Discuss Notion Music Composition Software here.
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I got EWQL and I'm having problems making everything work with Notion.

System specs: Windows 7 64-bit, 16GB RAM, 3.4GHz i5 CPU, EWQL library installed on Samsung 840 PRO SSD.

The first time I wrote a score with a sizable number of parts everything worked during playback, but when I exported to WAV I noticed distortion. Looking at the file in Audacity told me that the levels were too high, so I reduced the levels of all the instruments by -6 dB (which worked when I had the same problem with Alchemy).

But after that the same piece would get distortion and playback problems (echoing, static). I installed the ASIO4All driver v.2 (I had been using the Windows default driver). Same problem with slightly different characteristics.

So I got the Samsung 840 PRO SSD and copied the EWQL library to it, and redirected the favorites to that drive.

Now I get no errors during playback when I use ASIO4All (2048 samples, with the Offline option selected during install), but when I export to a WAV file the file is corrupted. Windows Media Player won't recognize the file, and Audacity can't read it either. (Switching back to the default Windows driver still has problems during playback.)

So now I'm not sure what to do. Is this a known issue with ASIO4All?

I don't need a fancy sound card for any other purpose. I won't be doing any recording or mixing, all I want to do is export from Notion using VSTs to WAV files. But if an ASIO card will fix the problem, which would be the one most suited to my needs?

(An aside: does Notion use the hardware on the sound card to do signal processing that would affect the output of WAV export?)

Thanks for any help you can give me.
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by Surf.Whammy on Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:07 pm
brucekvam wroteI get no errors during playback when I use ASIO4All (2048 samples, with the Offline option selected during install), but when I export to a WAV file the file is corrupted. Windows Media Player won't recognize the file, and Audacity can't read it either. (Switching back to the default Windows driver still has problems during playback.)


I do everything on the Mac--so I cannot be much help with Windows--but when something like this happens on the Mac, I do experiments with the various parameters, options, and settings based on the rule that many problems with digital music production hardware and software are due to the way everything is configured . . .

Try exporting the audio at standard CD quality (44.1-kHz at 16-bits) . . .

Lots of FUN! :)

Surf.Whammy's YouTube Channel

The Surf Whammys

Sinkhorn's Dilemma: Every paradox has at least one non-trivial solution!
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by brucekvam on Sat Jul 12, 2014 11:17 am
I get the same problem with 16, 24 and 32 bit. I don't see a way to change the sample rate during export or in any of the ASIO setup dialogs, so I assume that it's always at 44.1 kHz.

I fiddled with every other parameter in the ASIO4All setup dialog and nothing makes any difference.

But thanks for the suggestions.

Does anyone else have experience with ASIO4All and Notion? I've found some references to it in previous posts, but they were using ReWire and I'm not sure they're trying to do the same thing.
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by kmlandre on Sat Jul 12, 2014 1:14 pm
"So now I'm not sure what to do. Is this a known issue with ASIO4All?"

There's something that in the driver that says "force 44.1 -> 48" or something like that. Make sure that's check or unchecked, depending on your current setting. And if you haven't tried a system reboot after changing settings (or at least restarting Notion), you may want to try that. Yes, I know the EWQL reload is a time killer in those instances... :-(

"(An aside: does Notion use the hardware on the sound card to do signal processing that would affect the output of WAV export?)"

I don't think so. In fact, I do all my mix downs to the "Default" or "Direct Sound" windows driver without any problem at all. I've used ASIO4ALL (and a few other ASIO drivers) to connect to Cubase and Reaper via Rewire, but otherwise I don't use it. You may want to try that instead.

You could try installing Reaper and using it's ASIO driver - I think Notion may be able to grab ahold of it. It may work a bit better for you...

Kurt M. Landre'
https://www.SoundCloud.com/kmlandre
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by johnny21 on Sat Jul 12, 2014 5:17 pm
Hi Bruce,
Asio4All will work fine. I've used both asio4all and Firewire Boxes. Both work good on my system.
However, as you probably know you can't run Notion, Audacity or Youtube etc... at the same time using asio4all.
You need a dedicated full duplex sound card/box for that.

FWIW,
A Focusrite Scarlett USB 2x2 I purchased only crashed Notion over & over.
I returned it and got the Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 which has worked flawlessly on my system.
As for audio devices boxes/sound cards and audio rendering quality
I'm guessing that the quality of the sound Notion produces is from a rendering algorithm (engine).
A soundcard/box reproduces what Notion creates.


Answering these questions may reveal the cause to the issue you want help solving.

1. Is the computer a desktop or laptop?

2. What version of Notion are you using? Goto HELP > ABOUT...
see your version number "x.x.xxx,xx-xxx" in the lower left of the About Notion window.

3. Is the computer system drive an HDD or an SSD ?
if HDD, is it a 7200 RPM or greater ?

4. What is the total capacity of the Samsung 840 PRO SSD and the free reminding after the EWQL samples are loaded?

5. Is the audible sound or rendered wave file bad if some staves are muted in Notion?

6. Does the problem occur using Notion's instruments or other vst instruments.?

7. Using asio4all are audio recordings (line or microphone) in Audacity affected in the same way as in your Notion project?
Also, In Audacity if you load, edit and modify an existing wave file then render it to a new file, save and re-open it do you get errors?

8. Which EWQLSO presets do you load from?
(A.) "FILE > NEW FROM TEMPLATE..."
12- EWQL Symphony Full Orchestra
13- EWQL Symphony Full Orchestra Lite
or from the
(B.) "Score Setup":
EWQL Symphony Orchestra list . FULL, Lite, solo, sections etc.....

**Can you upload a short 15-30sec. wave file to listen to for an example?

These questions may reveal more about the issue.


,Johnny

:arrow:

Ps. On my system the EWQLSO Platinum Complete Library has worked well. Especially the Notion preset EWQLSO Lite.
I mostly make my own custom instrumentation lists in Notion and use multiple instances of the "Play sample engine"
and find no problems with memory issues. Transposing instruments get there own instance of Play in order to
avoid Notion Staff Setting transpose issues.
Sample load times are very fast and streaming latency is not an issue with SSD'.
System instructions are received during playback very fast from a system SSD.
Processor performance is my next hurdle and will get a new computer when an upgrade is the only option.
I'm good for a while though.
The Notion EWQL Full Orchestra Lite_ template takes about 1:35 seconds to load.
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by brucekvam on Sun Jul 13, 2014 8:17 pm
Johnny, thanks for your response.

It's a desktop, I'm running 4.0.329, which the update check says is the current version. I'm also running the current version of the PLAY engine.

To avoid changing everything at once, I added the SSD as a separate drive and left Windows to boot normally. Changing too many things at once usually results in making everything break. The hard disk that the OS is on is not particularly high performance. Do Notion and EWQL bang on the system hard disk a lot? I was under the impression that if you've got a large physical RAM and an SSD for the samples it should leave your hard disk alone.

The SSD has a capacity of 240GB, 115GB of which is used (just EWQL is on it).

In the Notion score that doesn't work properly I added staves one at a time (full versions) with Score Setup. It seems that after a certain number are added it starts to fail to play with the Windows default audio driver.

I've had no problems like this at all using Notion instruments (Notion performs like a champ -- the only issue I have is with the sound quality of some of the samples in certain situations, especially when a lot of instruments are playing -- it seems there's too much noise, making the playback muddy, which is why I thought the 24-bit EWQL instruments would help). After fiddling with levels, I have had no problems with the Alchemy VST (though I only use a few instruments at a time).

I never use ASIO4all for anything other than Notion, and am only trying it because EWQL's website says they require it (which does not seem to be true, because everything works with the Windows default audio driver when I have a small number of EWQL instruments loaded). I would much rather not have to load it at all.

In my failure case, which is a subset of the instruments needed for Holst's Jupiter, I added each instrument separately to the score in Score Stup, using the Full versions of the instruments. I added the strings, the woodwinds and the brass (18 parts). The playback begins to fail when the horns start playing with the standard audio driver (only three horns, first and second violins, violas and cellos are playing when the errors start). If I switch to ASIO4All everything plays properly, but when I try to export to a WAV file, the file appears to be corrupted -- Windows will not open it and Audacity will open it but cannot play it.

If I create a score from the EWQL Lite template the individual instruments work, but none of the woodwind or brass ensembles plays sounds. The downside of the Lite template is that each section of the orchestra is ganged together into one channel (all brass on one, woodwinds on another, strings on another), which means the volume and stereo location are the same for all those instruments. That's not how most orchestras are set up: you normally have your first violins on one side and the doublebasses on the other, for example. I can't do that with the Lite setup, and the stereo separation is important in some pieces.

(I also noticed that there's an error in the EWQL Lite Template: it's trying to load CSR Hall as a VST effect in the mixer. Is that a separate plugin from another supplier that was accidentally left in place, or is something missing from my installation?)

It looks like the full versions of the instruments are exceeding the capacity of my system, but I'm not sure why. I've got 16GB of memory, am running 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Notion, and Notion is only using about 4GB. Watching the resource monitor while it plays doesn't show any thrashing or excessive disk or memory usage. I've got a 3.6GHz CPU.

If I load a second window of Notion with the score that doesn't play back properly while the score that does play back is loaded, neither will play properly. That seems to indicate that it's some kind of resource bottleneck in Notion or the PLAY engine.

Am I correct in guessing that each full instrument I'm adding in the Score Setup is creating another instance of the PLAY engine? And that 18 instances of the PLAY engine are causing my problems?

When you say you make your own custom instrumentation lists how are you doing it? Are you loading multiple instruments in the same instance, or each one in its own?

Thanks again for your help.
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by johnny21 on Mon Jul 14, 2014 1:49 am
Bruce,
I did Holst's The Planets years ago. It took ever MIDI tone generator I had. That takes a very large orchestra. Recently I thought about working on it again.
Funny I never recorded it. It was darn good and sounded quite convincing.
I feel that importing the MIDI data into Notion would be hopeless.
I've already done remakes of remakes in Notion because editing MIDI imports was not possible or productive. The Planets? Personally I'm not that ambitious at this time but it would be cool to here an EWQL etc version of it.
--------------------

As for solutions to your dilemma,
The East West minimum requirement for a HDD speed is 7200 rpm for the sample library.
They don't say it but even if your system drive is 7200 RPMs I'd still wonder about its abilities.

My computer is older and less powerful than yours and it works pretty good with the EW lib. I get no errors and no playback issues (unless pushing it to a very, very extreme full orchestra voice count, ala finale endings). It has to be really busy to get drop outs or glitches.

I don't use reverb or other DSP' during production. IMO the Platinum (3 mic) samples don't need it. At least not until post production work. If Notion or other samples are loaded I do apply a Lexicon PCM reverb on those sounds.
I'll post some sound clip examples.
A laptop computer is what I use most of the time. It's a 5 year old HP dv-6 duo-core 2.53 Ghz with 8GB RAM memory and I believe 2GB of video memory. I added a 224GB system SSD and a secondary 450GB SSD for sample libraries including EWQLSO Platinum and Symphonic Choir.

I will say that most professional audio production software requires a hard drive with a minimum speed of 7200 RPM and IMO that includes the system drive.
On there web site, Notion's hard drive requirements only mention the free space needed for the application and sound library installation.
Not really knowing_ I'll say, I'm guessing that due to longer samples, and the larger data stream the EWQLSO library leaves a slow system drive scrambling to keep up trying to deliver instructions on what to do with the streaming sample data which in this case is stored on and delivered from a fast SSD.
A computer processor running out of instructions for handling processes would most likely produce audible sound processing errors.
Wasted processor cycles won't show up in a system load monitor. Those errors will show up on the end of the process which in this case may be your rendered sound file and or poor audio playback. Just my opinion.

I'd also add that an audio buffer greater than 1024 doesn't work on my system.
Anyway,
I'm just saying_ you've got the EWQL software and other parts of your system up to the standards needed. Why shortcut on the system drive?
Installation is a breeze and backup & cloning even easier.
A ($130) SSD or a ($50) HDD 7200 RPM system drive will make a difference in the overall performance of your computer without a doubt.

About sound cards: as you know the asio4all software will not make a poor sound card sound good.
In my experience OEM (original equipment manufacturer) sound cards have very poor specifications. In particular the dynamic range and the signal to noise ratio. Line level noise (hiss) so loud (joking) you'd think an air hose is leaking near by.
Also, the circuitry shielding and insulation is so poor noise from surrounding circuitry can induce digital noise artifacts into the audio signal. That noise can make it difficult to adjust levels and diagnose sound systems in general not to forget drive you crazy...
I guess I am suggesting a better sound card. Most USB audio devices at this point in time are USB 2 which I would not recommend because USB devices must share the signal bus with other USB devices.
As I mentioned earlier in this post the Firewire audio device I use enjoys its own data bus. Internal or external, a better sound card or audio interface is worth the investment.

The two points I've mentioned here aren't a "for sure" solution; however, they sure wouldn't be a waste.
I'll have to continue this another time so until then, good luck,

Johnny

Ps. As for Notion EWQLSO templates and presets I hope to add some comments next time.
And yes! the warning about the IK-multimedia "CRS" reverb missing at load time of the EWQLSO Lite template is associated with the 32bit Notion3 and CRS is not included with Notion 4. I disregard the missing reverb warning.

:arrow:
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by brucekvam on Mon Jul 14, 2014 8:27 am
Thanks again, Johnny.

johnny21 wroteBruce,
I'm just saying_ you've got the EWQL software and other parts of your system up to the standards needed. Why shortcut on the system drive?

I'm just leery of changing too many things at once and screwing my system up completely.

First, the good news. If I use the EWQL Full template I don't get any errors. Playback and exporting to disk work fine.

It seems that the problem is due completely to adding instruments one-by-one in Score Setup (I suspect this is why they implemented the templates for Notion). I had expected I'd be able to build my own templates from scratch for EWQL (as I did for Alchemy and Kontakt 5).

However, this has exposed another issue. The Steinway piano sample for EWQL is, frankly, unusable. But when I include the Notion piano it sounds "dead" (especially in solo passages) because Notion's built-in reverb is turned off for the template. If I turn on the built-in reverb it makes the EWQL instruments sound really bad because it screws up the miking inherent to EWQL.

How do I get the piano (and other Notion or other VST instruments) to sound decent when played in concert with the EWQL instruments?
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by johnny21 on Mon Jul 14, 2014 11:37 am
brucekvam wroteI'm just leery of changing too many things at once and screwing my system up completely.


Most Hard Drives now come with good cloning software.
I have Acronis true image 2014 which can backup my complete computer (on a WD myBook_and! if the computer is even destroyed the backup image can be loaded(migrated) onto a totally new computer without having to install the software over again. Serial Number or activations may need to be updated but it all is very easy to restore if something is wrong with the drives.

brucekvam wroteFirst, the good news. If I use the EWQL Full template I don't get any errors. Playback and exporting to disk work fine.


Excellent! _No problems with "Audio Export" or "Playback Sound Quality" then?

brucekvam wroteIt seems that the problem is due completely to adding instruments one-by-one in Score Setup (I suspect this is why they implemented the templates for Notion). I had expected I'd be able to build my own templates from scratch for EWQL (as I did for Alchemy and Kontakt 5).


I've added EW instruments one at a time to the "Score Setup" without any problems. Even with each instrument having its own instance of the "Play" engine. No problems with memory or anything else.
The term I've use is my "custom instrumentation lists". They are not part of Score Setup. They are just empty instrument staffs that I store on disk.

brucekvam wroteHowever, this has exposed another issue. The Steinway piano sample for EWQL is, frankly, unusable.


The EWQLSO piano works on my system.

brucekvam wrote But when I include the Notion piano it sounds "dead" (especially in solo passages) because Notion's built-in reverb is turned off for the template. If I turn on the built-in reverb it makes the EWQL instruments sound really bad because it screws up the miking inherent to EWQL.

How do I get the piano (and other Notion or other VST instruments) to sound decent when played in concert with the EWQL instruments?


Add the built-in reverb to a mixer bus A,B,C or D. On the Notion instrument mixer strip turn up the send to 100% for the bas that hold the built-in reverb.

good luck I've got to go,

,Johnny

:arrow:
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by johnny21 on Mon Jul 14, 2014 2:51 pm
Bruce,
The EWQLSO (Full) presets in the Notion use a channel-change method to access and playback the different techniques.
The (Lite) preset versions use a key-switching method instead to access and playback the techniques.

The (Full) versions I believe must have there own instance of the "Play" engine because a "Play" instance can only address one bank of MIDI channels 1-16.

So!_ I think this describes the differences of the two types of EWQLSO presets available in Notion 4.

--- The (Full) channel-change method ( * having the most capabilities)

--- The (Lite) key-switching method ( * having the somewhat minimal capabilities).


I've been loading and using the (Lite) versions in the Score setup.
I need to try the (Full) and see if Notions custom rules do the channel-change method as I expect.

Anyway, I don't wish to complicate or turn your thread in a different direction
so I may think about starting a new thread which focuses on the templates, presets and rules for the East West products.

,Johnny

:arrow:
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by brucekvam on Mon Jul 14, 2014 3:58 pm
johnny21 wroteExcellent! _No problems with "Audio Export" or "Playback Sound Quality" then?


Yes, everything works perfectly as long as I start with the Full Template. The instrument ensembles (six horns, three clarinets) all fail to produce sound in Lite template.

Fortunately, my system seems to have enough horsepower to load the Full template in a minute or so. I want to use most of the articulations, so I want it anyway.

johnny21 wroteI've added EW instruments one at a time to the "Score Setup" without any problems. Even with each instrument having its own instance of the "Play" engine. No problems with memory or anything else. The term I've use is my "custom instrumentation lists". They are not part of Score Setup. They are just empty instrument staffs that I store on disk.


Adding a couple works fine, but adding 18 individually the way I did caused serious problems.

johnny21 wroteThe EWQLSO piano works on my system.


It works, but it's unusable in the sense that it doesn't have any articulations (there's only one set of samples, unlike the woodwinds and brass that have dozens of samples for different articulations). For example, staccato and trilled notes play no sounds, making it unusable for any serious piano work. I'm guessing EWQL expects serious piano works to use their piano library.

johnny21 wroteAdd the built-in reverb to a mixer bus A,B,C or D. On the Notion instrument mixer strip turn up the send to 100% for the bas that hold the built-in reverb.


Aha. I had to click the Bus button to get those to show up. That makes it sound a lot better (though I'm sure a purist would be able to detect the acoustical mismatch between the Notion reverb and the EWQL ambience, my ears just aren't that good. But having it just be the piano minimizes the issue in any case.)

Notion is really a damn good application. It can do so much, and it's samples are actually pretty decent. It's just that you want to get that little bit extra to make it sound better...

And thanks again for all your help. You resolved all my issues!

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