pilby

Well, after a little research, I realized the best place to buy my RAM was from Crucial.com. It's neat how they provided a scanner and told me exactly what I needed. I bought only 2 4GB sticks and will bring up my RAM to a total of 12GB RAM. Unlike you, I'm just a hobbyist, so I think 12GB will be fine for me. If I need more, easy enough to buy some more. Total cost me $50 flat, not bad. I also learned there's some memory leak going on with Apple Logic Express, that's why I almost ran out of memory. With my Windows PCs, I always put them to Sleep, never really had to reboot, sometimes for as long as a month. I guess I have to reboot more often with Apple iMac. Before I shut down my computer, with only Activity Monitor running, it said I was using up 2.7GB. After the reboot, Activity Monitor says I was using only 1.06GB. If you just run and exit a few times from Apple Logic, you will notice your Memory Used in Activity Monitor will keep going up in small increments. And who knows if Safari and iTunes are doing the same thing, but I didn't bother to test them.

20 gigs! I was told by the sales people at the Apple Store 4 gigs was PLENTY for music, and I'm only at the first four bars of my song with 4 tracks! Either EW is a gargantuan memory hog, or I've got some stuff running in the background that's taking up so much memory, which I can't see in the Activity Monitor.

Ski, how much RAM do you have? I have 4 gigs, and I was getting memory overload warnings just loading up the violin "keysw", and I didn't really have anything else open except for my mail and browser.

Oh I got it! So instead of me picking a non-Keyswitch violin instrument, I should select the Keysw instrument in the violin group of instruments, and then I'd be able to select any instrument within that violin group by playing the appropriate blue key within Logic. This is quite a different approach from the way hardware tone generators handled bank/instrument selection, but I'd have to say it's a very good approach! Do most (if not all) software synthesizers handle keyswitching in a similar fashion? You already discussed briefly about Kontact, and it sounded similar to this kind of instrument selection scheme.

It works! And it also taught me something I think. Using Audacity, with Normalize set to "off", the waveform looked awfully thin, but it did sound as loud as when played back within Logic. I remember struggling with the output MP3's amplitudes 15 years ago, but that was when Cakewalk didn't have the sophistication of Logic Express today. I'm glad Logic will try to "fit" the amplitudes within limits to avoid distortion, at least that's what I think Normalize is doing, right?

Yeah, that's what I thought it meant. I used to do this before with hardware tone generators. I can see the concept here is still the same with software synths. Ski had a snapshot of his EW screen, and he somehow had blue keys that allowed "bank switching" within the software synth. My EW interface shows only yellow and white keys. Since I am planning on purchasing Komplete 8 (which uses Kontact I think), your response will help me on that, thanks.

I compared your snapshot to my EW interface, and I'm not sure how you got all those blue keys, mine only has yellow and white keys. Did you have to click something to enter a mode where those blue keys would appear?

Assuming a constant speaker volume level, I noticed that Bouncing my MIDI music to a MP3 file results in a significantly louder volume level than when I play my music from within Logic Express 9. When I open the resultant MP3 file in a wave editing program like Audacity, the wave amplitudes seem to look okay. The Master volume (lower right corner) within Logic Express 9 is at maximum already. So what could be causing the wide disparity in volume levels, and how can I do it so that "how loud I hear is how loud I'll get" between Logic and the MP3 file? Thanks.

When I first read you talking about keyswitching, it occurred to me I used to do that in Cakewalk fifteen years ago where I would switch instruments within the same track at different times. That was what you meant by "keyswitching", right? I tried looking through the online help using "keyswitching" but found nothing. I called up Apple Proapps support, they turned me away saying they don't train people to use the application, but they did tell me it could be done. How do you do that with Logic Express 9?

I appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

Great tip! Thanks!

I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, EW had varying effects for string instruments, like one for mellow, one for accented notes, one for staccato, one for trills, one for tremolo, and I can see myself using ALL of them for one single musical excerpt if that is what it would take to achieve the realism of a human performance. Nor would I hesitate to replace any of the EW string effects with that from another library if I felt it delivered the effect I needed better than EW could. This could mean 4 to 5 tracks of instruments from two or more libraries just to complete one small excerpt of the entire song. Sounds tedious, but what one would do to achieve the artistic and creative level one aspires to attain. And I am seriously looking into those two libraries now. Thank you very much for your help!

I think what you're saying is that to achieve realism, one shouldn't stubbornly insist on one particular library. Instead, one should view all libraries one owns as one palette, and to pick/select instruments to whatever fits the music to achieve realism, regardless of the library where it came from, and to utilize the EQ/articulation/effects tweaking capabilities if necessary, right? That's what I wanted to hear. Clearly you folks have a lot more experience on this area than I do, and I just want to hear a positive appraisal of a library before I would even consider it. I'll look more into Komplete and EWQLSO. Thanks.

That answers one of my questions. With the exception of percussions and drums, are there range limitations on any of the strings, brass, strings, piano, guitars? I know some manufacturers use some of the keys for special mode functions (like the way EW and RealGuitar does), and that's okay with me. What I didn't like was when EW limited the flute to just a little more than 2 octaves, which I felt can become inadequate at times. Does K8U have all the instrument categories integral of an orchestra? On the subjective side, does it have oboes, clarinets, glocks, pizzicato strings, whooshing cymbals? I just wish I could simply see a complete listing of orchestral instrument names that K8U supplies.

When I used the word "best", I meant it loosely, hoping to get any one of you to "rave" about what you liked about a certain library. For me, the "best" library would be one that contains the most realistic-sounding instruments along with excellent modifiable effects parameters that can be applied to the instrument. A good example I can think of right now is RealGuitar. I am beginning to love it because it has the most realistic classical guitar sounds and realistic strumming and note glide effects I have ever heard. So at this point in time, RealGuitar is the "best" classical guitar library for me. (My needs are modest. ) I'm looking into Komplete 8 Ultimate, but it sounds to me like a collection of products from different 3rd party manufacturers; if that is the case, I'm concerned these manufacturers might come out with new versions that might not easily integrate with Komplete 8, but I'm still researching. Even though it claims to have orchestral instruments, it certainly doesn't boast much about it in their demo videos, which is another concern. Any of you own Komplete 8 Ultimate? Perhaps I can ask some very basic questions about it?