SampleTank 4 on the way

[quilys]

ST4, "Rompler from Hell" ,.. so bizar that it gets funny

But not funny for those that got their money and time stolen, working free fro IK as beta's

Still missing the tool they paid for

Money is money, but even worse is the time they steal, becourse you wil never get that time back

And then comes the aspect of being fooled, and participate in a bad joke

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

For me stepping out after the ST3, and latest T-Racks mess, has made me take a break, and explore
Presence XT once again, as found in the latest S1 ver 4, such a nice and well-supplied rompler with sounds that I actually feels like using, in oposition to ST3, that remained uninspiring, and unused to

Wasted money and time ST3 was

Presence, and S1, alle the versions, in contrary, never coursed me ONE single problem,... EVER !!

Hard to believe I guess, for someone, but its actually possible to make a rompler that just works

(given you have the competence obviously)

Right now I am importing JRR's new Orpheus library into Presence XT via EXS-format, seems to work

Guess I kinda forgot how well-equipped Presence actually is when I bought ST3, typical GAS

And for more specialised stuff, not being bread and butter, there is more specialised plugs anyway

But there is lots of favourits in Presence, that stand the distance until final mix

Exactly what I think, what happens that most of us who are here co-executing on the poor functionality of the product, we should be focused on our music and productions using the time that, as you say we are losing, writing as beta users and working ' free ' for IK and they ignore us or criticize us for putting the finger in the frame? it's ridiculous.

[zzz00m]

Presence, and S1, alle the versions, in contrary, never coursed me ONE single problem,... EVER !!

Hard to believe I guess, for someone, but its actually possible to make a rompler that just works

(given you have the competence obviously)

Right now I am importing JRR's new Orpheus library into Presence XT via EXS-format, seems to work

Guess I kinda forgot how well-equipped Presence actually is when I bought ST3, typical GAS

And for more specialised stuff, not being bread and butter, there is more specialised plugs anyway

But there is lots of favourits in Presence, that stand the distance until final mix

I like Presence XT, and think it is really quite a capable sampler/rompler. If PreSonus would just unlock it from the S1 DAW and release as a plugin I might actually use it, and buy more content for it.

But I don't want to tie my workflow or projects to an instrument that is locked to a DAW. I like having the option to move a project to another DAW if I feel like it, and also taking my instruments along for the trip. So VST instruments are the only option for me.

[benjamind]

Sampletank won't offer me anything different to what I already own.

But MODO Guitars certainly will.

Waits patiently...

[Weasel-Boy]

After working with this for a week or so now, I have some notes.

Congratulations IK Multimedia, you have managed to burn an enormous amount of goodwill to the ground with the release of SampleTank4.

There are people who loaned you money, months in advance for a product that is a bug-ridden, library corrupted, slow reacting, RAM choking overpriced product. Not only did you burn the early investors with a terrifyingly flawed download scheme, you doubly burned the folks who spent extra money on USB drive delivery... as they now find themselves having to use online downloading to get at the “fixes” you’ve provided. Wasn’t the point of the USB drive to avoid online downloading entirely?

Anybody notice the incredible amount of time it takes to launch your DAW if ST4 was used in your projects? This is time we’re never getting back. The library doesn’t retain how you set it up with a new relaunch....Hell, you didn’t even bother to generate contextual info rollovers for the myriad of cryptic icons scattered across the interface.

Then there are the samples themselves. Do you have any idea how many of them are firing late because they weren’t trimmed properly. I’d fix ‘em myself, but wait, you didn’t bother to provide a rudimentary sample start and end editor like all your competitors do.

You padded the library with more than 20 gigabytes of useless (or just plain boring) synth samples and loops, rather than providing useful sampled band and orchestral instruments. There was far more value in the standard ST3 purchase than the standard ST4, as far as original content is concerned, .... with an extra burn of an inflated upgrade price for previous ST3 owners thrown in for good measure.

If I were you, I’d think long and hard about making some form of restitution to your customers... before someone wises up and initiates a class action lawsuit. Really, you should be ashamed....but then again, I’ve never actually seen anyone ashamed laughing all the way to the bank.

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

for me, there are two main circumstances where crashes happen. i'm on Windows 10, and using REAPER.

scenario 1: switch to folder mode in the library, and go to SampleTank 4 -> Guitars -> Electric -> Black LP, and start going patch by patch. at some point SampleTank will crash on switching to a new patch. rinse and repeat until it happens.

scenario 2: load four instances of SampleTank 4 VST3 in REAPER: instant crash.

Okay - Windows 10, up to date. Reaper 5.973. Dell 7559 Inspiron (laptop), 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GTX 960M/Intel HD 530, i7 6700HQ (6th generation).

- Could not reproduce Scenario 1
- Could sort of reproduce Scenario 2 on loading the 6th or 7th instance on several attempts. I left the GUI open for each instance as I piled them on. The "crash" did not shutdown Reaper or even the other ST4 instances, but it did destabilize Windows display manager, which was odd. Screen went completely black for a bit (seconds, not minutes). When it came back, the windows theme was gone and the scaling was changed (it came back at 150%, even though it was originally set to 100% scaling). Very odd... I wonder if the some of the crashes (on Windows) are related the GUI framework used? I'm a bit disappointed that Windows would allow an application to do this.

EDIT: Just noticed you said "VST3" - I only have VST2 installed, so this might not be a good test

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

Just got an update on my support ticket logged 6 business days ago. It says my issue with missing drum kits in ST4 standard is resolved with the new update. This is by far the longest I've ever had to wait for IK support, so I would guess they are pretty back logged at the moment. I will report back on whether my issue is actually fixed.

Unfortunately, the missing standard edition samples are still missing after the update. Contacted support again.

Support answered back within hours and asked me to re-download the latest version of Acoustic Drums parts 1 and 2. I downloaded them, re-installed and rebuilt the database. Still no luck. Reported this back to support. Everything else is there, so I still suspect that the documentation is wrong and that these kits were never meant to be in the standard version. I probably would never use them, but it's kind of the principle of the thing, so I'm going to keep chasing them

ISSUE SOLVED: Sorry - did not have the chance to update over the weekend, but after my last post that re-installing the Acoustic drum kit sample parts did not work, support responded within the hour to ask if I had installed Sampletank sound installer 1.1 (not sound updater 1.1). It is very likely that I had installed sound installer 1.0 and then just applied the incremental sound updaters. Apparently this does not give the same result. Installed Sampletank sound installer 1.1 and the missing kits finally showed up.

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

fun fact: i've just re-watched the video that i've submitted to support, and i can see that while Windows shows "used memory" for SampleTank 4 as somewhere around 2GB per SampleTank 4 instance, the committed memory actually grows by 7GB. yes, you read that right - a single empty SampleTank 4 instance occupies SEVEN MOTHERF$%KING GIGABYTES. Running more than three of them (i.e. eating more than 28GB worth of memory!) crashes on my machine, because i have my paging file disabled, because why the fsck would i need one on a machine with 32GB of memory?!

seriously, IK, you need to fire your software developers and hire some new ones, like, immediately. this is fscking insane. for a little bit of perspective, Kontakt 5 takes up 200MB of memory.

Wow! I will concede that that is insane!

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

fun fact: i've just re-watched the video that i've submitted to support, and i can see that while Windows shows "used memory" for SampleTank 4 as somewhere around 2GB per SampleTank 4 instance, the committed memory actually grows by 7GB. yes, you read that right - a single empty SampleTank 4 instance occupies SEVEN MOTHERF$%KING GIGABYTES. Running more than three of them (i.e. eating more than 28GB worth of memory!) crashes on my machine, because i have my paging file disabled, because why the fsck would i need one on a machine with 32GB of memory?!

seriously, IK, you need to fire your software developers and hire some new ones, like, immediately. this is fscking insane. for a little bit of perspective, Kontakt 5 takes up 200MB of memory.

Wow! I will concede that that is insane!

6 instances - then crash for me on 7th. Would I use that many in real life? No, but the memory footprint is staggering! 37 GB committed with 6 empty instances.

EDIT: Created new support ticket for this (828216). Not expecting a quick fix, but I want to make sure I'm on record as another voice bringing the memory footprint issue to the forefront.

[DarkStar]

ISSUE SOLVED: Sorry - did not have the chance to update over the weekend, but after my last post that re-installing the Acoustic drum kit sample parts did not work, support responded within the hour to ask if I had installed Sampletank sound installer 1.1 (not sound updater 1.1). It is very likely that I had installed sound installer 1.0 and then just applied the incremental sound updaters. Apparently this does not give the same result. Installed Sampletank sound installer 1.1 and the missing kits finally showed up.

Hold on. Are you saying the installing Sounds Installer 1.0 and then Sounds Updater 1.1 is NOT the same as installing Sounds installer 1.1? How big is each of those 3 download files?

[DarkStar]

6 instances - then crash for me on 7th. Would I use that many in real life? No, but the memory footprint is staggering! 37 GB committed with 6 empty instances.

General Question: what does that 37 GB represent? Is the excess over the 11.5 GB RAM used then stored in the Page file?

I have just read that:

The process may reserve more memory than it actually needs or uses at one time, just to maintain ownership of a contiguous block of addresses. At any one time, the reserved memory addresses do not necessarily represent real space in either the physical memory (RAM) or on disk. In fact, a process can reserve more memory than is available on the system.

If so, then commit memory is "just" a number.

[Burillo]

i'm a bit fuzzy on how virtual memory works in Windows, but i'm pretty sure that "commit" vs "used" memory is whether the memory is in use. meaning, SampleTank reserves 7GB of memory, but uses only 2GB - the rest is apparently reserved "just in case". (with "used" being defined as "pages are loaded into RAM and have been accessed recently").

the "memory commit" is there because while virtual memory theoretically is only limited by address space width, in practice you can't reserve memory indefinitely, as at some point you'll run out of storage for the pages that are in use. the "commit limit" is the total amount of memory that can be reserved and in use by all software on the system, and is defined as "size of RAM + size of all page files on the system". so, even if SampleTank just reserved a 5GB buffer just so that it has a nice contiguous buffer to read samples into later, this counts against the commit limit, and that memory becomes unavailable for other processes.

this puzzles me a bit, because on Linux, one can reserve terabytes of address space pretty much for free (it will be backed by a "zero page" unless it's written to) - apparently, Windows isn't smart enough to do that, or they're not doing that and doing something else instead. i would be curious to know if memory usage is similar on OS X.

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

ISSUE SOLVED: Sorry - did not have the chance to update over the weekend, but after my last post that re-installing the Acoustic drum kit sample parts did not work, support responded within the hour to ask if I had installed Sampletank sound installer 1.1 (not sound updater 1.1). It is very likely that I had installed sound installer 1.0 and then just applied the incremental sound updaters. Apparently this does not give the same result. Installed Sampletank sound installer 1.1 and the missing kits finally showed up.

Hold on. Are you saying the installing Sounds Installer 1.0 and then Sounds Updater 1.1 is NOT the same as installing Sounds installer 1.1? How big is each of those 3 download files?

Support didn't come out and say this, but that is my experience. I know I applied the 1.1 updater before and the problem persisted. Very unclear as to everything that needs to be installed and when.

Very small files - they are more definition files and not large like the actual sample content downloads.

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

i'm a bit fuzzy on how virtual memory works in Windows, but i'm pretty sure that "commit" vs "used" memory is whether the memory is in use. meaning, SampleTank reserves 7GB of memory, but uses only 2GB - the rest is apparently reserved "just in case". (with "used" being defined as "pages are loaded into RAM and have been accessed recently").

the "memory commit" is there because while virtual memory theoretically is only limited by address space width, in practice you can't reserve memory indefinitely, as at some point you'll run out of storage for the pages that are in use. the "commit limit" is the total amount of memory that can be reserved and in use by all software on the system, and is defined as "size of RAM + size of all page files on the system". so, even if SampleTank just reserved a 5GB buffer just so that it has a nice contiguous buffer to read samples into later, this counts against the commit limit, and that memory becomes unavailable for other processes.

this puzzles me a bit, because on Linux, one can reserve terabytes of address space pretty much for free (it will be backed by a "zero page" unless it's written to) - apparently, Windows isn't smart enough to do that, or they're not doing that and doing something else instead. i would be curious to know if memory usage is similar on OS X.

I'm very fuzzy on this too, but based on our collective experience (especially yours with no pagefile) - it certainly appears as if committed memory in Windows actually reserves memory exclusively, which basically means the reserved memory is unavailable to other processes. Windows may eventually claim some of this back, if it remains unused, based on some weird behavior I witnessed with memory being released 20+ minutes later, if I left a session idle. However, if ST4 is using about 1.5GB per instance and reserving another 5.5 GB, that is a whopping 33 GB of unused memory held hostage by ST4 in my case of loading up 6 instances. That is certainly a application that is inherently behaving badly.

[dandezebra]

I genuinely wonder if anyone at IK has brought up any compensation for us poor bastards. I highly doubt it, which will be a huge shame as this will certainly have an affect on future IK purchases.

Has there ever been a sloppier release from a largish company like this? Seriously, if so please point me to the VI-Forum, GS, or KVR threads about it.

[Mkdaws32@gmail.com]

I genuinely wonder if anyone at IK has brought up any compensation for us poor bastards. I highly doubt it, which will be a huge shame as this will certainly have an affect on future IK purchases.

Has there ever been a sloppier release from a largish company like this? Seriously, if so please point me to the VI-Forum, GS, or KVR threads about it.

Well I appear to be one of the lucky ones in some respects. I upgraded from ST3 SE to ST3 Standard just prior to the ST4 announcement. I got everything I purchased and was expecting, so the fortunate timing of the ST4 release was a real unexpected gift to me. Had I paid full retail price for ST4, I might not be quite as calm about this as I seem at times

Despite the high memory footprint, it also seems very stable and usable for me, which is obviously not the case for everyone.

So I do not have any real $$$ invested in ST4 and I do remain confident that it will be improved upon yet. With the current RAM usage IK have either put themselves into the position of fixing it or simply pulling the product altogether. I don't believe it will have long-term viability in it's current state.