Ocean Way Drums on Receptor / Receptor 2 ?

[looneytunes]

Hi Receptor Community,

Does anyone have experience with Ocean Way Drums on a Receptor? I'm curious as to its performance (eg. Kit Load time, general playing in stereo mixdown, streaming to multiple channels). Can anyone give me their perceptions? Does it play nicely with other plugs, or does it pretty much take over the whole machine?

Thanks in advance, Regards,
Kevin L

[looneytunes]

A quick update for anyone who is interested.

I installed Ocean Way Drums (OWD) on Receptor, and updated it to include the handy GM mappings. The drums sound very clear on Receptor, however it probably is the biggest hog of CPU and resources for any Kontakt lib I've been able to run on Receptor. I find that I can run possibly one more plug or Kontakt lib on a Receptor Pro 2 max with OWD running, before getting CPU spikes present in the audio stream. Amp Emulators and other CPU hungry plugs really seem to push this over the edge of usability.

I am running OWD on 1 Kontakt plugin, with 6 output streams (Kick, Toms, Snare, Hat, Overhead, Ambient).

So anyone doing a multi-Receptor setup to cover band mockups, and interested in using OWD for great drum parts - better plan on limiting Receptors for OWD. Despite hardware improvements in Receptor 2, you can still easily hit a wall on performance for things like OWD.

Hope this helps,
Kevin L

[Kermit Jagger]

Thanks for the summary.

[Bryan@MuseResearch]

Thanks for the summary.

I agree with Kevin... I've never seen a kontakt player eat up so much resources as this library does. Having said that, I think it sounds awesome.

I've used it on a Receptor PRO750 where it pretty much max'd out the processor all the time, and then on a Receptor 2 PRO it eats up a fair amount of the processor but not worryingly so.

I just played a gig where I put triggers on my acoustic kit, ran those through a Drum Kat, and then sent the MIDI to my Receptor 2 PRo running the library. It sounded amazing, and it was actually pretty cool because the drum kit was a Yamaha hip gig-- those tiny little cocktail kits - and I was triggering a massive kit out of OWD so for those in the know it was very much a visual discontinuity!

Anyway, I can say it works very well on Receptor however it is definitely a CPU eater, no question about it.

Groovology

[BlackMath]

can you share how you installed the Ocean way drums on the receptor. I have a pro jr and would like to make it a dedicated drum module for my e-drums.

Any help would be appreciated.

[batgab]

I just played a gig where I put triggers on my acoustic kit, ran those through a Drum Kat, and then sent the MIDI to my Receptor 2 PRo running the library. It sounded amazing, and it was actually pretty cool because the drum kit was a Yamaha hip gig-- those tiny little cocktail kits - and I was triggering a massive kit out of OWD so for those in the know it was very much a visual discontinuity!

I wish I could have seen/heard that! I'm sure there were a few people trying to figure that one out, Groovology!

[digitalelements]

Hey Guys,

Just want to let you know that there is plenty to tweak to optimize OWD for Receptor.
Reducing the max voices on each drum will help tremendously. set kicks to 16 instead of 128.
Snare down to 64 instead of 300... Toms to 32 cymbals to 32...
look for the Max: in each instruments info window and adjust to taste.
Also, turning off extra room mics will also reduce the amount of voices used. In a live setting, you don't need the extra room sounds most of the time. Plenty of air in the overheads. Kontakt does a great job of managing the polyphony so let it do the work.There is a setting in the full version of Kontakt for fade time of voices that get stolen when max voices is reached. Click edit (little wrench)/ Instrument options/Instrument tab look at "Voice Stealing Fade out time" Setting this fade time to 1000 will smooth things out especially on cymbals.

After these tweaks, you'll see a huge improvement in performance

[looneytunes]

Hey Digital Elements,

Awesome suggestions, Thanks!

I'm trying to use OWD in a studio context for band mockups, so for me, I'm mostly trying to optimize CPU usage. I was seeing occasional CPU spikes (with the default settings) when hand-playing faster/more-complex drum parts, so I could see this being an issue for Bryan/Groovology or anyone else doing live drums. Anyway, - I'm glad to hear of optimization options. It might be a nice Xmas present for Muse or someone to program these as Receptor Presets.

BTW - another tidbit. I've been talking with SonicReality customer support over various things regarding the OWD 1.1 update (available from SonicReality).

First, even though it has an installer, you can still run the updater remotely on a PC/Mac, and point it to your OWD folder on a mounted Receptor HD. I tested this and it seems to work fine.

Second, there is a bug in the presets for China crash cymbals on GM mappings (Flanging sound - sounds like sample is being double-triggered). SR is working on a fix for this. They did describe a way to get into Kontakt to fix it though:

"You can open up the china instrument by clicking on the wrench icon within the instrument. Once opened, check for the glide function I believe its under Source then click "mod" look for the glide and turn it off. This will stop the "flanging" This is something that is on the table to be updated and we are hoping to get to it soon. "


As Bryan says - OWD sounds great in Receptor. I am preferring it to my previous drum plugs. I'm curious how Steven Slate drums might compare.

Regards,
Kevin L

[looneytunes]

Hi again,

Here's some more performance observations - and a little more context to the problems.

So I followed Digital Elements suggestions, reducing the voice reserves (and compensating on fade times for cymbals). This seemed to make a little difference, but I was still seeing CPU spikes - frequently.

So here's the rub - I am doing mockups - in ProTools, using Uniwire. The buffers were set in ProTools at 128 (which is effectively the same as 64 on Receptor without Uniwire). This is the key parameter to the spikes and audio dropouts. I increased the ProTools buffers to 256 (effectively 128 in Receptor) - and this brought everything to reasonable performance level without CPU spikes.


So Brian/Digital Elements - quick poll: what Receptor buffer settings are you using for OWD?

Thanks, Regards,
Kevin L

[digitalelements]

hey Kevin,

I can get the sample buffer down to 32 samples with these tweaks ..... super snappy and fast!
I'm not using Uniwire though ... this is for live play from a drum controller

[looneytunes]

Hi again, DE,

Thanks for the info.

Hmmm. So I haven't got CPU usage down quite that low yet. Without Uniwire, and with 64 buffers - triggering live from a Midi keyboard, I can easily get frequent CPU spikes, and drive nominal CPU level above 90% (eg. if I trigger Tom rolls with 2 hands, moderate to fast speed, all 4 toms per hit, I can freeze the machine). I've also halved all of the reserves that you recommended, and moved voice fades on all drums to 3. The only thing I did not do that you recommended was cut-out the ambient channel.

I'm curious - are there any other Kontakt tweaks that you can think of that may help? While I probably could record with 256 buffers, the latency is noticable (and makes it hard to record parts accurately).

Thanks again for any insights,
Kevin L

[Bryan@MuseResearch]

I just played a gig where I put triggers on my acoustic kit, ran those through a Drum Kat, and then sent the MIDI to my Receptor 2 PRo running the library. It sounded amazing, and it was actually pretty cool because the drum kit was a Yamaha hip gig-- those tiny little cocktail kits - and I was triggering a massive kit out of OWD so for those in the know it was very much a visual discontinuity!

I wish I could have seen/heard that! I'm sure there were a few people trying to figure that one out, Groovology!

Got a few perplexed looks from people in the audience for sure... MAN those drums sure sound bigger than they look!

Cheers

Groovology