MacBook Air, i7, 16GB RAM, Monterey. Vst Live Pro 1.1.0.622
I have a project with 15 songs all of which use around 12 stems. As each one is played the memory usage increases. If I play all of the songs it’ll use over 4GB of RAM and the response degrades as the memory usage increases to the point of being unusable - 10 seconds to respond to a mouse click! At this point it affects the entire OS. If I close VstLive the system response comes back to normal.
I’m assuming that VstLive is loading the stems into memory when I hit play but not releasing the memory when I move onto the next song. Surely it would be better to stream the stems from disk rather than load into memory?
Also I still don’t understand how VstViewer works. Sure I can now add the module but how do I get it to load a PDF? When I click “e” the buttons you show in the manual don’t appear, and I can’t see another way of opening the viewer, I just have an empty drop down box to load or save presets.
That assumption is certainly wrong, of course it streams from disk.
However VST Live does hold everything that it can for rapid changes that are vital on stage. And that requires sufficient memory for projects which use large amounts of resources. Those are almost always plugins; tracks release their files when the Song becomes inactive. So check to see which plugins you use, and try to see if the situation improves when you use other to replace “suspicious” ones as a test.
For Layers, you may consider to use Shared with instruments if possible.
If all else fails you may send a project file for us to check, no audio/midi etc files needed, just the .vlprj file, thanks.
I rebuilt a project with 3 songs in and just the stems. After closing VstLive and reopening it locked up. Memory usage at about 1GB but the CPU was at 103% (not sure how that is possible). Completely unresponsive.
Restarted the MacBook and the project would load and was responsive but the display was choppy- the playback cursor was not smooth. CPU again at 103%, memory at 989MB. After playing a couple of seconds of each song now unable to access the window green button to bring it out of full screen. View, exit full screen also not working. Then no menus working and locked up. Right click on task bar and quit app from there finally got to a windowed display after cancelling the force quit. At this point could actually play songs again but still choppy.
Restarted VstLive and was able to get it running again but playback cursor still choppy. One thing I noticed this time is that the memory usage increases every time I select a song. Not always by the same amount but it is cumulative and not released. CPU still at 102%
Closed VstLive and it thought I’d changed something, which I hadn’t, started the app again. High CPU, 600MB memory. Unresponsive
I wonder whether this has something to do with VstViewer - how do I uninstall it?
In this update something that worked to stop working. It affects me a lot to change version between show and show. We should be careful with this.
A guitar plugin like Native Instruments - Session Guitarist, receives the synchronization of the tempo of the part and the selected song. This is so, but as soon as you give it, it changes the tempo that sends to the plugin to 120bpm!. That is, it synchronizes well if the song is in stop but I cannot give it play or lose the syncro with the plugin or.
… can you give us some more hints? What happened? You are working with a project made with 1.0.41? And you are loading this one to 1.1.0? And your lyrics are gone?
Yes, that’s how you can describe it, although these are very simple projects, which previously only consisted of audio files and text, but after the update none of the text was available anymore. I’m glad that I’m not on stage live right now.
There is nothing special with your project. Memory consumption comes from the plugins in the Layers (Halion Sonic SE).
We did find a problem though, which occurs when you load a project while one was already activated. Plugins are not released in this case, so memory consumption accumulates. This will certainly be fixed with the next version. For now, the workaround is to end and restart VST Live before loading another project, sorry for that.
One has to keep in mind that VST Live does not deactivate any plugin instance when Parts are changed, unless shared instruments are beeing used. This explains why memory consumption increases when you select a Part that had not been selected before - unless you start File/Preload… which does exactly that, because it takes time for a plugin to become activated (for some, quite significantly so) which you want to avoid when playing live.
To avoid memory consumption, you can use the “Shared” feature which allows you to use Layer instruments from other Layers. Usually, you use that with multi-timbre instruments using MIDI channels.
Thanks for the project, at least it helped us to fix said problem, which was tough to find.
I’m glad you found something - I thought I was going mad.
Halion just there because the app demands a Layer and that is the default. Worse, if I set the Layer to that setting is not saved. Do we really need a default layer? In the meantime I will try a shared layer.
The excessive CPU still happens even with just one wav file loaded into a track and this makes the app unusable.
Thanks for your help, I do appreciate the effort you folks are putting in.
Shared layers are not saving correctly. When I restart VstLive and reload the project all of the layers except the first one are showing NOT FOUND for the instrument,
Finally managed to tame the memory use slightly by setting all the layers to output to “Vm Out 1” rather than use an instrument. However my 15 song stems project still tops 2GB RAM usage after playing 5 seconds of all the songs and now I’m seeing the CPU spike at 200% when changing songs. Generally it sits at 102%. Response to mouse clicks is about 10 seconds. The previous release was much better behaved…
I’m surprised that I seem to be the only one having these issues. I wonder if it is specific to MacBook Air Intel? Have also upgraded to Ventura 13 OS, didn’t make a difference to performance.
Good question, problem is first time users should have something. But we are considering a preference.
That makes no sense. Something else must be wrong!
This is related to another bug which we have fixed already, also coming with the next version. But just in case we tested it again with shared plugins.
Still makes no sense so we will have to look deeper.
The play buffer for playing back audio tracks is a so called ringbuffer, it does not allocate more memory while playing back, in fact all memory for that is prefetched when the project has been loaded. That may add up to some amount, but not that much, and then the CPU issue also points to a different issue.
Me too. We’ll have another look to check what could possibly go wrong, but this looks really weird. Do you have other applications running in parallel, or a very high sample rate or anything the like? Any hint is welcome, thanks for your patience!
There is no default stack so having not having a default layer would be fine imho. Or you could provide the option of removing the default layer. For someone just using stems, being forced to have a layer chewing up resources seems strange to me. Later on I will add stacks and layers but for the moment I just want to get playback stable.
(Inconsequential info removed)
Eureka! When I set the project to preload it was obvious it was loading 15 instances of Halion and that’s where the memory went. The CPU usage is still high and the interface is still slow to respond. You were right of course, Spork/Musicullum!
Now I am finding some issues in layers:-
Changing all layers to VM MIDI Out 1 and saving, then restarting VstLive and reloading the project - Halion is still being loaded into each track. Why?
Once a track is set to VM MIDI Out 1 it cannot be assigned back to a shared layer unless you first assign it to an instrument and save. Then, after reload, you can assign it to a shared instrument. However after another save and reload, for the shared instrument the layers are showing “not found”.
Trying to share an instrument from the Global Part also shows “not found” in song layers on reload.
Saving after “not found” results in shared instrument being loaded to each songs layer.
I replaced Halion with Korg Odyssey which has a much smaller footprint.
Even with the “not found” errors, and the resulting memory reduction to 350MB the memory consumption still rises with each song played, 670MB after 10 songs played. That’s a helluva lot better but the interface gets increasingly slower as more songs are played. CPU at 102% on idle, can jump to 130% during play.
A little research revels that the %CPU in activity monitor isn’t what it seems. It’s out of 100% of a single core but with multiple cores is misleading. So 100% is actually 100/800 of the total capacity on my machine. So nowhere near as high as I thought on first look. Sorry about the mislead. What a weird way to display it!
I also notice that adding a global part shifts the song numbers by one. My first song is now song 2!