Omnisphere - Post purchase Questions, Issues, Problems

[StuartAmbient]

Have you tried switching to the option that only loads a sample of the instrument and not the whole thing?

which option is that ? I see nothing allowing when your saying.

SA

[Zero dB]

Koolkeys is on a role....

I just have him on ignore.

[Zero dB]

As for running out of memory, I'd like to be able to tell you that will never happen when doing anything on a computer. But, that would be misleading you. When working with any streaming, sample-based instrument, some tuning of your system will be needed to get the most out of your available memory, which, alas, will always be a limited resource. Please see the FAQs for tips on how to make the most out of the memory you have.

Glenn, please, this has been discussed to death before. Users are running a single instance of Omni in a clean new project and after an hour and a half of trying out sounds we get "out of memory". Close the project and open a new one again and all the sounds that were "out of memory" are now fine and working for another hour and a half. This is memory leakage as far as I understand it. Otherwise what can it be? Running big projects with lots of plug-ins for a long time gives no such problems. Only Omni does that after some time.

Exactly. We all know about computer memory limitations but this is about a PROBLEM with Omnisphere. Glenn surely you'd agree that just as a patch uses memory on loading, on unloading/going to another patch this memory should be freed up. Otherwise we'd be out of memory fast, and this is precisely what's happening. I'm astounded if you think this is, or should be perceived as, normal behaviour. These memory problems also lead to frequent "runtime" C++ errors in REAPER, forcing it to close. Errors I'd *never* seen before I installed Omni.

Please go back and read the posts on northern sounds on this and check your tech support files.

yairhol is stating exactly what I talked about above, and what I've also read dozens of posts about on northernsounds.com. Now I don't know whether or not people are reporting this to your tech support - but by the sounds of it that's a rather thankless task anyway!

[dreamkeeper]

Koolkeys is on a role....

I just have him on ignore.

Let me guess... the reasons are that

- he's trying to help,
- brings logical, reasonable and balanced arguments and
- never insults anyone.

Am I close?

[topaz]

maybe working with 5 ch's of light patches would be fine, my guess is the 5 patches are quite intense and the host will not start to use the other cores untill a 2nd instance is loaded.

this is the same for any instrument, try doing this in EW play, only 3 parts of an intense patch will overload core 1, spread that across 3 instances and the core loads will distribute.

try it and see. do not think you can load 5 channels of in intense patches without overloading 1 core.

No doubt the sounds are beautiful, the features fine, but if I'm limited to a 3-4 midi channels before real degradation sets in I don't see how I can really consider it a working multi instrument that I can rely on.

[siriusbliss]

I KNEW this thread would evolve to this same issue.
VERY LITTLE Of these issues seem to be posted on the Omni forum (relatively speaking).

So, now Spectrasonics is aware of it already, OK?

Greg

[yairhol]

maybe working with 5 ch's of light patches would be fine, my guess is the 5 patches are quite intense and the host will not start to use the other cores untill a 2nd instance is loaded.

this is the same for any instrument, try doing this in EW play, only 3 parts of an intense patch will overload core 1, spread that across 3 instances and the core loads will distribute.

try it and see. do not think you can load 5 channels of in intense patches without overloading 1 core.

We're talking about RAM memory that is being filled and thus we get an "out of memory" message. It has nothing to do with CPU cores.
Besides, after I used to work with several instances of Omni and got these error messages I got a reply on another forum from Spect. staff to start using only 1 instance of Omni and not several.

[Zero dB]

I figured that would help too, yairhol, so started used one instance and multiple parts/channels within it. But guess what? The same thing still happens!

[topaz]

I was quoting stuartambient and his multi timbral issues.

We're talking about RAM memory that is being filled and thus we get an "out of memory" message. It has nothing to do with CPU cores..

that looks like he is talking about cpu issues to me.. no ?

I see the cpu utilization (in Live) jumping in erratic ways.

[RawTheory]

Exactly. We all know about computer memory limitations but this is about a PROBLEM with Omnisphere. Glenn surely you'd agree that just as a patch uses memory on loading, on unloading/going to another patch this memory should be freed up. Otherwise we'd be out of memory fast, and this is precisely what's happening. I'm astounded if you think this is, or should be perceived as, normal behaviour. These memory problems also lead to frequent "runtime" C++ errors in REAPER, forcing it to close. Errors I'd *never* seen before I installed Omni.

Please go back and read the posts on northern sounds on this and check your tech support files.

yairhol is stating exactly what I talked about above, and what I've also read dozens of posts about on northernsounds.com. Now I don't know whether or not people are reporting this to your tech support - but by the sounds of it that's a rather thankless task anyway!

Although I have had a mostly smooth experience with Omni, I have run into the "out of memory" message on both full blown Reaper projects with three or four instances of Omni with up to three or four channels on each, and with just Omni open for a long time playing patches and soundsources. With rendering and deactivating instances as I work on full productions, I'm able to compensate for the memory loss, but it would be nice to not have to worry about them. Im on an Intel Core2Duo 2.20GHz PC with 2.00 GB of RAM built by ADK Pro audio called the 1QSR.

I've also received the Reaper "runtime" C++ errors in Reaper while using Omni and browsing through soundsources is a bit of a pain while having to wait 2-3 sec for the sound to load. Some Soundsources load almost instantaneously though.

I do think Omni can use some more optimization but it does represent the future of VST technology so I expect its functionality to grow as computing power grows and drops in price....

[yairhol]

I have a question for all of those who experience problems with Omnisphere:
Have you reported them to Spectrasonics tech support?

Too bad Glenn dropped out of the thread.
We need his comments since it seems that more people are having slow soundsource browsing, C++ runtime errors, "out of memory" messages even with only 1 instance of Omni etc.

[RawTheory]

Now that you've made a point of it, I've copy/pasted my observations to an email to Spectrasonics tech support. I suggest everyone else with similar experiences do the same...

[GlennO]

I can't comment on specific cases since I'm not familiar with the details, of course. For that assistance, you'll need to contact tech support. But, here's a general observation that may help:

For efficiency purposes, Omnisphere will defer allocation of memory for things until you need them. Therefore it's natural that a fresh instance in which you're not using many features will use less memory than a mature one in which you've turned many things on.

However, the most significant usage of memory in Omnisphere is soundsources. Omnisphere is quite efficient in the use of soundsources and offers sample streaming so you don't need to load an entire soundsource into memory in order to play it.

Even with streaming though, if you use enough large soundsources, you may tax the available memory. By the same token, if you don't provide Omnisphere much memory to begin with, the memory capacity may be taxed even when using relatively few soundsources. There are a number of tips in the FAQs, under "Memory Issues" that will help you make the most of the available memory. Or, contact tech support and they will be glad to assist you. One other thing, and this can be confusing, please note that in this context, the relevant memory is virtual memory, not RAM.

Finally, as with improving performance, we are constantly striving to reduce the memory requirements of Omnisphere and hope to improve it further in the future.

- Glenn

[koolkeys]

Have you tried switching to the option that only loads a sample of the instrument and not the whole thing?

which option is that ? I see nothing allowing when your saying.

SA

On the browser screen, there is a button that says "Preview Load". This lets you go through and just preview instruments by only loading part of the samples. Saves a LOT of time if you are just browsing through. The "Auto Load" button makes the entire instrument load when you click on it.

Also, on the "System" screen, there are options for pre-loading and streaming that may help some people and at least may be worth checking out. They can affect performance a little bit.

Brent

[koolkeys]

Koolkeys is on a role....

I just have him on ignore.

Wow, sensitive soul, eh?

Regardless, I'm flattered.

Brent