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
•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.
The other solution to this problem is to optimize your disk performance and/or choose a faster drive to install Ivory on. We recommend having Ivory installed on its own dedicated hard drive, at least 7200 RPM. Note that internal laptop drives are slower than this. Consider using the RAID feature in OS X for optimal performance, and see the tips below on hard drive performance for more helpful details.
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 Digital Performer, the setting is called "Buffer Size":
Setup > Configure Audio System > Configure Hardware Driver In Pro Tools, the setting is called "H/W Buffer Size":
Setups > Playback Engine
In Logic, the setting is called "I/O Buffer Size": Preferences > Audio > Drivers > Core Audio
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.
And finally, some effects plug-ins impose a delay due to the nature of how they process audio. The host may compensate for this during normal session playback, but will be exposed while playing Ivory in real time.
system is directly related to the speed of your hard drive and the hard drive interface you are using. For example, users with Powerbooks 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.
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). Partitioning can also be a problem. When a disk gets parti- tioned, the newer partitions on a disk will generally be created on a slower part of the disk.
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 with FW 800 drives.
OS X provides RAID support without additional software by using the Disk Utility application found in Applications/Utilities. To create a RAID volume, launch Disk Utility, click on the RAID tab, set it for Mac OS Extended, Striped, then drag the drives into the empty box below and hit Create. It's a very simple procedure.
RAID performance is optimal when drives are identical. A RAID set with 2 FW 800 drives may be used on a single FW800 bus provided there are no other devices connected to this bus. Connecting a single FW400 device to a FW800 bus will often bring the entire bus down to the slower speed. It is also possible to set up a RAID using drives on different buses. For example, using two FW400 drives on separate FW400 buses will usually perform better than if they are on a single bus.
If you decide to use some of your existing drives as a RAID, keep in mind that this will create a new volume with these drives, and therefore com- pletely erase anything that is currently on them. So be sure to move/ backup any data that is currently there that you may wish to keep.
Ivory does not show up in host
If Ivory doesn't show up in your host after installation, make sure that the plug-in itself is properly installed. For RTAS, there should be two files named “Ivory.dpm” and “Ivory.dpm.rsr” located here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Digidesign\DAE\Plug-Ins
The VST file is named "Ivory VST.dll" and is installed at the location you specified while running the installer. If you don't remember where it was installed, perform a Windows Search for the name of the file. Once you've determined that this file is on your hard drive, you may need to tell the host application where it is. Each host is different, so please refer to indi- vidual host documentation on how to load VST plug-ins.