has anyone else found PLAY to be the most unstable plugin in the history of Earth?

[The Right To Arm Bears]

+1

Yep - same problems

Glitchy Playback
Crappy Interface – what really annoys me is the volume sliders - rubbish.
More than 2 instances – forget it.

I got the platinum orchestra for play and barely use it. I just stick with the Gold version in Kontakt (absolutely solid) and use the other samples as and when is necessary in Play - but essentially I try and avoid it.

Their support is awful: I had problems registering MOR and they responded after a week via email requesting I resubmit my query! Good job I managed to sort it myself because it was like talking to the cat.

The sounds are blooming fantastic – especially those basses in MOR!! Just a shame about PLAY

[Len]

I posted once on their forums a few years back asking if a licence transfer was possible (since I thought I would not want my copy of Silver after all since I wanted Gold). Got deleted immediately. The place is run by the bleedin' Gestapo. I really hate that muzzling of criticism and free speech by Doug Rogers and the moderators (and my post was not even critical, it was just a question!).

These guys are "head in sand" all day, and the mystery for me is why SOS continues to feature their products (and in this/last month's issue, them) without mentioning that many people have huge problems with their products. I bought Gold on Kontakt and that is great - bought the Play upgrade and am glad I have never installed it.

All in all, their arrogance is breathtaking.

So, SOS, what's the answer?

[Paul Farrer]

Well this week I have screaming deadlines with Gladiators, Dancing on Ice a Playstation 3 game and The Krypton Factor, so its the perfect time for it all to be acting like a Atari 520ST with a faulty diskdrive

I feel a 'Notes From The Deadline' rant coming....

[Rousseau]

Well this week I have screaming deadlines with Gladiators, Dancing on Ice a Playstation 3 game and The Krypton Factor, so its the perfect time for it all to be acting like a Atari 520ST with a faulty diskdrive

I feel a 'Notes From The Deadline' rant coming....

ooooh the irony. Last month your short article coincided with a major interview with Doug Rogers in SOS... If only...

[shirkethic]

Paul,

While I'm not sure what the prob is, for the sake of getting you up and running with Sd2, try deselecting "stream from disk" for every sound you have loaded. It's in the file menu I think under "current instrument".

You are then bypassing the disk streaming and hopefully that will help in the short term!

Cheers

Paul

[. . . Delete This User . . .]

Can you calm my doubting heart and post some links to any reviews that become real slatings - I really want to believe it's true, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying it can't possibly be

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec03/a ... obx5.htm#2

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Feb02/a ... iosp5b.asp

neither of these gave a glowing report, and both products were basically sales flops as a result... and "updated" or withdrawn sooner than otherwise planned....

there are others , but i actually have work to do rather than spend the time i'd normally be sleeping in, digging out negative reviews for the unbeleiver..

[* User requested deletion 2 *]

Well, that's me told - I didn't realise Paul and Hugh could be so uncomprimising, so merciless, so, so......insulting!

Seriously though, thanks for pulling those reviews out of the past - neither's quite what you could call a 'slating' , but they're certainly to the point. Back on topic, it does seem bizarre that the Dave Stewart reviews made no reference whatsoever to the widespread difficulties that folks have been having around the world with the PLAY interface.

Dave Stewart is Nick Phoenix. (That can't be his real name, surely? He should be directing S.H.I.E.L.D, not poncing around with sample libraries)

[Rousseau]

Dave Stewart is Nick Phoenix. (That can't be his real name, surely? He should be directing S.H.I.E.L.D, not poncing around with sample libraries)

[Stephen Parker]

interesting thread..

as a distributor I am always interested in making sure the products I represent get as good a review as possible and there have been a number of occasions where SoS haven't been the kindest - but it's always in everyone's interests to see honest reviews where possible and you can always read between the lines.

and regarding EW PLAY - I was going to write a few things but after thinking about it, the comments above are plenty..

Steve Parker
Music Technology Manager
Arbiter Group

[Peter Conz Connelly]

My QLSO Platinum Complete Upgrade is still gathering dust, waiting to installed. Sounds like I won't be doing this for some time... if ever.

I had no idea Play wasn't recommended (or indeed, not designed) for use with 32bit Win XP systems. Niiice!

I am, sort of, tempted to install it anyway... if simply out of curiousity!

P

[Len]

There's a 20 page (and counting) thread on this very issue on the Northern Sounds forum. I cannot see how EW can recover after this fiasco. If their entire business model has now shifted to PLAY, and the majority of people find that PLAY does not work, it's game over for them.

Two things are unforgiveable:

1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming); and

2. Deleting all posts (and banning posters) on their forums which appear to criticise PLAY in general.

Goodbye EW - I'll continue to use (and love) my EWQL Gold on Kontakt, but that's the last time I'm spending money with you.

[onesecondglance]

and regarding EW PLAY - I was going to write a few things but after thinking about it, the comments above are plenty...

ouch!

[Tomás Mulcahy]

1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming)

They seem to make a habit of that. The issue I had was with a sale item that was not as advertised, and I was accused of all sorts of things when I pointed this out.

They're also listing past clients of Cello Studio as if they were clients of the current studio.

Seems like a case of megalomania to me...

[...................]

1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming)

Mine works (albeit after much hassle - see above) on XP 32 bit. They do say it will on their site.

[redleicester]

I think one of my overriding frustrations was that it was buggy on day one, which in this day and age is understandable - after all, rare indeed is the product that just works out of the box on every possible software/hardware combo, so for that they can be forgiven. However, many raised issues with support, or on the EW forum, or on other forums, to which the standard answer was "it's your system" or "it's your hardware", or "it's your problem"...

Yet with successive updates over the last 18 months it has slowly become more stable and potentially even usable for more than 4 minutes without crashing, and will actually play back sounds.... without any changes to hardware or software configurations....

Now I'm not a software designer, but six or more updates over that period (I've long since lost count), and many of the issues which I was assured were entirely my problem and down to me having an "inadequate" system (after all, a Q6700, 4Gb, multiple HDs and so on is just poo), have been resolved, which surely would imply it might just have a teensy-weensy bit to do with the Play plugin, and be nothing to do with my puny DAW?

Extremely frustrating.

[Peter Conz Connelly]

... after all, rare indeed is the product that just works out of the box on every possible software / hardware combo,

Which begs me to wonder why the heck an efficient form of standardisation isn't put into effect to minimise this. Compatibility issues are becoming the norm and spiralling out of control... or at least they will be if nothing is actioned NOW.

Everything should be built to protocol that will work universally, in a way that MIDI was devised back in the early 80's. If component manufactures worked together and stuck to standards, life would be a LOT simpler for s/w developers.

Slightly OT, I know... but needed to be said.

Cheers,
Peter

[Martin Walker]

errr, I can cite several examples of a real slating in the pages of SOS.

Here's one from me:

www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec03/articles/staudio.htm

"Within a couple of minutes of initial WAV playback auditioning, my ears were telling me that something was wrong at the bass end... ...low frequencies were seriously lacking, being 0.5dB down at 120Hz, and -3dB at 45Hz. ...ST Audio soon confirmed my findings, and reported that the problem was again simply due to unsuitable capacitor values being used, and was easily corrected.

From serial number HOON0315 onwards more suitable values will be used, and all remaining units in the field will be recalled."

What really tickled me at the time was the manufacturer initially claiming that I must be wrong, since this unit had already been favourably reviewed in two other magazines

Martin

[Paul Farrer]

Glad to see I'm not the only one.
It can be a pretty lonely business locked in a room with all this technology particularly when it doesn't work as you expect. However...
I will restate how much I love the sounds themselves and its 'ALMOST' worth buying a PLAY soundware product and spending a few weeks sampling them into the EXS 24 so they work as you expect. When will manufacturers realize they don't need to re-invent the wheel with their front ends? For example the first EWSO library originally sat in the stand alone Kompakt player. Which doesn't work on intel macs, so when I upgraded my mac I had to invest in Kontakt in order to play the sounds. Fair enough, but 12 moths later we are all being forced to move to PLAY- a front end that simply is not good enough in my opinion. When I load an empty new track and insert a single instance of PLAY I get a huge white block where the plug in should be. Clicking on it resolves this but I have simply never got more than two or three PLAY's working at once without a complete crash. I have cash waiting to invest in loads more EWQL soundware but I simply can't as long as they insist on forcing PLAY on us.
SORT IT OUT.
void(0)

[redleicester]

1. Advertising PLAY without warning that it will only work on a full 64 bit system (I can see false advertising lawsuits looming)

Mine works (albeit after much hassle - see above) on XP 32 bit. They do say it will on their site.

Matters little, I have thus far tried it on XP32 with 4Gb with and without the /3GB switch, XPP x64 with 8Gb RAM, Vista64 with 8Gb of RAM and all have shared a common theme, which wasn't a terribly tuneful one.

[muzines]

When will manufacturers realize they don't need to re-invent the wheel with their front ends?

They obviously did it for a reason, and we don't know what the deals with NI were - it could be that renegotiating a deal to bundle a Kontakt player became cost-prohibitive. I know NI annoyed a lot of people around the UB transition time by not offering UB versions of Kompakt, and forcing third-party soundware developers onto a new deal with a later engine version, and I've a feeling the costs went up a lot - there were a lot of transitions away from Kompakt players at that time, iirc.

However, my view on Play (and I haven't used it, or had any personal experience with it) was that it was almost *guaranteed* to cause issues for some time.

A sample playback engine in itself is not a particularly hard thing to develop, but a really good one, with a lot of internal playback features, large-memory and streaming support, across multiple plugin-formats from, and this is the key, *a company that has no experience developing audio software* - well, it's going to have kinks.

Kontakt is a fairly mature piece of software from a company with a lot of experience developing audio plugins and engines, and is reasonably solid. EW have either had to contract out to external developers, or buy in development talent to build the platform. I don't know which, but in either case, building these engines, and basing the future of the company on them, is a pretty big task.

Any company making the transition from soundware to software is going to have kinks, and customers should bear this in mind when getting tempted by shiny new gui's from soundware companies, until the products are tried, tested and proven solid.

The biggest annoyance with all this is not the fact that the product itself may have issues, hey, nobody's perfect, software has bugs and these things are complex - it's the attitude of the company that really matters. If customers are reassured that these issues are being worked on and will be resolved, it inspires confidence.

Alas, the feedback from the support side of EW, as evidenced by many posts here and elsewhere over the years, paints a rather dreary picture of how much their customers are valued, and does not inspire confidence that these issues will ever be resolved.

It sounds to me like EW need to step it up a bit, at least in how some of these issues are being treated on the user side...

[Steve Hill]

It has to be said, after reading this thread there is no way I will buy any EW product (and my studio is probably in the market for some decent orchestral samples right now).

Their zealous purging of all criticism from their own forums is not going to change the facts.

Surely samples - which are only a bunch of little audio files - can be, and should be, offered for multiple formats (such as Logic's EXS24, Kontakt and the rest).

What's currently happening is a bit like Coldplay putting out a new album which only runs on Sony CD players. In other words, barking mad.

[* User requested deletion 2 *]

What's currently happening is a bit like Coldplay putting out a new album which only runs on Sony CD players. In other words, barking mad.

Barking mad? Nah - small favour to the world, more like.

[adrian_k]

@ desmond - thanks for saying all that, it's exactly what I wanted to say but couldn't be bothered to type ;0 .

When I read the SOS article I thought it unusual to say the least that a music company - not even an engineering company - decided to write something as tricky as a sample player (simple in concept, but it HAS to work in real time within a range of unpredictable system conditions, on multiple platforms). I had a quick shudder and thought "glad I don't work there - they'll be learning how to make it stable until release 3".

Then this thread popped up and it seems EW have compounded the issue through poor customer relations.

It doesn't have to be this way. In the early days of the liquid mix I couldn't get it to work with Sonar. Both Focusrite and Cakewalk handled things very well (Focusrite especially), recognised the issues, avoided finger pointing, and engaged with the people having the problems to diagnose the issue. I think it took them about 6 weeks to put out fixes - pretty good. And they didn't delete posts about the problem from forums either.

Sigh

[redleicester]

When I read the SOS article I thought it unusual to say the least that a music company - not even an engineering company - decided to write something as tricky as a sample player (simple in concept, but it HAS to work in real time within a range of unpredictable system conditions, on multiple platforms). I had a quick shudder and thought "glad I don't work there - they'll be learning how to make it stable until release 3".

Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works. Mac and 32 and 64bit PC, and it's been so successful they have subsequently released their own plug-in specific host which features built-in audio and MIDI over LAN, a suite of 64-bit plugins and now have annouced that the next version of the host will support 3rd-party plugins too....

All from a sample developer....

As you say, EW's challenge was immense, the learning curve collosal, but others have done it and succeeded.

[muzines]

Therein lies the rub - VSL did precisely this exercise a year earlier than EW. And it works.

All from a sample developer....

I'm not saying it's impossible. Spectrasonics have also transitioned from being a soundware developer to a software company as well. And Eric will tell you I'm sure that that path hasn't exactly been trivially easy...

There's a right way to do it and a wrong way. And potentially alienating your customers when your products aren't right isn't the right way...

Especially when I keep seeing press releases about how EW have bought expensive studio facilities, and have every amp ever made, and all this other stuff, indicating that they are making quite a bit of money - some of which doesn't seem to be being channelled back into software engineering resource (of course, that's conjecture only, and may be completely innaccurate, but...)