Diva and Mainstage?

[PF3Steve]

Does anybody else experience trouble using Diva with Mainstage?

I'd really like to be able to use Diva as a core part of the live rig I'm building but I'm finding even pressing a single note - of any preset - is sending the CPU directly into the red with crackling. Multicore is selected. It is a relatively recent i7 4 core 2.4 GHz MackBook Pro and I have no trouble running Diva via Cubase on the same machine. Mainstage version is 2.2.2 and I'm on OSX 10.7.5. All recent versions of Dvia including the current beta behave the same. Other third party plugs, e.g. Native Instruments cause no problems.

I'm a relative novice on the Mac side as my studio computer has always been a PC and I don't really know OSX well enough yet to troubleshoot to any useful degree - so feel free to suggest what might appear simple stuff or potential schoolboy errors.

I'm hoping its me doing something daft as it doesn't seem to be a reported problem in these forums.

Appreciate any help.

[jdoo]

I use MainStage also, but upgraded recently to MainStage 3. I never had issues across the board with Diva, on either system. There are patches which I had to drop to 'Great' or even to 'fast' (something you may want to check. How much memory (RAM) you have can effect things too. 8 GB RAM <-- what I would consider min. for a gigging Mac, with lots of AU instruments...

Something to check --- Right Click on MainStage in the Finder (it should be in "Applications" folder) - and select "Get Info" (or select it, and hit Command-I ). On the dialogue that pops up -- make sure you don't have "Open in 32-Bit mode" selected. That's something you want to select after adding an AU instrument (it forces MainStage to rescan the software instruments on the Mac)... but then turn back off after running MainStage once. On you i7 - you want MainStage running as a 64 bit application, if at all possible.

Anyway - am shooting in the dark here. There are other forums (Logic Pro Help forums, and the Apple Forums) - where you might get some more response..

[Urs]

I have no immediate answer to this, I'm afraid

I'm working in Logic a lot; so that's my benchmark host, and there wasn't any problem there. I would naturally expect Mainstage to behave similar.

What samplerate and buffersize is your audio device set to? Maybe Mainstage - being a live host - has very "optimistic" settings...?

[PF3Steve]

Hi guys, I appreciate the responses.

I am not running 64bit Mainstage yet as to do so would force me into a Kontakt upgrade (Kontakt being a must-have in my particular case). Although granted for a live rig this is something clearly worth considering (I have 16GB of memory going begging).

However, I have been experimenting with sample sizes as Urs has suggested. The default value where I was having problems was 128 with 18ms latency. Changing it to the maximum of 1024 helped but with an expected hit on latency. But to my surprise, after setting sample size to the minimum of 64, the problem now seems to have gone completely!

I shall continue to experiment but I think I'm getting somewhere now!

Cheers, Steve

[PF3Steve]

As an additional note, I am also finding that it's easy to get the problem to return whenever I activate the multicore button - with multicore switched off, I'm getting much better results. The opposite of what I would have expected?