Arturia V Collection issue, particularly with MainStage

[SteveQB]

I recently bought Arturia V collection 4 as managed to pick it up discounted with the release of 5.

 

I have found however that using any of the plugins in MainStage causes a big CPU load spike when changing MainStage patches. They are also real CPU hogs.

 

On an unrelated point the majority of the presets I have tried in Jup-8, CS-80, Modular, Mini etc are either drowned in reverb or delay, or have massive release times (this is particularly apparent in Jup-8) making the preset almost un-playable. Has anyone else noticed this? (I know many of you roll your own sounds but to quickly pull sounds together for a covers band I often tweak a preset)

[EscapeRocks]

Steve, Sometimes my Arturia V collection will spike when I first load it. After that, I can change Mainstage patches all day without an CPU issues.

 

I also don't find them to be CPU hogs.

 

Just some housecleaning ideas:

 

Make sure you have the latest updates for your Arturia instruments. I assume you have the Arturia Software Center loaded on your Mac to make sure they're all up to date?

 

Also, make sure you have latest Mainstage loaded.

 

As far as "drowned" in reverb or delay: do you by any chance have reverb and delay loaded at the concert level, like the infamous ST-Delay? That's a real CPU hog.

 

As far as long release time, well, just like any synth, you'll need to tweak the ADSR settings to your liking.

 

That's about the advice I can give without digging more into your system

 

For reference, I'm using a MacBook Pro late 2013 13" Retina with latest El Capitan 10.11.6 and latest Mainstage 3.2.4

 

I make sure to "Perform" in window, and make the window semi-small. This reduces base CPU usage.

 

I use Jup8 v3, Sem v, Prophet v3, and Mini v3 with no untoward issues as you describe.

[Sven Golly]

There's a number of reasons they effectively rewrote the entire suite of plugins for V5. Performance is one of them.

 

Well worth the $ to update.

 

That being said, although David's post is very accurate, the plugs he's using are from V5, so that doesn't really apply to your situation, except to say that yes, the FIRST time you select a patch in your concert, you'll see a CPU spike. Thereafter during that session, it should be fine.

 

However, it really is better if you update.

 

[EscapeRocks]

 

Well worth the $ to update.

 

That being said, although David's post is very accurate, the plugs he's using are from V5, so that doesn't really apply to your situation, except to say that yes, the FIRST time you select a patch in your concert, you'll see a CPU spike. Thereafter during that session, it should be fine.

 

However, it really is better if you update.

 

 

 

Also, one thing I do when loading a concert for a gig is to simply scroll thru all my patches and hit a note or two to get that CPU spike out of the way.

[SteveQB]

Thanks for the responses.

 

David - I checked in the Software Center and everything is up to date. I have also removed the St-delay and my concert is clean (other than the damn metronome that I cant seem to remove). I am running MS 3.2.4

 

My macbook was bought in late 2014 is a 13" retina with 8gb of RAM.

 

Re. V4 vs V5 are the plug-ins not the same? I didn't install from the CD I went to Arturia's website and just downloaded the latest version.

 

To be fair my concert is quite plug-in heavy with many patches containing Kontakt or EXS24 and a few Alchemy and Korg M1. This may be adding to the issue. I get quite a bit of CPU movement +/- 15% when nothing is playing so maybe something else is also going on

[Markay]

To be fair my concert is quite plug-in heavy with many patches containing Kontakt or EXS24 and a few Alchemy and Korg M1. This may be adding to the issue. I get quite a bit of CPU movement +/- 15% when nothing is playing so maybe something else is also going on

Try the following, open the concert, delete all patches except the Arturia ones, rename and save. Open the Arturia only concert and see if it plays OK without overloading the CPU. If yes, and I suspect that will be the case, your original concert has too many CPU hogs initialized. My experience with Kontakt and to a lesser, but manageable extent, UVI workstation is that they are CPU hogs. At idle MainStage reports 5% CPU usage on my machine. B-5 in UVI can push that near 100% with both hands full, streaming from an SSD into 16 gigs of RAM. Strangely MS reports 25% memory usage.

 

Finding VI's that play well together is as much an art as getting the right sound. Just one reason why I prefer modelled rather than sampled VI's for live work. They seem to use less CPU than sample engines, which is counter intuitive but what I see on screen.

 

You could also try increasing the samples on the I/O buffer and safety buffer in the original Concert.

 

Another observation is that MS 3.2.4 seems have more issues managing sample players than earlier versions.

 

The good news is that beta testers of Sierra report improved CPU and memory management in Logic. I suspect the next Sierra compatible version of MainStage will include improvements in CPU and memory management, and hopefully clean up the new Concert file structure introduced in 3.2.4.

[EscapeRocks]

+1 to Markay's suggestions.

 

One thing I have also found is that of all of Apple's now built in sounds, Alchemy can be a real CPU hog.

 

To add to Markay's tips:

 

I turn everyting off on my MacBook I don't use during shows such as Wifi, bluetooth, auto updater, etc...

These could be part of the +-15% cpu movement you're seeing when not playing.

 

 

 

 

[SteveQB]

Thanks guys I will give it a go. I have started turning wifi and bluetooth etc off and have experimented with alias'.

 

It it possible to have one instance of Kontakt as a multi and then alias in each patch and select the sound via the midi channnel?

 

It would be nice if it was possible to have an instance of the plug-in at concert level and then just select the plug-in patch within the mainstage patch (like you would with hardware gear in a rack). I understand its the actual plug-ins that make this difficult due to the way patches are stored (Reaktor being one such plug-in)

[EscapeRocks]

 

Cool. My so called knowledge has come from simply experimenting with my concert setups until I find a good balance that works.

[SteveQB]

To help anyone who finds this post via a search, an update...

 

I implemented the tweaks and advice above and was still getting issues. I started to look at the number of instruments I had loaded within the concert across the multiple patches. This was causing the issue I think (I haven't stress tested this at a practice yet but the CPU meter is far more stable).

 

I had seven instances of Kontakt loaded across the concert in 7 separate patches each playing a different sample. I think this was causing significant CPU drain even though only one instance was playing at any one time. To combat this I have created a new patch within MainStage that just contains a single instance of a multi output (16xStereo) version of Kontakt. I have created a multi with each of the 7 samples assigned to a separate Kontakt output. I have now pasted an Alias of the Kontakt channel strip into the 7 MainStage patches. With a multi-output plugin there is a little +/- button on the channel strip which creates a new channel where the Kontakt output can be selected. I have changed this to correspond with the Kontakt output assigned within the multi.

 

Hey presto I only have one version of Kontakt running within the concert. I am going to see if I can do something similar with other plugins now where I create an Alias and use MainStage to select the patch within the plug in

[EscapeRocks]

Excellent, Steve!

 

Experimenting is how I have gotten my Mainstage to play nicely in my system.