Just to avoid confusion... you'll only get a few "best of" patches and not the whole Appassionata... just like you already got a "best of Pro Edition" lib with Opus 1&2 . :D

Hope you have fun with it!

PolarBear 

This market is so fastly evolving and announcements are pilling up. I only believe it's really there until I can buy it in a shop. Afterall it only then is interesting... they also said that those 800GB SSD drives (I'm presuming using that MLC technolgy then) could be availible thisyear already. Anywa, prices have to come down first to be of use for bigger sample libraries.

PolarBear 

PS: There's an Edit button? ;)

Hmmm I think I grasped the confusion now... The sample base from Opus and VSL SE VI is generally the same. You hear the same recording when hitting a 14 violins staccato patch on A5 with velocity 127. You don't get all new sounds with VSL SE. Sometimes just a little less whereas a lot more on some others.

Which also leads to your other question: Standard + Extended = Full. In abbrevation talk: STD + EXT = Full. When having Horizon Opus registered you only get discount on buying EXT or Full. You only can get EXT when you already have STD. With STD alone you will miss quite a few patches you already have in Opus, and as the EXT can be possessed now by you for only a few pennies more that's definately only then worth it to "upgrade".

OTOH (on the other hand) if you don't mind the hassle of MIDI piping from Sibelius into Logic and then EXS24 you don't necessarily need to upgrade if you don't miss sounds in you palette that are contained in VSL SE.

One other thing: VI is Vienna Instrument whereas VE is Vienna Ensemble. The VI is the sample containing part (think of it as sample playback engine without sample editing capabilities). And VE is a hosting software with some mixing capabilities which could host several of the VIs.

I'm sorry that I can't help you on the Sibelius-MIDI-Logic bridge question, I simply don't know if it's possible or not.

Any questions left so far? :D

PolarBear 

I'm not sure I understand? Do you mean that you think you wouldn't be able to playback old compositions you created with Opus 1 through Sibelius when using the VIs? They take MIDI events just like Kontakt or EXS24...

PolarBear 

In that case I'd rethink if it's not better upgrading to VSL SE, with the Opus bundle you get the discount on the EXT library... so the cost should stay about the same but you get a more versatile product which can be used in Logic and Sibelius plus you will have the benefits of being able to use mroe RAM in the future as soon as it is 64bit ready. 

You do use Safari. There's a glitch between Safari and the VSL forum software. Either use Firefox with the VSL forums for the moment or put in <br> for a line break or twice <br> <br> to make it look like a new paragraph. This will only work so long as the Safari glitch is not fixed.

Best,

PolarBear 

Still availible... contact VSL sales department for that.

PolarBear 

If you want to use the sounds with Kontakt there is still the possibility to buy a sidelicense for Kontakt. Contact VSL for that. Dunno about EXS24/Logic/Sibelius, perhaps there is also something possible.

PolarBear 

Okay, now let's see: You can mount a 120mm in the back and in the front in the 330 case. It does help to keep HDD and overall system temperatures down quite effectively. Just be sure that the rear mounted fan does work at same or higher speed (voltage) than the front mounted fan. This way you will produce a (little) low pressure situation in the case which will ensure the hot air will get out somehow. There's no problem for fresh air to come in through small chinks in the case, it's just that these can cause noise too sometimes if they are too small, but nothing to worry about here. If you are concerned about noise from the fans and the case temperature allows it, you could run the fans at 7V (stock is 12V) or just control the value via a fan controller module which let's you choose any artificial value between 5V and 12V. Less voltage slows down the fans, which effects in lower air throughput, but then they are less noisy, sometimes down to barely audible.

For 120mm case fans I recommend you to look into Scythe S-Flex or Slip Stream series, the Blacknoise SX1 or XL1, also good are the Noctua NF-P12 - as well as Papst 4412 series is sometimes a good choice IMHO but rarely availible outside Germany, with the forementioned being as good or sometimes better I'd not give it a sweat.

I'm no fan of boxed cooling for CPU, these coolers usually aren't of high quality, only meet the minimum criteria of cooling and therefore are sometimes insufficient under high load (and moreso under your circumstands then), and some models are very noisy. Their design usually needs the fans to run at higher speeds to work properly at all, which also means they are more noisy then. So my bet is that if you do a change here you're already quite a step ahead of your problems.

If you wanna go cheap there is an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (or also 64 Pro), if you have a little more money left you could go for either CoolerMaster HyperTX2 (probably the best buy for little money in the field atm) or Xigmatek HDT-S963, the next step up would be a Scythe Mugen or a Xigmatek HDT-S1283, the ultimate solution A Thermalright IFX-14 with a case fan from above. There is also some effects by low quality paste used for the cooler, but the quoted products shuold deliver reasonable qualified paste with them. All these coolers should require you to remove the airduct from the case due to their size, but that's not really a problem I think as they will perform better without a doubt.

Ok, hope I didn't frighten you with all the product names, but with little investments (far less than your air conditioning thing is my guess) you can get pretty much effect which will be more than sufficient even for your current situation.

Hope this helps,

PolarBear

Oh and, for anyone interested, Tomshardware.com test quite a few CPU coolers and they found out horrible differences in quality!

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/20/cpu_cooler_charts_2008/

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/26/cpu_cooler_charts_2008_part_2/

Unfortunately they don't list any boxed cooler set there, but my bet is that it is far down the list if not the at the bottom.

Have you sorted out your PC problems already? Just thought without the feedback to the questions above my answer would not yet be complete...

PolarBear 

I'd look out for a piano tuning/repair guy, they probably know where good used (and therefore no so expensive) piano with the tone you are looking for are for sale, and as they don't usually make business with this probably give a honest answer about condition (and they know it if they tuned the pianos for some time).

But it's tricky... as one also does think of it as a piece of furniture.

PolarBear 

Re 1.) me thinks you won't upgrade here... sounds are the same but 24bit instead of 16bit. Sometimes less layers in the VI than in Horizon series. If you upgrade to VI Ext. and Plus libraries you get more variety than with Opus 1 & 2 with additional patches. Different workflow is considered to ease things though. Dunno anything about 2.)

PolarBear 

Hmm, a few open questions here: I couldn't find a Elite 300 case, that seems to be the series... which one would you think comes closest on the Cooler Master site? http://www.coolermaster.com/products/product.php?act=morecategory&finalflag=Y&tbcate=402&cateid=000019 

Could it be the 330, the 331, 332 or even the 333? I'm asking this because of the possible fan mountings, they seem to be about the same in general else: Could you mount 120mm fans to the back (and the front) or 80mm fans in addition to the PSU fan? Are there fans mounted at the moment and where are they connected to?

One other thing - which cooler do you have for the processor? Or do you use boxed cooling (bought the CPU "boxed" or "tray" + additional cooler)? Do you know which Nvidia graphics card is used, or if it is cooled passively/actively?

As I already mentioned above with 3 harddrievs, and all being used fairly well in the system, there are some things to cool... but I wouldn't say you need RAM cooling in your case if you're using it at stock speed (i.e. no overclocking done and everything running at 667MHz).

Nice systems/setup btw!

PolarBear 

Yes, that and the overall heat the drive is/was exposed to may cause drive to fail earlier than in other environments. I'd take no risk for data I really need and would look to get these critical data stored elsewhere, harddrives are so cheap, 4 hours of installation saved will be easily worth an 80$ harddrive if you need to rely on it as a pro.

PolarBear 

 Just print the RSS Feed then... click on RSS availible on the lower right of a topic to see, Firefox does already support reading RSS, otherwise you'd need a RSS News reader (there are a lot of free ones out there)...

Please post me your complete system specs (I didn't get that picture part it seems, plus it would be helpful to know the involved components)... I think it's perfectly doable with aircooling to keep the system cool and running while not noisy but not having to invest in watercooling.

If you suspect your drive to be the culprit, (turn off the computer here,) umount it from the case and then have it lie e.g. on toilet paper or something else soft. If the unpleasant noise is still there, and you can really locate it to this harddrive, then you already have the problem. Cooling the system is another chapter.

Best, 

PolarBear 

Arne, that "learn on startup" idea is nice, but that would only work for monolithic sample files where we know we will have 100% of all possible read accesses done in the loading phase... anyway... this thing is a task of its own and I seriously doubt I'm gonna go and do it.

PolarBear 

I could only guess, but so far the SSD managment is purely done by Vista and not implemented at hardware level. Cache sizes usually are 256MB which is really small for OS plus apps. And then again - Vista would have to know which files should be loaded to manage to get them to the SSD portion before it really requests them. It would also have to know which application you were to launch next or which application data to precache when booted. So I don't think it's a problem that SSD is involve, but morea structural one, that it's not supported or used to maximum (or in that case: any noticeable) effect.

PolarBear 

If you actually really consider this idea I'd make my userbase a lot if not indefinitely larger by providing SSD benefits for all possible applications - you'd need to buffer/copy the first portion of every file to SSD to overcome HDD seektime and have a little RAID-like controller manage your files and managing read and write operations, e.g. in an encapsulated external bay. I think a 64GB SSD drive should be enough for buffering 1million files, typical on a 500GB drive should be around 300k at max. and less.

Actually the drawback here is, that it wouldn't really work with monolithic files ;)

PolarBear 

Bah, Rolls...

I want an Aeromax :) Can't afford both but a bike though...

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/images/front_picture_library_UK/dir_422/car_photo_211256_7.jpg 

There will be: You just have to add the SSD I/Os to the current workflow, so the I/Os in CPU/RAM will be roughly doubled.  And there's still that thing that the user would be able to do everything on his SSD drive via his Explorer which you don't have any control over... so missing files here will crush the system easily.

The way I understood it now for a 4 part sample, each letter representing a 32kb part of the buffer, the brackets [..] the 64kb preload amount:

[AB] [CD] [EF] [GH]

When the sample of [AB] is accessed, you will read A into CPU, and request the following 32kb (which are needed after B) from HDD to be filled in A while B is transferred to CPU?

I thought that [AB] would be left untouched and for each voice of polyphony there is a new buffer [XY] in RAM where X is the 32kb after B, and Y the 32kb after X, and meanwhile X will get filled with the next 32kb after current Y.

How else would you deal with the situation if a sample is retriggered again within that first 350ms or while the sample is still streaming? In case you don't want any data loss...

PolarBear

PS: Funny thing - with brackets alone [] forum software won't display the second one...

I also played with this idea in my head some while ago. But what you propose would mean to write a IDE driver from the scratch. How could you verify things keep updated? That every sample still or already has the header saved in the SSD portion? And then again, there is no buffering model like you (and I) thought of with the SSD being an additional read acces medium - the way it is now is, that "streaming" still means that little chunks of data (likely to be 64kb blocks of sample audio data, hence polyphony limitations) are transferred into RAM and then from there go to the CPU. Pre-buffered chunks in RAM aren't touched therefore.

So you would have to make sure you are reading the first chunk of data from the SSD while already accessing the next chunk of data at the SATA/IDE drive at the same time. You'd have to double the amount of current voice polyphony buffering to serve both SSD and conventional harddrive. Last but not least I doubt it's an easy task to do this cross platform or maybe even for the different Windows versions of 2k, XP, XP64, Vista32 and Vista64, ... Ultimately it's easier to wait the year or two until such a development would be able to hit the market and by then SSD will be already reasonable enough in price so that everything could be substituted. Just my opinion though, it won't work as easy as the hybrid drives that are out there already with around 120GB capacity and 256MB SSD drive portion e.g. - they seem to cache the whole data and are most likely working on heuristic methods for pre-caching if they do any at all...

All the best,

PolarBear 

Nice to find out another advantage of my ancient sample library product... haha! One would think they'd not restrict this kind of things and allow to do some fancy matrix programming or whatelse for it to happen (I obviously just have seen the VI interface).

PolarBear 

PS: Come to think of it - perhaps it could be possible? With a hidden, inaudible volume 0 note being triggered in between which forces the pattern to go a step further... Evil, evil

Btw. I'm sorry Simsy that my answers to your threads have not been very helpful or even possibly misleading to you. Just thought I could help there!

All the best,

PolarBear