nori wrote:EnochLight wrote:Thing is, he's only running 8 audio tracks. Force can easily disk-stream that many, even on the crappiest performing SSD on the market. You're right about Force (as well as MPC) using a USB bus for the SATA port, but USB 2.0 has been doing stereo multitrack for almost 2 decades quite easily. That's definitely not his problem. As I said, I can disk-stream well over 20+ stereo audio tracks from my Force without glitching or pop/click at all...
Are your 20+ tracks (project) the size as OP? Like 4gb ish? Be interesting to see if file size/length or even sample rate has any impact.
Had some time off today and was bored, so I spent the afternoon running some tests.
THE TESTThis was all done on the public release of Force Firmware 3.1.2. Just fired up the sessions I made to test this (I've tried it with two different projects). One project - a single song - is 26 stereo stems (24 bit, 44.1 Khz) that total about 2.13 GB before import (it's roughly a 6+ minute song total, so each of the 26 stems are about 6+ minutes in length). The larger is a test session that consists of 23 stereo 24-bit 44.1 Khz audio stems, each one is roughly 1 hour in length
(soooo 23 hours of audio total), for a disk-streaming crushing total project size of...
23.6 GB.After setup (see below), my RAM hovered around
2%, THAT'S TWO PERCENT!!! and my CPU was around 25% during playback (for the session with 23 stereo stems disk streaming - I forgot to check what the 26 stem Project hovered at but can't imagine it was much different). IMHO, this leaves plenty of headroom for adding insert effects and other tracks with more Keygroups, Drum Programs, Plugins, MIDI control, etc. Anyway, playback for both Projects was flawless - no pop/click, and everything played just fine. One thing I did notice with the 26 stem Project is that some audio tracks would "disappear" for no particular reason, even though the waveform/Clip appeared to be loaded. So, that's a thing.
SETUP:So, to be clear - this is really just a "proof of concept" test. I loaded all files from an attached USB3 stick, setup everything to stream from disk, then saved the Project onto my Force's internal 1 TB SSD, and opened the Project from my internal 1 TB SSD after everything was saved to stream from disk to do playback. Warp was manually turned off for all stems.
There's some "preparation" one must do when you plan to stream more than 8 audio files from disk. Once you fill up all 8 audio tracks on Force, you have to resort to loading remaining audio files into a Drum Program. The problem is, by default Drum Program only allows you to load into RAM, so it will constantly throw up "Low Memory!" warnings when you load each audio file to a pad. After you load the audio file, you have to go into your Project settings, long press the recently loaded sample, and select "Stream From Disk" as the option. Then you have to wait until Force flushes the sample from its RAM and sets it up to stream from disk, which can take 10-15 seconds. Every. Time.
It's sort of a pain in the ass, and I wish Akai would let us change Drum Program to automatically stream from disk as an option, but they're really not encouraging people to use the Drum Program streaming as an option/work-around IMHO as you can quickly saturate your disk bandwidth and bring Force to its knees if you attempt to play a streaming Drum Program like a drum kit.
FUN FACT:Doing the initial save of those Projects once I imported the audio (basically transferring the audio from my USB3 stick to Force's internal 1 TB SSD that I installed) takes a long, long,
LOOOOONG ass time. We're talking almost
2 hours! Lol
So really not sure how "practical" something like this is in a production environment if you need to change/edit the audio, as it will resave the entire Project even if you only edit 1 audio file**. But... that said, once setup and initially saved, loading said project from my 1 TB SSD is almost instantaneous.
** could be wrong about this - need to test when I get the time.