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

[Tui]

OK, that's about one million variables to sift through... Quite a task. Not to mention that Macs are better.

Naturally, it's not satisfactory that EW's customers should be expected to put their systems under a microscope, in order to find some obscure bugs in PLAY. No argument there. Now that this is out of the way, I would suggest the following:

Use a spare HD, freshly install the OS and your favourite DAW, then PLAY, to see if it still doesn't work. Pull out all cables (except for the power cord ) and use your 'puter's internal audio. Then, one by one, connect audio interface, USB and ethernet devices. Somewhere along the line, I'd expect the gremlins to surface.

[Tui]

...

As a result of this simple architecture,

...

Simple? Blimey. Are you sure you didn't attach a USB toaster and firewire brain scanner as well somewhere?

[redleicester]

Red, I know this is probably a grandmother/egg scenario and not relevant to all your setups, but have you tried making the Play engine LAA (Large Address Aware), I used Laatido to do this. Opinion seems divided on the need, but it cured a whole bunch of streaming pop/click problems for my setup (PC, xp 4gb ram, 32 bit, cubase SX3).

Sadly my Grandmother must have some Scottish heritage along the line somewhere as she'd never buy eggs.... too expensive.

Laatido is a great program isn't it? Have used it on countless things and yes, I've tried it on Play. However, even if it had worked, it would have served only to show again that there's something amiss in the Play coding - afterall, if it's not working properly in standalone 64-bit mode on those slave (as it indeed fails to do), then there really is something awry.

[redleicester]

...

As a result of this simple architecture,

...

Simple? Blimey. Are you sure you didn't attach a USB toaster and firewire brain scanner as well somewhere?

Nope. Just the Firewire Trouserpress.

Really is a fairly simple rig, but given the above, I am rather bored of being told I don't know what I'm doing, and that clearly it's all my fault as I don't know how to set up a kompooter properly...

[Kevin Nolan]

Likewise - my numerous EW packages purchased over the past year are awaiting a new computer; and this news is nothing short of disastrous - I have invested heavily in EW.

To sum up what this thread has so far revealed:

- Eastwest products do not work under 'Play'

- Eastwest have no intentions of resolving this issue so their products are effectively useless

- The reputations of Eastwests talent - including Doug Rogers, Nick Phoenix and Professor Keith O. Johnson - all party to this fiasco - are now in tatters and they should never be trusted again in any music or music-technology venture.

- Sound on Sound reviews, in not identifying and flagging this significant issue should not be trusted; and at a bare minimum the reviewer(s) of EW products should be disregarded from here on in.

This is all very interesting and informative. I for one will now look at VSL from here on in (although cautiously); and although I've being buying SOS since issue one; this strengthens my argument on another thread that SOS is going downhill with regard to their review and journalistic quality. I’ll be delighted for all of the above points above to be wrong as all we want are working products and a strong and relevant SOS; but this episode is incredibly telling and worrying all round.

Kevin.

[Tui]

Strangely, all I had to do was install PLAY and, er, play with it.

Then again, I have always known that I'm special.

[Tui]

Really is a fairly simple rig, but given the above, I am rather bored of being told I don't know what I'm doing, and that clearly it's all my fault as I don't know how to set up a kompooter properly...

Sure, but you do realise that with every bit of gear you attach to your rig, your chances of encountering an incompatibility increase accordingly?

Go on, try the bare bones approach I suggested earlier. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get PLAY to work that way.

[redleicester]

Really is a fairly simple rig, but given the above, I am rather bored of being told I don't know what I'm doing, and that clearly it's all my fault as I don't know how to set up a kompooter properly...

Sure, but you do realise that with every bit of gear you attach to your rig, your chances of encountering an incompatibility increase accordingly?

Go on, try the bare bones approach I suggested earlier. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get PLAY to work that way.

Already done chap, on one 32-bit and one 64-bit slave built from the ground up...

[Tui]

... And..? Enquiring minds want to know.

[redleicester]

... And..? Enquiring minds want to know.

Sorry, thought the answer was implicit in the explanation - no joy, zip, nada, nix, naff all. Made little discernable difference, still didn't work to any reasonable standard of operation.

[Tui]

Bummer. That's really bad.

Now, can you do the same with one of the Macs? That simply has got to work. When I said I never had a problem with my two Intel Macs, I honestly meant it. Up until this thread, I was unaware of the massive problems some (many?) people seem to encounter.

If I remember correctly, I think I noticed a couple of samples in SD2 that didn't play well or perhaps glitched, but considering the size of SD2, I didn't take much notice and pretty much forgot about it. Most of my libraries contain the odd duff sample (Kirk Hunter, for example), and I kind of take that for granted. Importantly, however, PLAY never gave me any real problems, but happily works alongside all the stuff I listed earlier.

[hugol]

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.

That's exactly how it's supposed to work - it's called an API. Nothing is going to talk directly to anything - it's always going to be through several layers of abstraction. That's not to say that many APIs aren't over complex, badly documented or just plain buggy of course. There are also of course platform specific.

To other comments earlier, what hardware you have plugged into your DAW really shouldn't make any difference - but admittedly you are opening yourself up to any bugs in the associated drivers.

All of these really does sound like incredibly poor testing on EW's part. It really shouldn't be this hard - highly likely their code is just poor, also inexperience could mean they are invoking stuff in pretty non-standard ways and exposing platform bugs or they themselves are using some pretty buggy 3rd party libraries. Either way it does sound totally unacceptable.

[Rousseau]

If I remember correctly, I think I noticed a couple of samples in SD2 that didn't play well or perhaps glitched, but considering the size of SD2, I didn't take much notice and pretty much forgot about it.

Aha!

Tui, do me a favour chap if you would, load up the following midi performance please:

Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130. What do you get?

If you get the drop outs, mute the following sample: 130bpm Glitched drone. What do you get now?

Cheers

[redleicester]

- Sound on Sound reviews, in not identifying and flagging this significant issue should not be trusted; and at a bare minimum the reviewer(s) of EW products should be disregarded from here on in.

Not entirely sure I'm with you on this Kevin - reviewing software in particular is a tricky business, and can easily swing both ways: You could (as clearly Dave Stewart did), have totally plain sailing and see no issues, even if that was a million to one shot, it could still happen.

Conversely you could have crashes/bugs/issues on a machine that no one else experiences, and support staff cannot reproduce... Basically just the same as a user themselves may have a utopian experiance or a dystopian one.

I think it's a little unfair to point fingers at specific reviewers, it's not an easy exercise as anyone involved in the field will agree I'm sure, and others would be just as quick to leap on the over-cautious reviewer for being paranoid or picking holes if they covered every single itty-bitty fault found.

That said I am astonished that there have been nothing but positive reviews, given the number of issues raised on these forums and on countless others over the past 18 months, and that scant attention has been paid to looking back and wondering why.

[dmills]

That's exactly how it's supposed to work - it's called an API. Nothing is going to talk directly to anything - it's always going to be through several layers of abstraction.

The other issue for things like sample playback engines is that not all APIs are realtime safe, the audio handling code typically must not (for example) call anything that might allocate memory (Thereby causing page faults), and typically the audio code cannot even draw anything on the screen (memory management and locking issues), this sort of bug can be **HARD** to track down and its appearance can be highly system dependant. Realtime programming is a totally different mindset to writing GUI code.

That's not to say that many APIs aren't over complex, badly documented or just plain buggy of course. There are also of course platform specific.

All too true, and often all three at the same time. There are also the cases where poorly documented API behaviour changes between different versions of the 'same' operating system.

You can test till you are blue in the face, but sometimes code that worked perfectly in all your test cases, crashes and burns when released to retail customers (Had it happen, it is painful). Of course the modern practise of pushing stuff to market without an adequate set of beta and release candidate testing (It adds a year to your release cycle if you do it right) does tend to make problems with early releases more likely.

Avoid any version number ending in .0 for anything, and especially avoid 1.0 else you WILL be a beta tester.

The real test is in how the company responds to a decent bug report.

Regards, Dan.

[hugol]

I absolutely agree Dan. It does sound EW are being less than pro-active though - you'd think even if they couldn't reproduce (and I've also experienced things going wrong you'd never expect) they'd supply select people with debug code to assist.

[Kevin Nolan]

- Sound on Sound reviews, in not identifying and flagging this significant issue should not be trusted; and at a bare minimum the reviewer(s) of EW products should be disregarded from here on in.

Not entirely sure I'm with you on this Kevin - reviewing software in particular is a tricky business, and can easily swing both ways: You could (as clearly Dave Stewart did), have totally plain sailing and see no issues, even if that was a million to one shot, it could still happen.

Conversely you could have crashes/bugs/issues on a machine that no one else experiences, and support staff cannot reproduce... Basically just the same as a user themselves may have a utopian experiance or a dystopian one.

I think it's a little unfair to point fingers at specific reviewers, it's not an easy exercise as anyone involved in the field will agree I'm sure, and others would be just as quick to leap on the over-cautious reviewer for being paranoid or picking holes if they covered every single itty-bitty fault found.

That said I am astonished that there have been nothing but positive reviews, given the number of issues raised on these forums and on countless others over the past 18 months, and that scant attention has been paid to looking back and wondering why.

Listen - people are paying hard earned money on these products. SOS are reviewing many of them and they have mentioned nothing of this issue, let alone its severity.

If this was a Car magazine or Audiophile magazine (as ridiculous as some Audiophile issues can be) they'd hunt down the issues until they were revealed. I'm not on an SOS bashing session for the sake of it; but I was about to purchase EW Pianos partly on the basis of SOS's recent review.

SOS reviews are increasingly toothless. They should stress test these products on multiple platforms. It should not cost a lot of money to install each of the major DAWs and test plugins in them. Virtually always, SOS reviewers clearly indicate that they review software on only a single platform / DAW. That's no use to most users.

SOS claim they are a major music recording publication, but look at the disaster that is EW Play, and not a peep out of SOS. What's the actual point of them reviewing if they are not going to highlight vital issues?

EW are one of only two major orchestral sample release companies, so many people like me have invested heavily in them. This makes it all the more vital that the likes of SOS do thorough and robust reviews. But they are not. Too often their reviews are like a summary of the brochure, with nothing of substance or real world insight. This issue verifies this to be the case.

I'm honestly shocked at the severity of this issue, the apparent disinterest of EW as a company and that only a month or two ago SOS gave a great review to EW Pianos on Play. How on God's name did that reviewer not encounter this issue? It must have been the most superficial of tests.

Kevin.

[Steve Hill]

Kevin, you can't pin ALL the blame on SOS. A lot of car magazines gave rave reviews to the Ford Pinto until, much later, Ralph Nader exposed a disturbing tendency for the fuel tanks to explode.

What do you think SOS is, when you demand stress testing on multiple platforms? It's a little cottage industry with a handful of full time employees. 99.9% of readers want to know about new products quickly and in as much depth as is reasonable - not 18 months after they've been launched to suit your desired "scientific peer-review" standard.

If something works OK for a reviewer on his own platform, is he really supposed to say "something wrong, surely"?

I'll concede however that in the light of widespread experiences such as this thread reveals, it might well be worth another article, underpinned by some searching questions to EW's management.

[Tui]

I have to agree though, I doesn't seem like asking too much from SOS, when we expect a major piece of software - and an expensive one at that - to get tested thoroughly on the only two universally prevalent platforms: PCs and Macs. I thought that's what we are paying our subscriptions for? If I wanted to read sales blurb, I could go to the company web sites. No, honestly, that's not good enough for "The World's Best Recording Magazine". If I had bought PLAY and couldn't get it to work on my system, I'd be fuming too.

Rousseau, is there really a file labelled "Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130"? I never knew. Strange name, though, doesn't bode well for PLAY's stability, does it. I'll give it a go later when I'm back home.

[Setter]

A lot of car magazines gave rave reviews to the Ford Pinto until, much later, Ralph Nader exposed a disturbing tendency for the fuel tanks to explode.

The difference is that (presumably) the exploding fuel tanks were not a common feature of chat on the web.

It would seem reasonable for the recent reviewer to have done some background research on the forums and to have been aware of the stability issues.

I'm finding SOS reviews to be less and less helpful. Reading a typical review (not the obvious slatings) will suggest that there may be a few issues but as far as general quality is concerned the purchase will be a good investment.

As an example consider the microphone reviews. A typical review of a 'budget' microphone will read much the same as a review of a high end system except that it will say things along the line of 'much better than the cost would suggest' or "not quite as good as the really high end but you'd have to pay a lot more to get a small increase in performance".

They never say, this microphone is ok for starting out but after you've been recording for a few years you'll wish you'd bought quality right from the start.

Increasingly the reviews have to be read 'between the lines' and opinions sought out on these forums (fora??)

J

[thenaturallevel]

A lot of car magazines gave rave reviews to the Ford Pinto until, much later, Ralph Nader exposed a disturbing tendency for the fuel tanks to explode.

The difference is that (presumably) the exploding fuel tanks were not a common feature of chat on the web.

No internet in those days. However, it cause a major controversy not least to due to the now infamouse "Ford Pinto Memo" which basically stated that it was cheaper to pay off any resultant law suits, arising from a fatality, than implement the fuel tank redesign. Perhaps EW have decided it is cheaper to take the heat and the criticism rather than fix the issue?

[Setter]

No internet in those days.

Just testing

I should have done some background research first.

J

[Rousseau]

Rousseau, is there really a file labelled "Glitch Ma XXXitch 4/4 130"? I never knew. Strange name, though, doesn't bode well for PLAY's stability, does it. I'll give it a go later when I'm back home.

There is Tui and thanks that'd be great.

[. . . Delete This User . . .]

They never say, this microphone is ok for starting out but after you've been recording for a few years you'll wish you'd bought quality right from the start.

err... isn't that what's implicit when the words "good for the money" , or "better than cost implies" and paraphrases thereof , appear ANYWHERE in a review?

reality = you get what you pay for.

it always has, and it always will
.

[* User requested deletion 2 *]

re: toothless SOS reviews - all credit to the management for letting a thread like this develop in its less than complimentary direction. If this was the EastWest forum, it would have been spiked by the second sentence of the first post.

As for 'reading between the lines' which seems to be the default excuse for the limp nature of most SOS reviews - that's all very well if you've some kind of insight into the MT world, but if you're a sixteen year old kid about to splash all your cash on your first mic / interface / bit of software, you don't want to be subject to the sophistries (oooh I love that word) of some been-round-the-block reviewer. Have some balls, risk offending a manufacturer and earn the respect of your paying readers - if a mic is just another Chinese bag of bolts with a new name on it, say so. If a piece of software doesn't function as advertised, say so.

Or is ad revenue always going to be king?