Kawaian,
I agree with you completely - there IS a caching mechanism. I don't know whether Play does it, or whether the OS does it (I suspect the latter), but the samples are most certainly cached. This is why the disk drive can easily be idle for more than 5 seconds whilst playing. ;^) (refer my earlier problem report about the idle drive problem)

Also, I agree that 10MB/s is usable. That's roughly what my system is giving me, and I find it usable. When I get more storage, though, I will be aiming for significantly more throughput.

Greg.

OK, so after 50+ replies, why has no one even asked what audio adapter the OP is using?

Based on the symptoms my first question has nothing to do with Windows vs Mac or suggesting a dedicated platform like the Receptor.

Blueston, are you using the embedded sound card in this laptop? This is most likely not a problem with the software or the main parts of the computer, but just a problem with the sound driver and sound hardware itself.

(edit to add: if someone already has asked this I apologize, but I just skimmed through the entire thread and I did not see anything indicating that this was even considered)
Rich

Don't know, but it all comes down to an appropriate ASIO driver. There is e.g. ASIO4all which is perfectly usable for many soundcards including most of the common onboard solutions. Hardware should not be an issue, because you only need to create a 2-channel 44,1KHz stream, that's nothing compared to the 200 streaming sounds from EWQLP. But you need an ASIO driver to get direct access to the sound controller and high priority for sound output (thus low latency). To avoid crackling, BTW, you can also set the ASIO buffer up to a higher amount. That would of course add latency to the sound output. I would always seek for a compromise that latency is low enough to keep playability and to avoid crackling. Latency set to zero would lead to permanent crackling. So you have to do some trial and error.

Even worse. Your wireless HiFi interface "hears" a data packet from someplace and it has to actually read and process the packet in order to know that it should be ignored. You can't control the PC in the ouse next door. It will transmit whatever it wants and yours will at least have to decide to ignore it or not

Kind of like you needed to read the address on a letter in your mail box in order to know it is not addressed to you.

I am using the built in sound card for this laptop which I'm not even sure what it is, but I got the Asio4all drivers of course to keep latency reasonable.

I looked into getting an external sound card for this laptop but I couldn't find any. I guess they are called Audio Interfaces now? Anyway, I don't have a PCMCIA slot, so it would have to be USB dongle type and I wasn't sure if USB technology was ok for this type of real-time application? These Audio Interfaces were usually $200+ for a decent one.

(Warning- bitch about life not being fair coming) I hate to keep being put in a position where I need to spend a few hundred $ by changing something in my setup to see if it will finally fix or improve something. Especially seeing as I have a high suspicion (overly pessimistic or cheap?) for most of these purchases I'll still be stuck back at square one (with a thinner wallet)

Anyway not to worry. Last night i reinstalled just the Steinway, and removed the Disks Contents Indexing and it seemed to be performing much much better for about 40 minutes with Steinway DYN (SusRep only) with 1 mic position. I could not recreate the issue!! I'm going to push it further tonight by adding the other 2 mics, maybe some more samples (Sost/Key off), and then turning the latency down as far as I can and see how well it holds up. Btw- the CPU never goes above 20% (I think I misspoke earlier and said 50%).

I know I don't need all 3 mics for Live. I just want to see how much headroom? (need a different word here- performance room?) I have. I still haven't even messed with my power settings, removed Anti-virus, increased the Engine level, or tried the IO meter thing. ( I want to limit it to 2 changes at a time so I know what is fixing it ) but I'm excited to know I have several more things I can try if I run into any more problems.

At this point, it looks like the Contents Indexing setting was very likely 1 major factor in my problems- Thanks (I believe it was Chris A?) for that suggestion.

As I stated earlier, it's not a CPU-related issue, but a hard drive thrashing one.

Reinstalling made sure that all the files were in sequential order (as much as possible), therefore eliminating some of the useless random seeking of the hard drive & increasing performance.

Hopefully, this issue's resolved, but a dedicated external one would be 10x better.

You seem to have this right. USB is literally orders of magnitude faster than is required for audio playback. It is the best interface to use until you get past a half dozen or so simultaneous audio tracks and then you'd want to move the Firewire. (FW is a must less CPU intensive interface.)

The audio quality of a good external interface is much better than what is inside the typical office PC. But for playback (vs. recording) speakers are the weak link so audio quality hardly matters until you have some really nice speakers in a good listing room.

But with most external audio interfaces you get some practical things like separate speaker and headphone jacks with real physical volume knobs for each (vs. your mouse) "balanced" outputs if you need to run longer cables and a more reliable type of audiojack (1/4" or XLR vs. 3.5mm) Practical issues might make it worth buying.

For simple playback usage prices start at $80 (Lexicon Alpha) but $150 is more typical.
Some to look at (there are more) are


USB or Firewire is the way to go also because you can keep it when upgrade the computer.

Blueston: congrats on your progress. Yes, shutting down indexing makes a lot of sense. This is one thing I did very early on, automatically, out of common sense. I don't think I ever would have remembered about it to tell someone else about it.

I also spent weeks trying to get QLP to work btw.

Kawaian: Re: the 10MB throughput, naturally if folks use 16-bit samples, a single mic, and live with some sample stretching etc I would be even more confident that this would be ample. I am using the full versions (per-note sampling, and 24-bit samples), however to save disk space, I have removed some articulations. (repetitions, soft pedal, plus a couple more which escape me at the moment). I have approximately halved the disk space by doing this, whilst retaining all mics. I really like mixing multiple mics btw.

Note that I can't increase my polyphony much above my measured worst case polyphony (50) without the occasional dropout. I am confident it is due to disk throughput, however the proof will be in the pudding when I upgrade my storage.

Greg.

Btw, re: ASIO4ALL, this doesn't work very well on my system. It works, however it seems to cause timing problems - it causes slight arppegiation when playing chords. I surmise that ASIO4ALL is not compatible with the driver for my MIDI interface, and is robbing the MIDI driver of processing time, causing delays in the processing of MIDI events. Since I have a USB based audio/MIDI interface with native ASIO drivers, I have not bothered to try and fix the problem with ASIO4ALL. (I tested ASIO4ALL with my laptop's integrated audio interface). My audio/MIDI interface is the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra. (which is overkill if you're never going to do any multi-track recording)

Greg.

Here's a link that has information on how to optimise one's Windows XP system for real time audio work: http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=349591

Obviously the Protools specific stuff should be ignored.

Note sure whether there's a Windows 7 version of this document.

(my EWQLP supplier gave this to me when I was having problems)

Greg.

if I were you I would spend the extra money for a usb audio device. you're spending $500 or more on your laptop, several hundred dollars on your piano software, but you're still using the cheap builtin audio. I've heard the apple laptops do have adequate builtin sound cards, but it seems a shame to spend all your money on your laptop and software and nothing on the sound card.

RE: my drive's power management issue when idle, I've discovered that using the HD Tune Drive Power Manager fixes the problem. This is far nicer than having to generate background activity.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

I move the slider all the way to the right (high performance).

The laptop should really come with this functionality I think. (perhaps in the power management profiles).

Greg.

About running on PC's: If you are sure your software piano runs on Linux, you can install Linux operating system as a second system, and use windows for other tasks. When you want to play piano, you run blank Linux instead of Windows with rubbish.