New Muse Research Receptors

[johnchop]

http://www.museresearch.com/products/index.php

 

TRIO and QUATTRO models announced:

 

- Quad-core processors

- 8-16GB of RAM

- 1-2TB

- Apparently they use the new OS exclusively?

 

The most curious change: more Audio I/O via Presonus Audiobox stacked on top. Hmmm. I understand why they'd do it this way. There's really not a lot of spare room inside that 2U chassis, and the Presonus box reportedly has excellent latency and audio specs.

 

However, I do wish there was still an option for digital IO on the 2U module, rather than having to slap on an additional rack unit for this. I also wonder if a VIP + audiobox connection is supported.

 

-John

[allan_evett]

Intriguing. Muse does make a quality product; and their newest Receptor line presents both a friendlier user interface, and what appears to be a more reliable unit. So expanding that into new, more powerful models is very cool.

 

The issue that keeps me from jumping back into a Receptor is the inescapable, product owner tethering to Plugorama. If Plugorama experienced a significant upgrade - allowing for almost transparent software instrument integration, i.e., 90% of product lines available, and with the current versions - it would help greatly. When I owned a pre VIP era Receptor, quite a few of the software instruments were 'behind', version-wise; plus several of the popular brands / instrument offerings were not 'Receptorized' by Plugorama.

 

For many users, the Receptor will work out well. If I got a call for a gig that necessitated use of my software instrument library, I'd find the most secure way to rig my MacBook Pro for live use. Sure, a rack mount software instrument unit would be ideal; but unless Plugorama instantiates a big change Receptor ownership still presents some obstacles.

 

 

[ADino]

^ Good point on Plugorama..

And I thought they'd come out w/a new card for the Musebox.

[wmp]

Yikes. Sounds like the iPod iTunes business model.

[richwhite9]

Yikes. Sounds like the iPod iTunes business model.

 

Worse. You can buy many non-plugorama synths. Some even work! But some popular ones like VB3 and Ivory are always behind the curve. Those are the two I'd expect to see always current. Then there's the East/West Play engine.....

 

They are more like Microsoft hoping that developers will write Windows 8 touch screen applications for Windows RT. Someday they will.....or Microsoft will finally have to do it themselves. Meanwhile you can sneaker some unsupported stuff on the unit.

[mate stubb]

Agreed, Plugorama is hard to navigate, has pitiful selection for pianos / epianos, and the whole vibe makes me afraid to buy something, for fear it won't work.

 

I've taken to just installing plugs manually, with about a 50% success rate. Luckily, the current version of VB-3 was one that worked.

[Phil Aiken]

Despite having sold my Receptor (which had been upgraded several times) and replacing it with a rack mounted Mac Mini and Babyface running Mainstage, I always found the Receptor to be robust and reliable, provided you knew what it could handle, and what it was good at.

Ultimately though, it was the incomplete plugin support mentioned above that made me switch. THe folks at Muse were great to work with, and I still keep an eye on all the developments. Maybe someday....

[johnchop]

I bought mine knowing it wouldn't run everything, and what it does run for me (Omnisphere, Komplete 7, VB3, AAS stuff) is great.

 

I'm sort of dubious about things like a 2TB hardrive and 16GB of RAM--is there anything the Receptor runs that REALLY requires that much iron?

 

-John

[allan_evett]

 

...... Ultimately though, it was the incomplete plugin support mentioned above that made me switch. THe folks at Muse were great to work with, and I still keep an eye on all the developments. Maybe someday....

 

Kevin and Gary at Muse are good guys; super-helpful, sharp, etc.. Like you, Beethree, I'll keep watching them. Perhaps I'll own another Muse Product again someday; we'll see....

[stillplaying]

Any of you used one with an SSD? How quickly does it boot up?

[richwhite9]

 

I'm sort of dubious about things like a 2TB hardrive and 16GB of RAM--is there anything the Receptor runs that REALLY requires that much iron?

 

-John

 

I think this was a sharp move to keep the boo birds from knocked them for selling barely adequate hardware.

 

At this point with Crucial selling a 1TB SSD for $600 (and 480 GB SSDs selling for $320 all day long) I'd like to see them offer that with Acronis pre-installed for backups and a well documented back-up and restore routine.

 

 

On the plus side the 2 TB allows them to ship an immense amount of pre-installed software even if unlicensed and eliminates many installation headaches

[OB Dave]

I have a Receptor 2, and personally I think it's a horrible software architecture. The fact that every VST & VSTi has to be explicitly "Receptorized" pretty much un-does a major part of its appeal. And it's a pain in the ass to install new VSTi's. The rest of its appeal is further undone by the long boot times, long sound load times, long latency, poor use of memory, and poor use of disk caching.

 

That they're trying to mask the problems with faster hardware is disappointing but not surprising. This is a failed architecture. Faster hardware will only get you so far. I think there's plenty of firepower in these machines, most of it is squandered because it's running a Windows VST sitting on top of WINE sitting on top of Linux sitting on top of a BIOS, and it doesn't make effective use of disk caches or memory. It's a wonder it works at all.

[joeljjison]

I have a Receptor 2. Making patches for a gig on it takes much longer than using Mainstage on my mac. On the downside its heavier, larger and more fragile. Yes it could deliver sound without latency, but it really wasn't much use considering random inexplicable crashes were far more frequent than with a laptop, and that you can't feasibly take it anywhere to gig without a selection of screw drivers, a spare hard disk and/or removing the hard drive.

 

Id sell it if I knew anyone wanted it, but I'm in the UK... if I ship it something will probably come loose! I bought a shockmount case for it as well, 2u, so thats something to get rid of!

[wmp]

I have a Receptor 2, and personally I think it's a horrible software architecture. The fact that every VST & VSTi has to be explicitly "Receptorized" pretty much un-does a major part of its appeal. And it's a pain in the ass to install new VSTi's. The rest of its appeal is further undone by the long boot times, long sound load times, long latency, poor use of memory, and poor use of disk caching.

 

That they're trying to mask the problems with faster hardware is disappointing but not surprising. This is a failed architecture. Faster hardware will only get you so far. I think there's plenty of firepower in these machines, most of it is squandered because it's running a Windows VST sitting on top of WINE sitting on top of Linux sitting on top of a BIOS, and it doesn't make effective use of disk caches or memory. It's a wonder it works at all.

It's so good to get all the stupid answers without having to ask any of stupid questions.

[johnchop]

OBDave,

 

We must have different machines (I have a Receptor 2 Pro Max). Startup time to get to Receptor host is WAY faster than booting my laptop and loading Mainstage. At 128 samples and 44/48KHz, I get no discernible latency.

 

Not every VST/i has to be "Receptorized". I can install many plugins either by dropping the installer executable in the "Drop Installers Here" folder or by copying the .dll file to the "Unsupported Plugins" folder. This is in the documentation.

 

I'll agree that WINE's "sort of Windows" architecture imposes some frustrating limitations, such as no support for certain authorization schemes (like eLicenser) and incomplete graphics library support, which means some plugin GUIs can't run or run with glitches. While I haven't tried the new host software, my understanding is that it still doesn't offer the MIDI mapping capabilities of Mainstage or even something more basic (like filtering certain CCs). Also, multiple controller support is not where it needs to be.

 

However, it's not running any services that aren't essential to the host or networking, and that makes for a pretty streamlined OS! So, I don't know what you mean by making "effective use of disk caches or memory"; you'd have to lay that one out for the rest of us.

 

Unfortunately, Muse marketing does over-promise--or at least doesn't provide enough caveats--and THAT seems to be where they hurt their own rep, at least among buyers who don't do the up-front research.

 

So, yeah, it ain't perfect--and sometimes it's ugly--but I'm not aware of any other 2U rackable, road-tested VST player with front-panel controls. If someone else can deliver a similarly streamlined Windows-based solution--including audio I/O--I'd love to see it!

 

-John

[OB Dave]

Have you ever looked at syslog? Based in all the stuff I see being written to it, I would not characterize this as "a pretty streamlined OS." It's a wart upon a wart upon a wart. I pleased that you're happy with yours, I'm less than satisfied with mine. Have not used it in years, I really should sell it while it still has some value left.

 

When I first bought it, I already owned a library of about 30 VSTs and VSTi, some of which could be installed with "drop installers here," but most of which were loaded into the "unsupported plugins" folder. Not one of them worked correctly. Not one. Was this just bad luck on my part? I did buy Ivory, and installing that was excruciating, but it did install. I guess I must give them credit for that. Lounge Lizard installed easily. I should point out that both of these were specifically Receptorized VSTis.

 

Boot times take over a minute. If you want to load a piano like Ivory or Akoustik Piano, that will take another 30 seconds or so. Forget about changing sounds on the fly, because of the load times. As a result, you're forced to load all the sounds at once into a "snapshot" and map program changes to mute some sounds and enable others. Which would be fine, except you run out of memory pretty quick. With 4GB in the machine (of which the OS can only address 3GB), why do you run out of memory? Because the receptor attempts to load the whole freaking piano into RAM. Dumb, dumb, dumb. How would I have implemented this? When playing a disk-based sample, you can get zero latency without having the whole file in memory. You only need enough in RAM to get you started, and you kick off a disk read. The RAM cache is sized so that the disk IO buffer starts filling before you run off the end of the initial RAM cache. Furthermore, the very first time the sound is loaded you could build a little prefetch file, so that subsequent loadings of that sound only require you to read the one prefetch file. This would make sound changes nearly instantaneous. This is what I mean by effective use of disk caches. What the Receptor does is brute force and dumb. This is what I mean when I say it disappoints me that they've chosen to attempt to mask these architectural flaws with faster hardware. You shoudn't need an SSD to run this thing, you could actually make it pretty snappy with a 5400 rpm drive if they'd done things better.

 

I apologize if I seem overly harshly critical - I just am frustrated to see them flailing away at this thing for what, 6 or 7 years now? I'm frustrated that this thing so badly misses its potential, and Muse is not forthcoming about its shortcomings. Or as you say, they over-promise.

 

OK, I'll STFU now.

[ADino]

^ lol, let it out man ..I sold mine 2 months ago, but I have to comment that when playing live with it, Steiner or Bose Jazz, it was very hard to beat..actually, nothing beat it, so I do miss that experience.

[johnchop]

Yeah, this seems to be the case... for some it's great, for others, a total fail, and still others, it works but they no longer need it or they've come to terms with a laptop rig. That's cool.

 

OBDave, please don't STFU! I'm acutally interested in the I/O concern you raised (and no, I haven't checked the syslog). I assume you are referring to snapshots specifically here. I don't know how or whether the new Live mode improves on this. Also, FWIW, the new OS is 64-bit, so that lifts the 3GB limit, although you're right that for certain instruments cramming everything in RAM doesn't make sense.

 

Boot time doesn't bother me, but then I used to own a Korg M3 .

 

Honestly, if I had a crapton of patch switching to do live, I'd probably go hardware. As it is, I'm using my Receptor to offload processing from my laptop at home, and my live patch needs are pretty minimal.

 

-John

[stillplaying]

Boot times take over a minute. If you want to load a piano like Ivory or Akoustik Piano, that will take another 30 seconds or so. Forget about changing sounds on the fly, because of the load times. As a result, you're forced to load all the sounds at once into a "snapshot" and map program changes to mute some sounds and enable others. Which would be fine, except you run out of memory pretty quick. With 4GB in the machine (of which the OS can only address 3GB), why do you run out of memory? Because the receptor attempts to load the whole freaking piano into RAM.

 

...OK, I'll STFU now.

 

Thank you so much for posting this. That "snapshot" thing where all the VSTs are sitting in RAM (and you program change mute/unmute various channels) was how I had to do it when I gigged with NI Kore and a laptop. I assumed - from the Muse blurb about their own specially designed O/S - that it would be different on their products.

 

I have a little pot of gold set aside with "Muse Receptor VIP plus Kontakt" written on it. I decided not to buy on spec this time - I want to see it running - preferably in another working keyboard player's rig - before I go for it.

[J. Dan]

At the Midwest KC Hang, we fired up a Kronos and a Receptor simultaneously. In terms of boot time, the Receptor won, hands down.

[johnchop]

There's really only so many ways you can achieve "instant recall" on VSTs. I believe Mainstage does something similar (concert loads all VSTs).

 

Honestly, I don't see where a Receptor snapshot tries to load the entire sample set for something like a Kontakt-based piano. Those are typically DFD instruments, so how could the Receptor tell Kontakt to load the entire thing, especially a multi-GB instrument? I could see it snapshotting whatever is loaded at the time the snapshot is made, but not the entire instrument.

 

-John

[AnotherScott]

At the Midwest KC Hang, we fired up a Kronos and a Receptor simultaneously. In terms of boot time, the Receptor won, hands down.

But what state were they in at the completion of the boot, could you play them? That is, on the Kronos,. when the boot is complete, you have instantaneous access to their two streaming grand pianos, all the EPs, all the rompler sounds, the clonewheel engine, a few VA synths, etc. That's not where you are when the Receptor boots, right? If you create even just a basic "snapshot" of a multi-gigabyte piano, an EP, an organ, and a synth, and you added that load time to the Receptor boot (i.e. the minimum to make it basically useful for many people to be able to sit down and start playing a gig), would its boot time still beat the Kronos?

[stillplaying]

^^^ yes, that's why I'm interested in finding out about Receptor boot times with a solid state drive.

[J. Dan]

At the Midwest KC Hang, we fired up a Kronos and a Receptor simultaneously. In terms of boot time, the Receptor won, hands down.

But what state were they in at the completion of the boot, could you play them? That is, on the Kronos,. when the boot is complete, you have instantaneous access to their two streaming grand pianos, all the EPs, all the rompler sounds, the clonewheel engine, a few VA synths, etc. That's not where you are when the Receptor boots, right? If you create even just a basic "snapshot" of a multi-gigabyte piano, an EP, an organ, and a synth, and you added that load time to the Receptor boot (i.e. the minimum to make it basically useful for many people to be able to sit down and start playing a gig), would its boot time still beat the Kronos?

 

Yes, it was Tont's Receptor, and he had something loaded on it, ready to play. I'm not that familiar with it, so maybe he can chime in with details. But they were playing on the receptor way before the Kronos was finished booting. And I'm a Kronos fan.

[joeljjison]

In reply to some of the stuff I read,

 

Stillgigging, I went to try a Receptor (a Receptor 2 about a year before the VIP) in the Muse dealer in London. In house, their Muse Receptor worked perfectly. It was amazing.

 

If we ignore the limitations you have in what plugins you can run (I don't think its a big deal if your aim is just to have a sonically versatile high quality gig rig), its important to remember that you are dealing with a computer, and you will have to do experiments with the plugins and effects to discover its limitations. For example, on the Receptor 2+, If you use the reverb built into Kontakt for its strings (which I think may well be on by default), it uses an absolute ton of CPU (you can't play properly).

 

[johnchop]

its important to remember that you are dealing with a computer

 

This.

 

...and regarding the new models, I guess my main disappointment is that it's not all contained in the main unit. I would have liked to see at least S/PDIF built in, and less reliance on the Presonus box.

 

-John

 

[stillplaying]

@joeljjison thanks for that. I get work for my ability to play these days (not program or run sequences which I've done in the past).

 

My laptop setup froze twice in the 100 or so gigs I used it for. I can't have that happening for the type of work I get - functions, theatre show accompaniment.

 

I was hoping I could have Kontakt running in a live show. I've mentioned on here before that a laptop (or PC) isn't an option - too many questions about how much is live when folk see the screen. Receptor seems to be my only pro rackmount option - that'll run with no screen.

[Bill W]

The Receptor's "snapshot" concept is on its way out. The VIP now has live mode which works more like the Fantom G or Kronos (seamless switching of sounds). However, many of the other criticisms and shortcomings reported in this thread are valid. My biggest complaint is the lack of support for current plugins. I'm still stuck with VB3 1.2 because 1.4 isn't supported.

[allan_evett]

So I've had a chance to re-read this thread, and consider what I've previously posted. Indeed, the Receptor - past and current - does work fine for many. Ultimately I wasn't one of those people.

 

While I feel that there's likely a future for Muse, my whole 'experience' with a once upgraded, twice 'repaired' Receptor is probably not one I would repeat - even with the current models. Still seems a product very much still in developement. To their credit, the guys at Muse made a very fair effort with my Receptor. But at the end of that particular chapter, I ended up with $4k total spent on a device that worked as described only some of the time. As an analogy: I frequently felt like I'd purchased a mid-90's prototype hybrid car - at full price - from one the major car manufacturers, then spent several years dealing with breakdowns, and return trips to the dealer - at my additional cost, for the most part.

 

The Receptor is an excellent concept; certainly some forward-thinking folks work for Muse. When mine worked, it sounded great; I had several mixes set up, and was comfortable with the 'snapshot' mode. The new live mode interface looks great; seems an improvement. If Muse continues in that direction, and continues to improve the product so that average user reliability is comparable to that of the Yamaha Motif XF / XS, or Roland Fantom / Jupiter line, then the consistency will be there that needs to be, in today's market. The VIP does appear to be closer to that ideal than the Receptor 2 I owned. Hopefully Plugorama will 'catch-up', and become closer to being 'transparent', softsynth-wise.

 

The current ad design for the Receptor provides another analogy. If the Receptor was an air travel vehicle, I wouldn't risk the flight - at least right now. Already feel enough like a test-pilot who barely survived

[Tonysounds]

I talked with OBDave over the weekend about this, and at the front I have to say to you: I know jack about computers. I dont know about the WINE/LINUX/BIOS triple layer, or understand half of what Dave means when he spits out the geeklish, but I believe hes super knowledgeable and is not talking out his ass.

 

That said, my 7+ year relationship with Muse Receptors goes like this: like any other piece of gear I have, it does things in a superlative fashion, and othersnot so much. I have never bought gear based on what it will be able to do in the future; I only care about what does it do now and do I want this ability or sound and does it make me want to play. I think the Snapshot is bullshit, and I thought it was bullshit when they introduced it. I have never used it. It takes my Receptor 2Promax slightly longer than my Stage 2 to boot up cold. (which is how we did it at the hang) When I boot up, like most of my other gear, it defaults to whatever I was doing when it powered down. If my program selection involved any samples, it will take incrementally longer to pull it up than my hardware stuff; if its a one-sound program using a sample, or a 6 sound program using a sample, it takes the same amount of time, depending on the size of that sample. I dont run Ivory or any EP programs. I have Akoustik Piano and Elektrik Piano loaded on my Receptor, but I dont use them. I dont find them that much better than my Stage 2, so why bother. When I first got involved with a Receptor, everything I wanted to use was modeled (miniMonstah, Mtron, Oddity, CS80v, OPX, Pro 53, ImpOSCar, etc.). Many of the programs I use now are sampled (Mtron, Atmosphere, Omnisphere) but they load very quicklymaybe not quite as fast as a Motif or Fantom sound, but definitely not slow enough to derail any performance, and many times I am switching Receptor programs in the middle of a song.

 

That said, there are a couple programs I have put together that involve Kontakt, Battery, and a couple other sample-based softwares and I know Im going to have to give 2-3 seconds to pull everything together. Thats not ideal obviously. However, rather than using Snapshots (which I just dont get.unless youre a I only use 10 sounds a night kind of guy), I spend 5 minutes at soundcheck, or before the actual gig, just slowly stepping through all programs and doing a preload. I get 30-40 songs loaded and discarded in that amount of time, ensuring that everything worked (*and it always does), and the gig goes off without a hitch. Those sample-heavy presets then load in half the time (1-2 seconds), and I am NEVER the guy onstage saying hang on. I push for no-dead-air on stage, as most vocalists really dont have the wit to keep an audience entertained for too many tune-ups, or guitar changes, so when I can start a song and force everyone to fall in line, I do it. Conversely, songs where the drummer or someone else starts, they can just GO without worry of is he ready?.

 

So.were I a hacker and understood how this worked, I believe I would exhibit a lot of the frustration Dave has, especially since he can see where the system would be improved. But I dont experience the disruption or impedance to my work, so the Receptor has worked great for me.

 

Were it to die on me, would I buy another one? (I started with a Rev B, then a Rev C, and now the 2ProMax.) Since at this point in my life, Im trying to minimize the bullshit in everything and just break things down to what I need to do the job the easiest, I suspect my answer would be no, but a lot of that is tied to I dont want to tie myself to a piece of gear for anything anymore; figure out how to do it with what I have. And these days, Im feeling like I want to have less and less, and just focus on a handful, yes, 5 or less, sounds that are high quality, inspiring, and dont require programming of any type any more. And that is not a dig at the Receptor. That is a dig at EVERY piece of gear I own.

 

But the Receptor has and does serve me well. And I think my luddite stubbornness is such that you guys know if I dont like something, its gone faster than you can say PM me.