... power junkie.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMHO, with Windows this is more concern than Linux? The CPU speed and all other aspects must be way overkill to hopefully prevent this.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, totally. As I mentioned above, Linux runs very flat, there's nothing unexpected. The only increases in the system resources are your own doing and what your running.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then, what about very heavy polyphony????
And who can really predict how many notes may need to go at the same time?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If all your running are samples, then your poly count will be hundreds of notes. It's far far beyond any closed workstation or arranger, that's for sure.

Regards
James

............... Every time I start to try to understand the Mediastation in hopes of maybe considering getting one as I love the open architecture systems verses closed..
I read things like this above and wonder if you have to be a Computer Scientist to understand how to operate one?....is it as EASY to use as it is DIFFICULT? or what? Simplicity on stage is a key concern.

Yes, and just to add to that, my comments above which do talk of drop outs are extreme cases where the end user is totally pushing the system very very hard with big VSTi's.

The only thing I ever had to do was to adjust the buffer to 256. Once I did that, my MS had more than enough grunt to meet all my needs and I'd consider myself a heavy user.

I've not had a drop out or glitch in sound every since. My spec is the same as Dennis, but with only 4GB of RAM.

Regards
James

Hi Dnj



No, if anything we have wondered into an area you don't need to consider at all. The keyboard is not a PC in a keyboard case at all. Think of it as operating Closed Keyboard that's can accept any new software or harware upgrades you will need in the years to come.

What I mean by that is lets say you want to just switch on the keyboard and just plan it. You DO NOT at any point have to load a single PC program. The sounds on the keyboard are displayed no differently than they are on a Tyros. It's a simple table with sounds down each side of the screen and page up and down buttons.

When you press the ASIO button to run a VSTi, you still see all the sound of the VSTi displayed in the exact same way. You do not see the actual VSTi running on the screen unless you actually want to see it.

So for the most part you will never see the external programs running. Everything is displayed from within the Lionstracs OS, just like you see them on typical closed keyboards.

As you grow with the system and you want to to add your own sounds, modify the default banks, built your own libraries, add new VSTi's and then integrate all of the above into the Lionstracs OS so they are all displayed like a normal keyboard would display them..... You still don't need to have a degree in computers as my free LSCP Gen program is your Editor / Librarian that does all this for you.

It actually writes the system files for you

So bottom line is, there's nothing stopping anyone from just switching the keyboard on and just playing it. You do not see a single PC program running if you don't want, and you do not have to load any software. The OS make you truly feel like your playing a closed keyboard.

So forget PC spec's. The chances of you ever needing to care about all that is extremely unlikely. It's an OPEN keyboard that operates and looks like a Closed One until such time as you intentionally want to do something the OS doesn't offer by default.

Regards
James

Just to jump back to the Tyros.

For anyone interested in importing samples, Extreme Sample Converter supports converting from many different formats to Tyros 2 format.

Once you get the data to Tyros 2 format you can use the normal free tools available to get the data to Tyros 4 format.
http://www.extranslator.com/

Extreme Sample Converter also has the ability so extract sounds from VSTi's and convert them to Tyros sounds.... and much more.

Regards
James

James thanx so much for the confidence builder coming from you who I highly regard and trust really boosts my expectations.
I'd really like to see a few demos using the Mediastation going thru some of the major style categories like, Ballad, Latin, Ballroom, Rock & Roll, Dance, World.....
All done in a quality SOUND Video...so many of the ones on the internet are done very poorly sound wise..this certainly turns off potential buyers...
Another thing I wold like to see is a Demo of the Mediastation using a Vocal Harmonizer program in real time also.

As soon as NAMM is over I will seriously consider my next step toward an Open systen unit..is there much difference between the Groove & the Mediastation?

Again thank you James for all your efforts.

Hi All
All operating systems run programs in the background to keep things running smoothly, however if it is only doing one job (Running Music Software) then most of the background tasks are not required.

In PC based keyboards, or PC systems dedicated to music production, all the background tasks and programs that are not required to produce music are turned off, and the OS optimised for the job in hand, (Any OS can be customised to specific tasks) consequently you don’t get any problems with the CPU spiking etc.

Hope this helps to put your minds at rest

Bill