Force just got Disc-Steaming (sorry MPC)!!!

It seems it's already in the mpc software and force 3.0.6 as well (so not just the latest force firmware) if you folks werent so gingerish about installing custom firmware you could just add this line to your MPC.settings file.

<VALUE name="DiskStreamingEnabled val="1"/>

40Beatz wrote:Im Still Confused....What enhancement will Disc Streaming bring to the MPC? Will it help with Performances?

It should let you load heavy keygroups without filling the Ram (which is less then 1gb).
It should let you load very long samples and back tracks without filling the ram.
I have mixed opinions about it.
It's good to have multilayered high quality keygroups but I am not sure MPC would run smoothly and I am not sure it will not affect the ssd life time.

Straker wrote: I am not sure it will not affect the ssd life time.

You can read from an SD as much as you want without taking stabs at its lifetime. its the writes that screw it up. continually writing to the same blocks on sd isnt good, you'll get about 1000 writes before it degrades.

Ultros wrote:

Straker wrote: I am not sure it will not affect the ssd life time.

You can read from an SD as much as you want without taking stabs at its lifetime. its the writes that screw it up. continually writing to the same blocks on sd isnt good, you'll get about 1000 writes before it degrades.

Yeah but then your ssd will be always working with disc streaming. Now it just loads the samples and shuts off as you play.
And also MPC is connected to ssd with usb so it will be not so performative, isn't it?
Sorry I am not so expert about disc streaming, maybe I am saying bullshits.
On Force, is there a way to switch disc streaming off, just in case?

naw.. in theory it just opens some "read only' file descriptors and your sample pool uses those as the pointers to the data, rather than using a pointer to the ram. The waveform visual generated for the sample pool gets placed in ram still but its so small it doesnt matter.

Straker wrote:

40Beatz wrote:Im Still Confused....What enhancement will Disc Streaming bring to the MPC? Will it help with Performances?

It should let you load heavy keygroups without filling the Ram (which is less then 1gb).
It should let you load very long samples and back tracks without filling the ram.
I have mixed opinions about it.
It's good to have multilayered high quality keygroups but I am not sure MPC would run smoothly and I am not sure it will not affect the ssd life time.

The disk streaming for the Force is not to host heavy keygroups, it is for large samples and audio tracks which pretty much means its the CPU that is its most limiting factor. You can direct specific samples from disk or load them to ram just using a checkbox.

I need to be a bit more scientific but theres definitely an improvement with ram usage and large keygroups though, like its been optimized. On one of my “homemade” piano keygroups Ive seen nearly a 50% improvement. I havent checked to see if this improvements on the MPC too yet though.

@ Kcearl (welcome back btw)

Ah ok, so it's a half baked disc streaming, I thought the most useful way to use it was with heavy keygroups, if it's just for samples it's just ok, it doesn't change so much.
Do you mean your piano keygroup is 50% lighter on cpu or ram?
Could it be that some part of keygroup is read from disc and another part loaded on ram?
Or is it just a cpu optimization?
That sounds good anyway, I noticed that MPC is going through optimizations with every update.

It can be used for the samples in the keygroup. A keygroup is just pointing to audio files in your project. But you have to tell the Force to stream each sample one by one which is pita. So its possible but not the most convenient implementation

Straker wrote:I am sure disc streaming and arranger are coming to Mpc before 2022..

40Beatz wrote:Im Still Confused....What enhancement will Disc Streaming bring to the MPC? Will it help with Performances?

Disc-streaming will allow the existing 8 stereo audio tracks no longer be capped at a 4 minute 59 second limit, meaning you can truly use the MPC as a standalone stereo 8-track recorder and do proper vocals or additional live instruments on linear performances of any length you want. Or you could load unlimited lengths of stereo stems on those 8 audio tracks for remixes. It will also allow you to load stereo stems of any length into a Drum Program, skirting the 8-track limit. On Force, I've gotten up to 23-26 stereo tracks running before Force starts to give me trouble. Basically, it just opens up new possibilities for performances and productions on MPC.

Straker wrote:It should let you load heavy keygroups without filling the Ram (which is less then 1gb).

It does on Force, however; it is not recommended to use Disc Streaming on Keygroups or Drum Programs where you would be triggering a lot of audio quickly, as you can saturate your disc bandwidth quite easily that way. So, do this in moderation...

Straker wrote:It should let you load very long samples and back tracks without filling the ram.
I have mixed opinions about it.
It's good to have multilayered high quality keygroups but I am not sure MPC would run smoothly and I am not sure it will not affect the ssd life time.

SSD life will not be affected at all. Today's modern SSD's easily have MTBF ratings of millions of hours, and read/writes easily in excess of anything you'd do on an MPC or Force.

EnochLight wrote:It does on Force, however; it is not recommended to use Disc Streaming on Keygroups or Drum Programs where you would be triggering a lot of audio quickly, as you can saturate your disc bandwidth quite easily that way. So, do this in moderation...

Well that's not super helpful. The biggest limitation right now with MPC is the keygroups. They're too slow to load and more importantly too slow to save. It just takes you out of what you're doing. You can't easily swap out sounds either. In this regard Maschine + is 100 times better.

For some reason the Maschine loads sampler instruments super fast and saves super fast, even though it's just an SD card(I have ssd in MPC), and more importantly you can load huge instruments extremely fast in Kontakt because it does disk streaming.

EnochLight wrote:

Straker wrote:I am sure disc streaming and arranger are coming to Mpc before 2022..

Before 2023?
Or "it will come on this decade?"

Straker wrote:@ Kcearl (welcome back btw)

Ah ok, so it's a half baked disc streaming, I thought the most useful way to use it was with heavy keygroups, if it's just for samples it's just ok, it doesn't change so much.
Do you mean your piano keygroup is 50% lighter on cpu or ram?
Could it be that some part of keygroup is read from disc and another part loaded on ram?
Or is it just a cpu optimization?
That sounds good anyway, I noticed that MPC is going through optimizations with every update.

Im almost definitely sure I had a 1 stride 4 layer 88 note piano keygroup go from 65% ram to 30% ram after the Force disk streaming update…let me double check before its gospel but all the keygroups I tried felt optimized on the beta.

I think theres more work to be done before it hits the mpc where audio tracks arent as much of a priority (speaking for myself)…more that theyre pretty much unlimited on the force now (well cpu dictates) and you could load a large set of audio files for a live or dj set now.

Straker wrote:Before 2023?
Or "it will come on this decade?"

I have a bookmarked post from Akai Dan saying its def before 2030

Kcearl wrote:

Straker wrote:Before 2023?
Or "it will come on this decade?"

I have a bookmarked post from Akai Dan saying its def before 2030

Great.
If meanwhile they give us the arranger and some other nice Air toys, that's perfectly fine.
Actually I was using an electric guitar on Mpc and I found out 8 audio tracks were enough.
But I can see that unlimited samples open up many possibilities.
For me disc streaming would be great for keygroups, I am having fun a lot with autosampler and using a stride of 1 with multilayer would be great.