[Wine] Native Instruments Battery3

[jordan]

hey Nicola,

> Hi Jordan, thank you for the advices!

no problem :)

> I wiped out my Ubuntu installation and now I have a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 with Kxstudio's ppa (wine-rt 1.3.9, wineASIO 0.9.0, jack2).

ya, you will find KxStudio is a little better setup for wine audio
apps, then most pro-audio linux distros.

> You told me that you had to rollback your Battery version, which version you have now?

I am running 3.1.1 - I believe the upgrade that i had was 3.1.4 . if
that is not the correct version, i can list the main new features
included in the update. ~ midi automation was the big feature, and
also improvements for SMP support.

> 2. What is exactly SMP support? I can't be able to find it.

SMP : symmetric multi-processing.   as in your CPU has multiple
cores/processers - newer versions of battery can take advantage of,
when using the "standalone plugin"....
the VST (.dll) does not have SMP support.

In Battery goto the file-menu, then down and click on "options".  You
should find the setting for SMP in there. - either to enable or
disable smp support. (you will have to restart battery3 for the
changes to take effect.

You could also try running the VST version in FST/festige, and see how
it performs there.

Have you also tried to adjust Battey3's rt-priorites????

> 3. Ok, I reduced to one stereo output for testing.

did that help at all?

> 4. I don't use DFD: I load all the samples in memory.

that's probably a good thing.

I still will stress to you, that Battery3 is going to cause xruns to
one degree or another,
especially at lower latencies. The fact that you say it is using upto
50% of your CPU, makes me wonder why you would even bother using
it....?  (as i've been down this road before)

as I said before, you would be much better off using "native" linux
applications for sampling.
50% cpu (with Battery3) vs. 2-8% cpu usage with any sampling software
in linux. ie: linuxsampler, specimen, tapeutape.

if you actually plan on using many instruments at the same time, using
Battery3 is going to have bad consequences. - you wont get very good
performance out of your system. Battery3 is REALLY bloated, and it's
GUI is always going to cause you issues in wine... for example: select
multiple "cells" in battery, with lower frames in jack. repeat this a
few times, and watch how xruns appear - this is problematic.   It
isn't a very reliable app to use for music production in wine.

I have a quad-core 3.2ghz, with 8gigs of RAM  -   and i don't waste my
time with Battery3. I would rather be able to actually compose music,
with many synths/instruments/samples.

Let's put this in perpective ~ my laptop 1.6ghz coreduo, can run
specimen with 6 octaves of multi-samples (more than 1 sample per key,
with a total of 72 "cells/keys"). It can run this easily (with other
VSTi's, soooperlooper and FX - no problem, zero xruns, and very low
CPU usage, from specimen. If i were to do the same thing in Battery3
on my quadcore - it would be using 5-10X the CPU.

Instead as far as using VSTi in wine. I stick to synthesizers
(massive, FM8, Absynth), the odd sample-based instruments like the
pianos, M-tron Pro....and of course, FX and mastering utilities.  For
most drums and samples, it is much more sensible to use Linux apps,
they work much more reliably, efficiently and tend to not cause xruns,
the way Wine applications can.
i hope that helps.

jordan