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BBC SO and BBC Abbey Road - Heavy Cpu use - Advice ?

Paul Jelfs

Senior Member
Hey ,

I had a look around but because the Thread on both these products is 100 pages long, I did not find an answer -

Basically , I really love these two libraries- I have the Pro of SO and Abbey Road Foundations , but am finding them to be EXTREMELY cpu hungry. (Windows 10) Running off an M2 SSD.

I have a RME AIO pro card and a i9 9940 with 14 cores, yet even with One instance of BBC SO (albeit playing HUGE CHORDS ) I can cause CPU problems.

Is there a way to distribute the load across more cores , or a setting within the app (I have ample Ram) that will help with this? I did not want to increase the BLOCK sizes etc without getting some advice first.

I am not using many mics either -Just close and Tree. Both are great sounding libraries but do not seem to be very optimized, at least for Windows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Have also been looking at Spitfire Support, but only found others in the same position, with no answer given.

Thanks again,

PJ
 
That is VERY odd. The spitfire people are very quick to respond. I'd recommend reaching out to them and in the chat window try and share as much info about your system as possible. For me running windows 10 ( albeit with 256g ram ) I have never had a problem...it's very solid

best

ed
 
Sorry , I did not mean Spitfire had been contacted, just looking through their support site.

How many instances can you run and can you tell the best Block sizes ? I also have 256gb of Ram, so can take the load off the Cpu .
 
Do you experience this problem with BBCSO alone? Try it without Abbey Road One. My experience is that Abbey Road is incredibly CPU intensive, but I have never had a problem with BBCSO.
 
Actually those 2 are the Hungriest Libraries in Existence
so, you don't have a problem but that is how they are.
I own them both, on NVMEs and on an 19 10900k,
they bring it down to its knees. Nevermind what everyone
else tells you but you do not have a problem, its just the
way they work...do some research on you tube and you wil see.
 
Contact Spitfire Support. I run fully fledged AR1 and BBSCO templates, fully loaded and playing, on my i9 iMac and they work perfectly fine - with CPU to spare.
 
Contact Spitfire Support. I run fully fledged AR1 and BBSCO templates, fully loaded and playing, on my i9 iMac and they work perfectly fine - with CPU to spare.
I wonder how Spitfire would help them since they do not seem
to help anyone else with the same thing...many tried. I am not
trying to be anything but i just wonder if there is a workaround
since the majority YES, it bring every machine down to its knees.
Now, the problem with this is people just Load the Templates in
and empty project and Rave about it here...can you try making
a song with 25 ARO Tracksand 40 BBC SO PRO Tracks and hit Play?
Let us know how that works out.
 
I wonder how Spitfire would help them since they do not seem
to help anyone else with the same thing...many tried. I am not
trying to be anything but i just wonder if there is a workaround
since the majority YES, it bring every machine down to its knees.
Now, the problem with this is people just Load the Templates in
and empty project and Rave about it here...can you try making
a song with 25 ARO Tracksand 40 BBC SO PRO Tracks and hit Play?
Let us know how that works out.
I use libraries in practical application, not for tests that are not rooted in reality.
 
Maybe BBCSO and Abbey road just works on Mac?
It works fine on my old Mac pro 2013.
a friend if mine has big problems using it on PC. Spitfire has tried to help him but without success.
Its a bit sad, the sound of these libraries are extra ordinary....
 
I wonder how Spitfire would help them since they do not seem
to help anyone else with the same thing...many tried. I am not
trying to be anything but i just wonder if there is a workaround
since the majority YES, it bring every machine down to its knees.
Now, the problem with this is people just Load the Templates in
and empty project and Rave about it here...can you try making
a song with 25 ARO Tracksand 40 BBC SO PRO Tracks and hit Play?
Let us know how that works out.
works out fine. I have a massive template full of BBC and ABBEY Rd. No problems at all

best

e
 
I use libraries in practical application, not for tests that are not rooted in reality.
Exactly. Practical Application is using 1 single Library for a whole
composition that can end up having 250 Tracks.
Impractical would be making a Template with 250 Tracks
which the person will never compose anything on and then
rave how they have no problems loading all of it.
 
Exactly. Practical Application is using 1 single Library for a whole
composition that can end up having 250 Tracks.
Impractical would be making a Template with 250 Tracks
which the person will never compose anything on and then
rave how they have no problems loading all of it.
Unsurprisingly, you don't understand. I use my template to write music. It doesn't need to have 250 tracks unless you want to do one track per articulation, which I don't. You also are highly unlikely to have all 250 or whatever tracks playing at the same time, unless you are absolute sh*t are orchestration and have no clue what you are doing - which is similar to your proposed test.
 
Don't forget to exclude the folders from the Anti virus scan built in to Windows, that could help performance if it's not already done.

Actually that helps a lot with Any Library, Plugin or even DAW Loading.
But it helps only with Loading time not with CPU use.
 
Hey ,

I had a look around but because the Thread on both these products is 100 pages long, I did not find an answer -

Basically , I really love these two libraries- I have the Pro of SO and Abbey Road Foundations , but am finding them to be EXTREMELY cpu hungry. (Windows 10) Running off an M2 SSD.

I have a RME AIO pro card and a i9 9940 with 14 cores, yet even with One instance of BBC SO (albeit playing HUGE CHORDS ) I can cause CPU problems.

Is there a way to distribute the load across more cores , or a setting within the app (I have ample Ram) that will help with this? I did not want to increase the BLOCK sizes etc without getting some advice first.

I am not using many mics either -Just close and Tree. Both are great sounding libraries but do not seem to be very optimized, at least for Windows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Have also been looking at Spitfire Support, but only found others in the same position, with no answer given.

Thanks again,

PJ
i have the same configuration on PC and also the same problems with SA AR1 and BBC SO. Are there any solutions. i speak since 4 months with the SA support - but with no success :-(
 
On windows it helps to turn off real-time threat protection and the other stuff in windows defender. I do find BBC more demanding than other libraries though. Someone in another thread was suggesting using VEPPro might help.
 
Yes..on Windows is all that stuff already off. And i try also VEpro 7 for AR1. It was a bit better but only a bit. I don't know..can it be a problem with the intel i9900K?
 
Yes..on Windows is all that stuff already off. And i try also VEpro 7 for AR1. It was a bit better but only a bit. I don't know..can it be a problem with the intel i9900K?
There's nothing you can do.
Spitfire's own Direct From Disk streaming engine and voice management is simply bad.
It's not that it's "good, but not as good as", it's simply really very independently bad.

Some operation(s) there seem single threaded and those easily choke a single core on any cpu in existence today and years to come. your only way to get more polyphony with SA player libs, is to use more instances on more DAW tracks. its not a cure, its just a way to feed your audio workstation with an un-optimized workload so that it can distribute the load better.

In the same time there are users who manage to use the platform without problems.
Usually those users will use very big ASIO buffers (like 2048 samples), VEPRO with 1 or 2 buffers (which double or triple your ASIO buffer size), Cubase ASIO Guard (lots of latency for playback pre-processing)... or a combination of the above.
In other words their use profile is of "playback" optimized.
I assume its not your use profile at all, which means their experience has nothing to do with yours :)
 
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