Who has softsynth setup as stable as hardware setup?

[computa]

I only ask becsuse I am a hardware guy strictly who was slowly being turned to try the dark side but...

Had session last night where dude used Logic & soft synths strictly. Myself, guitar/bass player, keyboardist, and engineer who owns logic 8 // mac pro rig.

We had 3 reboots, 4 hangups where we just waited for the unfreeze and the god awful load times when auditioning sounds. It seemed like he had so many instruments that when u asked for a regular str pad it took about 10 min to find one. Also he was adjusting buffers for latency here and there.

The musicians who were "in the groove" were a little bit more frustrated than me because of the slow pace. Keyboardist expalined that he rather scroll thru a hardware keyboard and find sounds by ear than reading patches on a screen than waiting for load times to hear it before u say next. At one point he went to other room and jacked the motic xs7.

As an mpc guy. sequencing drums in ultrabeat sucked. we wound up using battery and loading drum samples I brought with me.

I'm seriously re-thinking my move to softsynths.

Any professionals who have a all softsynth setup that doesn't deal with these issues?

[dannygold]

Any professionals using softsynths? I'd guess "yes". Many. I think you just need to give it some time to see if it fits into your workflow.

[computa]

Originally Posted by dannygold

Any professionals using softsynths? I'd guess "yes". Many. I think you just need to give it some time to see if it fits into your workflow.

thanks for responding but my question was


Any professionals who have a all softsynth setup that doesn't deal with these issues?

[Tui]

I think you need to appreciate the complexity of the underlying technology.

1. The more "realistic", or sonically exciting a soft synth is, the more it will tax the CPU(s). Consequently, latencies have to be increased to give the computer more time to make the calculations. Increased latencies reduce playability, so there is a trade-off.

2. Not all soft synths are efficiently coded, or free of bugs. Some plug-ins can cause instability, and even cause Logic to crash occasionally.

If you think soft synths are particularly troublesome, ask
Jean Michel Jarre how reliable his hardware rig is during live concerts!

[Silver Sonya]

I use a MacBook Pro and an array of softsynths. No problems.

With a newer Mac, you will have none of these problems. It's great.

- c

[sonnyblack2000]

I havent worked alot w logic8 yet but when I'm producing away from my home studio I work strictly with softsynth, a laptop and a controller. My system is quite stable and I know where my sounds are so I'm not spending 10 min to find a patch - just like my old hardware setup. My laptop can take quite a few synths before it shows some signed of giving up!
In fact it influenced the way i work @ my own studio. I only use hardware synths nowadays for specific old analog sounds (Rhodes MKI, D6, Wurli, Moog)

[Joe Porto]

I still have some problems with Logic and softsynths, but Mainstage has been super stable.

FWIW, I was in the studio the other day and my Dave Smith PEK locked up for the first time. I've also had my SE1x lock up. Still, we're talking once a year, not once a day.

[synthoid]

As much as I like Logic (a lot), I still use hardware synths for all my tracks and for live performance.

The word "stability" covers a whole host of issues. One is resource allocation and loading. There is no hard-and-fast rule for how many soft synths (or voices thereof) a computer can support. You find out by trying. Ditto for audio buffer size. Then there is actual stability: mean time between failure. When all the instruments are hosted on a single computer and that computer is loaded heavily, the chances of something going wrong are multiplied. No one wants to deal with these computer management issues when they're preparing a gig, but with soft synths you have no choice but to work carefully through this stuff, with lots of planning and testing.

At the same time, there are some enormous attractions to using the computer. Size is obviously one of them. Lots of new soft synths are coming out. The fact that you can back everything up and move the whole rig to another computer is a big deal, and it helps offset the stability concern to an extent (you can at least failover quickly if you set things up right). It's easier to organize a big collection of sounds and samples in the computer. Software samplers are great -- they let you pack all kinds of sounds into the computer in a lightweight form, and they make moving sounds between computers even easier.

I think I'm with you, it's kind of an awkward moment in the sense that hardware synths still have some real advantages but software is becoming more attractive, and it seems inevitable that keyboard players will end up going all-software at the end of the day.

-synthoid

[H-Rezz]

Originally Posted by computa

I only ask becsuse I am a hardware guy strictly who was slowly being turned to try the dark side but...

Had session last night where dude used Logic & soft synths strictly. Myself, guitar/bass player, keyboardist, and engineer who owns logic 8 // mac pro rig.

We had 3 reboots, 4 hangups where we just waited for the unfreeze and the god awful load times when auditioning sounds. It seemed like he had so many instruments that when u asked for a regular str pad it took about 10 min to find one. Also he was adjusting buffers for latency here and there.

The musicians who were "in the groove" were a little bit more frustrated than me because of the slow pace. Keyboardist expalined that he rather scroll thru a hardware keyboard and find sounds by ear than reading patches on a screen than waiting for load times to hear it before u say next. At one point he went to other room and jacked the motic xs7.

As an mpc guy. sequencing drums in ultrabeat sucked. we wound up using battery and loading drum samples I brought with me.

I'm seriously re-thinking my move to softsynths.

Any professionals who have a all softsynth setup that doesn't deal with these issues?

I think some softsynths are prone to crashing your DAW, i try to focus on the ones that are stable and use the ones that crash rarely, but if i do i bounce the part as i soon as i have it and get rid of that softsynth a.s.a.p...

This is not Logics fault , i know which 3rd party Softsynths have the ability to crash my setup ! Never had a crash using just Logics own Synths ....maybe you should find out what is crashing your system .....

I also use hardware synths as a part of my setup, not for stability sake but for the sound of hardware ....

[Lagerfeldt]

Using lots of soft synths, never had a crash. I also use hardware synth via external instrument plug-ins.

I did had to reload a Trilogy bass plug-in once though.

In Logic Pro 8.