DS-404 problems in Orion PLatinum?

[Dingo865]

Sorry for the doukle-post...

OK, so I've just picked up CM#50 (arrived here in Toronto yesterday... not the fastest mail, eh?), and all's forgiven to CM as far as I'm concerned. A nice, rich edition, great gifts and all.

Related issues: I've played around with the DS-404 in OPlat, and it keeps crashing my system after every third or fourth loading of a sample in a row. I'm presuming this is because of the large size of the samples, but I have an Athlon 1700 with 768MB SDRAM running Win2k and an Audiophile 2496, so it's not exactly an underpowered machine...

...and the samples take on average 10-15 seconds to load, which seems a bit excessive...

...also, when I load the piano sample and start playin it, the keys shift an octave every 20 or 30 seconds, which makes the sample (incredible sounding as it may be) useless.

Am I missing something very obvious? I haven't tried to tweak anything yet, I'm still in the assessment phase, so I don't know if it's my fault, my system's, or the samplers...?

Any feedback would be sincerely appreciated! Thanks,

[Scot Solida]

Do you have all the patch fixes from the CM site? There are fixes that I KNOW apply to the piano patch, as well as few other things...

[Dingo865]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the note!

I went to the site, but there are NO 'fix' patches there, only a handful of user patches. I'm downloading them right now, and I'm sure they're fantastic, but they are only 22MB in size in all, and nothing says the'd fix anything...?

[Muon Software Ltd]

Scott is quite correct, there were a number of problems with the CM patches, the piano in particular is broken. You will be able to see that there is a slow square wave LFO activated and assigned to pitch mod, don't ask me why.

There most definately is a fix for the dud patches available at the computer music website. I'm not sure why you didn't spot it but try this:

http://www.computermusic.co.uk/main.asp

...and look right at the top of the news column on the right hand side. It's also a sticky topic on the forum. Honest, just go have a look!

And finally, as for not being able to load more than three or four patches in a row. It's working perfectly here on a very similar machine (I can load patches till the RAM runs out!) so I wonder if you have a faulty DIMM? have you done a RAM test? Can you get a crash location?

One thing that you should be aware of is that when you load one patch after another the samples from previous patches REMAIN IN THE MEMORY. In Orion Pro just delete the DS404 and add another one if you just want to browse through lots of patches. We're definately considering adding an "unload" button as this isn't ideal.

Regards
Dave
Muon Software Ltd
www.muon-software.com

[Dingo865]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the reply! Have to admit, I was looking for it on Muon's website, not on CM's - I figured you were the authors, so... But I picked up the direct link from another thread, and fixed everything.

As to the problems: as soon as the patching was done, they all disappeared! The piano sample is the very best I've EVER come across in a free sample, indeed better than many commercial samples. With a bit of Pianoverb or other reverb slapped on top (in moderation), it has a richness not easily rivaled by others.

Also, thank you for the 'unload' tip. Having a dedicated unload button would definitely be a nice feature, especially when one's dealing with a multitude of samples and trying to audition them sequentially - which, I presume, most of us do, especially in the beginning.

BEAUTIFUL job, as always!