New PC And Various Problems....

One problem at a time

Differentiate between hardware and software.

The fact that the PC is physically new does not mean that the software should not work.

Has the operating system been changed?

The Finale message is due to the fact that you have a Trial copy, meaning you lack the license to actually perform the recording... you should retrieve the original CD that you used to install Finale on the previous PC, where the code is written, and insert it into this installation as well.

When you are in trial mode, it may be that you do not have 100% of the functionality, so before going crazy with Kontakt, try to resolve the Finale problem.

The paths (which you call settings) are defined during the software setup phase and transcribed into the registry... it's a bit technical, but to verify use regedit.

Anyway, you can manage the path change with links... if it helps, I can explain how to do it.

One last question, I have proceeded on the assumption that you have Windows... can you confirm?

Not for general problems (see licenses), I find it useful to know whether Windows or not

Of course, it is Windows 7 64-bit; Finale2011 is the same one I used on the other PC. The fact is that on the other PC Kontakt 4 worked perfectly; could the change of system from 32 to 64-bit be influencing it in some way? For example, on the DVD there are both 32 and 64-bit versions, and is the 64-bit one playing this recording trick...?

Let's try to resolve this first, then we will try to understand the audio paths as well.

Ps.: I reinstalled GPO4 which, being small, fits in C (unlike the various EW) and everything works normally with Aria Player; the problem is Kontakt....

You can have an image of the old PC made and use it as a virtual one from the new one without changing anything

So, after a sleepless night I managed to resolve most of the things: regarding Kontakt, the error was due to the fact that the DLLs had to be copied both into the VST plugins and into a hidden folder automatically created by Finale (this problem with Aria Player didn't exist because the Aria installation automatically puts the DLLs in this folder too); I also resolved the issue with the paths: basically, you load the track as usual, the player cannot find the files where they should be, so you manually redirect it to the new location of the files, save it, and the next time everything is fine. I still have other things to install but I think the worst is over.....

Anyway, the operating system is Windows 7 64-bit.

Talentuoso wrote:

You can have an image of the old PC made and use it as a virtual one from the new one without changing anything

Doing audio on a virtual machine? I really don't think so. Insufficient resources... You would need a NASA computer. Let's remember that the operating system kernel on a virtual machine is loaded onto the kernel of the operating system hosting the virtual machine (nested kernels)... Unless you have a VT processor, then things change there, but there is always the problem of memory management and sharing between 2 kernels. In short, in my opinion, you can't do serious work on a VM unless you have extremely powerful hardware (much more than what would be needed to run the application we need to work on). Even if the primary operating system is not being used, the APIs continue to make system calls, and part of the resources must be dedicated to it. The remaining ones to the VM...

TheSimon, I assure you that most Enterprise environments are built on virtualized environments... we are talking about environments with tens of thousands of users. So we aren't engaging in psychological terrorism.

In my opinion, it is always useful to keep a virtual image handy to turn on when needed and verify working configurations, etc.

If someone is good, they can even achieve good results using the virtual image itself as their primary tool

TheSimon wrote:

Doing audio on a virtual machine? I really don't think so. Insufficient resources...

But, in reality, through a bit of help from Gozzo and detailed instructions from Frank (even at the BIOS level), I easily use my XP virtual image on Windows 7.

He also made some somewhat astronomical (for me) remarks about the possibility of using Windows 2008 in Server core (I hope I said that right) to save further resources, but the command line kills me... maybe everything has evolved today and there's a nice little interface to do what's needed.

Anyway, I am satisfied; after all, 1GB of RAM is enough for the physical machine and the rest one leaves to the virtual one and does whatever they want with it

DiesIrae wrote:

TheSimon, I assure you that most Enterprise environments are built on virtualized environments... we are talking about environments with tens of thousands of users. Therefore, we are not engaging in psychological warfare.

But in fact, I didn't say it was impossible. If that's the case, even today embedded operating systems are used which are even less performant than virtual ones! What does that have to do with it? The discussion must be focused on performance in relation to the available hardware and relative to the intended use. But with what you wrote, you proved me right. Do you think that in an enterprise environment with tens of thousands of users they use 4 GB of RAM and a Pentium 4?? In some cases maybe, yes, they might not need resources. The reality of multi-user systems is commonplace. Even this forum is multi-user and the server hosting it also hosts other sites that could be multi-user. However, the amount of resources invested relates to loading a website, not to producing audio!

The problem I highlighted was a performance problem. Given the same hardware and operating systems, two PCs: one dedicated to audio production and the other dedicated to audio production on a virtual machine will never have the same performance; I am not saying this, it is a fact, and the explanation can be easily intuited from any personal computer architecture book. It is my opinion that a PC must be purchased and aimed at a purpose? Is it for audio? I will invest my money to improve this purpose... Is it for graphics? I will invest my money so that it is easier to do graphics. Whether you like it or not, virtual machines have reduced resources, even if only slightly. So, if there are abundant resources, fine, but if the resources are what they are, weighing things down further makes no sense to me. To draw a parallel in the software field... JAVA is a nice language, I can use a class, everything is already written, I don't have to define anything or almost anything, I already have almost everything I need, I can exploit the inheritance of a class... But when it comes to performance, people turn to C. Why? Simply because Java needs a virtual machine to run (JVM). That is why 3D games are made in C, benchmarks are made in C, and even operating systems (which must be able to provide maximum performance with the hardware they run on) are made in C.

Talentuoso wrote:

But, in reality, thanks to a nudge from Gozzo and detailed instructions from Frank (even at the BIOS level), I easily use my XP virtual image on Windows 7.

He also gave me some somewhat astronomical discussions (for me) about the possibility of using Windows 2008 in Server core

Anyway, I am satisfied; in the end, 1GB of RAM is enough for the physical machine and the rest one leaves to the virtual one and does whatever they want with it

You are also proving me right... You are giving part of the resources to the primary operating system and the rest to the virtual one.

For me, 8 GB of RAM is not enough for audio, I don't know about you, whether it's because I use 24-bit libraries or because in some projects I use 20 tracks and many plug-ins, the fact remains. At this point, I don't understand if you use the PC only to write music or also to produce it.

To write music, it's clear you can do it even on a virtual machine... It doesn't seem to me that all these resources are needed. If the need is to produce, like everyone else who does so, I would never dream of turning to a virtual machine for production.

Has anyone wondered how many processors and how much RAM Geppino has at his disposal?

... which programs and libraries? Although I might be able to intuit the answer from his writings on the forum

Without this data, I wouldn't be able to perform any capacity planning; to put it simply, I definitely see it as useful to keep a working image of the old PC... just to be safe, it would only cost in terms of disk space.

@Talentuoso

Today you would do everything with Hyper-V, but a management console would be necessary ... I think the discussion we were having offline some time ago is a bit OT [off-topic] in this case

TheSimon wrote:

You are agreeing with me too... You are giving part of the resources to the primary operating system and the rest to the virtual one.

A 8 GB of RAM is not enough for me to do audio, I don't know about you, whether it's because I use 24-bit libraries or because in some projects I use 20 tracks and many plug-ins, the fact remains. At this point, I don't understand if you use the PC only to write music or also to produce it.

To write music, clearly you can do it even on a virtual machine... It doesn't seem to me that all these resources are needed. If the need is to produce, I, like everyone else who does it, would never dream of turning to a virtual machine for production.

Look at it this way TheSimon, it might be simplistic, but the new PC will surely have more resources than the previous one. This means that in percentage terms, you only need to take very little away from the new one to run the old one.

Frank is right, we don't know how many resources Geppino has, but assuming that:

- Before he had 1 CPU and 4 GB of RAM and everything worked

- Now maybe he has 2 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM

What would be the problem with reserving one CPU and one GB of RAM for the physical machine and doing everything as before without going crazy with configurations?

Then, if the PC change coincided with a software change (but it doesn't seem so)... then I might agree, but adequate evaluations must be made.

I was only telling my experience, by chance right following a PC change and parity of software (obviously, not Operating System)... the results were positive.

Look at it the other way around: if you added 1 GB of RAM to your PC, you could do the same without problems... sometimes it is necessary.

For example, I had a program that only ran on XP and I had to maintain that operating system... having the new PC with more resources than the old one, performance remained unchanged... actually, IMPROVED!

That's all.

We don't understand each other... It depends on what you do with it.

Let's start from the point that, regardless, the Virtual Machine sucks up something, okay? On this, I think we all agree... Just like electricity: if you connect another bulb to a light bulb, even a small one, it will suck up some current, right? Well...

I don't find your argument obvious. If you change PCs, it's because your old PC no longer met your requirements in terms of speed. Let's also consider that a new PC might have a new operating system. If we move from Windows XP, whose libraries consumed between 150 and 250 MB of RAM, to Windows 7, which sucks up 1 GB, the situation seems to change to me. Do we want to talk about application software? Improvements are applied to new versions and functions are added that require resources.

Now, the point isn't whether a software can run on a virtual machine—it's obvious that it can—but rather how many resources might be spent. I assure you that for Music Production, I have never known ANYONE who used Pro Tools, Logic, or Cubase on a virtual machine... Never! Because in this case, unless you have a 6-core or 8-core PC with 64 GB of DDR3 RAM, it is important to utilize every last MB of RAM.

To give you an example on my MAC with 8 GB of DDR3 RAM: I open Logic, I open a VST, I load the EastWest Bosendorfer 290 into it, I create another track and put the LA Scoring Strings in it... Done, I can't load anything else because I have saturated the RAM. If I had been on a virtual machine, I probably wouldn't have even been able to load the scoring strings and would have stopped at Quantum Leap Pianos. Do I have a PC with 64 GB of RAM? Then I can work on a VM, I can load 200 VSTs, so what? In that case, I can do whatever I want. Unfortunately, however, most PCs come with 4 GB of RAM, some 8, very few 16, almost no one 32 or 64. You can add more, but at what cost? That's why you have to be economical with resources. Will a notation software take up 500 MB? Obviously, on a PC with 4 GB of RAM, I can work in a VM; it fits easily.

PS. Regarding your point, rather than CPU, I would speak of Cores and in any case it all depends on the software; an increase in cores does not necessarily result in an increase in performance. If you have a 2.9 GHz dual-core PC and a 2.2 GHz quad-core PC, if the application is not designed for multithreading, it will run much faster on the dual-core.

Finale 2012, I have installed almost all the libraries and they all work; the only strange thing I notice is that Finale 2012 takes more time than 2011 to load Kontakt 4 or 5, whatever it is, whereas before the loading of Kontakt was instantaneous and the time was spent loading the sounds: is there a system to optimize Kontakt loading times? Perhaps the fact that there are libraries within Kontakt itself influences this? Would removing these libraries from Kontakt and loading them from the files menu lighten the loading times?

The PC is an i7, 3.40GHz, 8GB of RAM, 120GB SSD, 1TB HD; I have the software on the solid disk and the libraries on the 1TB disk. The improvement is noticeable, the real-time playback of scores is much smoother and annoying interruptions that used to occur on long sounds are avoided. Sample loading times have improved, but there is the inconvenience of the Kontakt loading time.

i7, 3.40GHz, 8GB of RAM, 120GB SSD.

There you go, you didn't say anything...

I know it's a great machine, it's just that I don't know how to use it optimally, at least for the moment; the fact remains that I am renewing the question: is there a system to reduce the loading times of Kontakt Player from Finale? Do I need to remove those libraries that already appear in Kontakt by themselves, or are those just shortcuts that do not affect loading times...? Thank you

Actually no, sorry, I noticed that it takes the same amount of time even when loading it in standalone mode, both Kontakt 4 and 5; so it must be something that concerns Kontakt itself, regardless of the interface with Finale....

It happens that applications written in 32-bit are sometimes less performant if installed on 64-bit platforms.

You should also check the compatibility grids between the product (namely Kontakt) and the operating system.

Yes, in fact it must be something regarding the fact that the operating system is 64-bit, but anyway the application has both 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs, so at least in standalone it should load the 64-bit ones and be fast; with Finale I'll settle for it since Finale is only 32-bit—in effect, the time I lose loading Kontakt I make up during the instrument loading which is faster, but the main advantage is the absence of clips, bips, interruptions, and various little glitches during playback.

The strange thing is that only Kontakt opens with a delay; Aria player, Kompakt, and other interfaces open instantly—could they all be 64-bit...?

I was thinking one thing: is it possible, by installing the two versions of Kontakt in different places (maybe on different drives, since I have two, one of which is an SSD), one at 32-bit and one at 64-bit, to make it so that in standalone the 64-bit version opens and as a Finale plugin the 32-bit version opens, or is that impossible...?

Ah, there it is, I found something different (I'm asking myself questions and answers, forgive me....): compared to the other VSTs, the Kontakt path is: C\programmi\Nativeinstruments\kontakt, while for the others it is: C\programmi(x86)\.... That is, in practice, the VSTs installed on program(x86) open quickly, while Kontakt, installed on programs [not x86] does not... Can I try to change the path without having to reinstall? And anyway, can this change of path have an effect...?