Hi Steve et al.,
I was actually able to solve 95% of my problems by reducing the polyphony in the piano and harp parts in the score I'm working on. That's not a big deal for me -- in this piece, at least, I don't need anywhere near the 64-note polyphony GPO assigns those instruments by default. I set them to 12 each, and playback was *much* improved. I still get periodic light clicks when playing back in Finale, but I'm hopeful that those will go away when I try to record to file. The important thing is that GPO playback no longer crashes and burns on me, even with 17 instruments playing simultaneously.
By the way, the instructions on how to change the polyphony for each instrument in GPO are hard to find (and, in one instance, misleading) so as a courtesy, I'm repeating that info here. In the Kontakt player window, below the "CPU Usage" indicator and directly to the left of the MIDI channel indicator, there's a window with a pair of eighth notes and a pair of numbers -- for instance, "0/64". The first number tells you how many notes are currently sounding, and the second number tells you the maximum polyphony for that instrument. Click and drag on the *second* number to adjust the polyphony -- drag up to increase, drag down to decrease.
[By the way, the user interface for the Kontakt player is almost as bad as the UI for iKey 2. Really, it's that bad. You'll notice there's no way to adjust the maximum polyphony by say, TYPING IN A GODDAMN NUMBER. Gah. Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.]
You should set all of your wind instruments to a maximum polyphony of 1 -- this actually makes the playback more realistic. Set any multitimbral instruments (including percussion) to the minimum polyphony you can stand. If you let the polyphony pile up too high, GPO will choke and plaback will grind to a halt.
By the way, it would be nice if we could set a *global* maximum polyphony in GPO, in addition to the settings for each individual instruments. This would let you get away with lots of polyphony on unaccompanied or lightly accompanied piano or harp parts, but reduce it on the fly when GPO starts to get overloaded.
Finally, Kontakt 2.0 is supposed to be much better optimized for Mac, and so hopefully eventually there will be a GPO Kontakt Player based on Kontakt 2.0.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
On 05 Mar 2005, at 8:12 PM, Steve Gibons wrote:
Darcy,
The playback ability of GPO on a mac vs that on a PC is just awful. The most I could ever get on my 867mhz 15" Powerbook was 6 instruments. So you could get 12. Maybe.
I have a 2.2 ghz PC. It cost $350. I have not found a limit on GPO.
There has been talk of improvement on the mac side but there has been none.
steve, still peeved.
On Mar 5, 2005, at 6:54 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
Hi -- I crossposted this to the Northern Sound Forum:
http://northernsounds.com/forum/showthread.php?p=268507#post268507
Okay, I've finally tried to get a moderately large score to play back in GPO via Finale 2005b on my 1.42 GHz Mac mini with 1 GB of RAM.
The results, unfortunately, are not encouraging.
Here are the instruments I'm using:
GPO PLAYER 1 Flute Player 1 Flute Player 2 Eb Clarinet Solo Bb Clarinet Solo Bass Clarinet Solo
GPO PLAYER 2 Trumpet 1 Player 1 KS Trumpet 1 Player 2 KS Trumpet 1 Player 3 KS Trumpet 1 Solo KS Trumpet 1 Player 1 KS
GPO PLAYER 3 Tenor Trombone Player 1 KS Tenor Trombone Player 2 KS Tenor Trombone Player 3 KS Bass Trombone 2 Solo
GPO PLAYER 4 Chromatic Harp 1 Lite Steinway Piano Lite Double Bass Pizz Solo
Ambience reverb is set to "Bypass."
Everything starts okay, but when the dynamics get more intense and/or the music gets busier, I get a ton of cracks in Finale, and, shortly thereafter, playback grinds to a halt in a sea of cracking, usually picking up much later when the texture thins out.
I tried the "Record to File" option in GPO studio, after quitting everything except GPO Studio and Finale, turning AirPort off, setting Finale playback to "Non-Scrolling (pre-scan)," and minimizing the Finale window and all GPO windows except the "Record To File" one.
Some of the cracks audible during initial playback are eliminated in the recorded file, but the big problem is that in many areas where the texture is dense, the tempo speeds up! The resulting AIFF file is therefore useless.
What to do? Is it even possible to get a score like this to play back on my hardware? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
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