The fastest and most convenient way to authorize your copy of Ivory is to access our web registration page at http://www.synthogy.com/register. However, if you do not have access to the world wide web, you may authorize Ivory via email. Send your Machine ID (from the Ivory Autho- rization Tool) and your Serial Number (from the inside cover of your manual) in an email message to [email protected] and your unlock code will be emailed back to you. If you do not have email you may call our toll free Tech Support line at 800-745-8020.
Outside the US please call +1-207-439-1052. Be prepared to have your Machine ID and your Serial number ready, so that you may receive your unlock code. You will have five (5) days to authorize Ivory after first launching the program or running the authorize tool.
Installing and authorizing Ivory on more than one computer
You may authorize Ivory on up to 3 machines, in accordance with our End User License, where only a single user would use the machines, and only one machine would be in use at a time. If you wish to have multiple users running Ivory on more than one machine, please consult our dis- tributor ILIO about a multi-user site license.
stall. Just move the Ivory Items folder to the new location. Then, all you need to do is update a file that tells Ivory where the Ivory Items location is. This path is stored in a text file:
C:\Program Files\Synthogy\Ivory\LibraryPath.txt
Either throw this file into the trash and let Ivory ask you where the new location is when it starts up (recommended) or open the file with a text editor and type the new path.
Uninstalling Ivory
The large audio files are all kept in a folder called Ivory Items. Simply deleting this folder will remove most of Ivory's data. The location of each plugin is:
Win RTAS: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Digidesign\DAE\Plug-Ins Win VST: Location depends on where you initially chose to install it. You may also discard the Ivory program folder:
Win: C:\Program Files\Synthogy\Ivory
Troubleshooting Performance problems
Pops, clicks or dropouts when playing Ivory.Performance issues are generally related to some bottleneck in your sys- tem. If your CPU meter is maxed out, this indicates that the CPU cannot run fast enough to keep up with its demands. Refer to the section on CPU/Bus Speed (page 60).
If the clicks coincide with the appearance of the Slow Disk message to the left of the MIDI light on Ivory's main page, refer to the section on Disk Performance (page 60).
Otherwise, in Windows, the culprit is likely a RAM issue. Refer to the sec- tion on RAM usage (page 60).
On Windows systems, you may try disabling background services like Indexing to improve audio rendering performance. These may get in the way of real time audio processing tasks on some systems.
Ivory's feature implementation was designed to work on a wide range of computer speeds. Each feature has an On/Off button in order free up resources on older computers, or those with significant bottlenecks, or otherwise during a resource-intensive session. Every system, no matter how meticulously optimized, will be limited by one of these three things:
•CPU/bus speed. •Hard drive speed. •RAM.
Ivory will bump up against one of these more noticeably on slower com- puters, but you'll hit one of these when pushing Ivory on any computer.
CPU/Bus Speed
The best way to determine if CPU/Bus speed is too slow is to call up and watch the host's CPU usage meter. If the meter maxes out, then you will need to reduce CPU load. Turn off any unnecessary features:
•Sustain Resonance. •Ambience.
•Chorus, etc.
•Set Key Noise to zero (12 o'clock). •Reduce the number of maximum voices.
Disk Performance
If the words 'Slow Disk' appear to the left of the MIDI light on Ivory's main page, you may be experiencing some disk related performance problems. This is often accompanied by a 'click' as a voice abruptly stops playing.
The quickest remedy to this problem is to reduce your polyphony or voice count. If the voice count exceeds the amount of data that can be streamed from your drive, then this will result in the ‘slow disk’ message. Back the polyphony count down incrementally until you no longer get the message.
Consider de-fragmenting your hard drive. Windows XP includes a pro- gram named “Disk Defragmenter” that will accomplish this.
RAM usage
Windows XP uses a virtual memory system that usually shouldn’t be turned off. So what may seem like a performance problem in Windows may in fact be related to RAM. If you are experiencing dropouts without the Slow Disk message appearing to the left of the MIDI lights on Ivory's main page, then it's probably a RAM issue. RAM issues can also become apparent when other sample-based plug-ins (e.g. samplers or sampling reverbs) are used alongside Ivory. The following methods will reduce Ivory's RAM usage:
•Turn off Release samples. •Turn off Soft samples. •Decrease Ivory's Buffer Size.
•Choose a keyset with fewer dynamic levels.
Latency
Latency is one of the most misunderstood topics in the industry. Ivory itself has very little if nothing to do with latency. The speed of your com- puter will have a significant impact, but it is mostly introduced by the audio hardware in your system and can be controlled with the hardware buffer size setting in your host software.
In Pro Tools, the setting is called "H/W Buffer Size": Setups > Playback Engine
In Cubase, the setting is located in the audio driver settings. Devices > Device Setup > VST Multitrack > Control Panel
Default values are usually set to 256 or 512. Selecting a lower value will improve latency. The trade-off is CPU load, so setting this too low may cause other performance problems.
In addition to hardware buffer size, increasing your hardware sample rate will also improve latency.
system is directly related to the speed of your hard drive and the hard drive interface you are using. For example, users with laptops often have slow internal drives (5400RPM), so using an external drive is going to result in better performance in almost every instance. We recommend using drives that are at least 7200RPM or more.
However, there are additional factors related to your hard drive that also influence performance. These are discussed below.
Bus Interface
Serial ATA is probably the fastest interface out there (with the exception of some very expensive SCSI solutions). After this FireWire 800 is next, followed by FireWire 400 and regular ATA, which are roughly equivalent in speed. So choosing to install the Ivory Library on a drive off of one of these faster interfaces will gain you more performance.
Ivory on its own drive
When using internal drives, we advise against installing Ivory on your system drive, or on the same drive that you will be recording and playing back digital audio to. When the drives have to be accessed by the system or other applications while Ivory is running, it slows the disk, and reduces the throughput of data from the drive. This can greatly hamper Ivory's performance. So we recommend if possible to install Ivory on a disk that is *not* your system drive or digital audio drive.
bined into a single volume that appears on your desktop. In a striped two-disk RAID setup, the work of accessing the stored data is distributed among two drives instead of one. We have found this to be the single big- gest gain in Ivory system performance yet. It can effectively double the amount of polyphony you can get out of Ivory in most cases. If you need the highest performance you can get, we highly recommend building a RAID system.
RAID support is not built into Windows XP. To set up a RAID system, you may need to purchase a third party solution.
RAID performance is optimal when drives are identical. You may also experience a performance increase by putting two slower drives each on its own bus. This prevents the bus speed from creating a bottleneck as data from two drive compete for bandwidth.
Configuration
Sometimes people like to use a dedicated 'sounds' drive where they store the sounds to all their soft synths and samplers. This is generally fine, unless they will attempt to stream other sounds from that drive from another sampler or application while Ivory is also streaming. However, if the sampler or other application just plays the samples out of RAM the speed of that drive will not be affected.
Fragmentation/Partitioning
Other factors that may adversely affect hard drive performance (and as a result, Ivory performance) are whether the drive is fragmented or near capacity. Any hard drive that is nearly full will get very slow. Of course we know from years of experience with digital audio what fragmentation will do (another good reason to keep Ivory separated from your digital audio drive). Consider de-fragmenting your hard drive with “Disk Defragmenter” that comes with Windows XP.
Partitioning can also be a problem. When a disk gets partitioned, the newer partitions on a disk will generally be created on a slower part of the disk.
the Ivory Library Tools icon to start the program.
You will see a screen with four tool choices: Check Libraries, Verify Libraries, Convert Libraries, and Delete Libraries.
Check Libraries runs very quickly and will perform a simple check of your object data. It will also confirm that the sample files are installed and that they are in the correct format. However, it will not check all of the sample data. For that, you will use the Verify Libraries tool. If Check Libraries finds a problem, you can correct it without running the Verify Libraries tool.
Verify Libraries runs all of the same tests as Check Libraries. In addition, Verify Libraries will read all of the sample data and test it. This can take almost as long as library installation, so please be patient! If any errors are found, they will be reported on the main screen.
Convert Libraries is useful if you manually copied files from your Ivory Install DVDs. The files on the DVDs are in Macintosh format, and cannot be used on your PC without conversion. The Ivory Installer automatically converts them for you. If you copied them manually, you can use Convert Libraries to perform the conversion.
You may need to use Delete Libraries if you find a problem with one of your libraries. After choosing Delete Libraries, you will be asked to choose a library for deletion. After you delete a library, run the Ivory Installer again, choosing the library that you want to reinstall. Note that the Synth library is used by all of the other libraries. If you delete the Synth library, you can choose any of the other libraries in the Installer program to reinstall it.
After any operation is performed, the tool selection screen is displayed again, so that you can choose another operation. Choose Cancel to exit from tool selection, and then choose Quit to exit the Ivory Library Tools program.
Ivory • 65