EZDrummer takes ages to load

[John Green]

EZDrummer always loaded slow for me, i.e. a kit would take sometimes over a minute, even in a specialist audio PC i7 Intel. I recently upgraded to an even more powerful high end PC with Intel Sandy Bridge processor running at 3.4Mgz, 6GB memory, Windows 64 bit, and EZDrummer still loads pitifully slow. If I have a project in Sonar, Addictive Drums loads in seconds whilst an EZDrummer kit still takes about a minute even though my resource graphs show a tiny, tiny fraction of memory and processor being used. This tells me the problem is EZDrummer not my DAW.

Why is this? Is there anything I can do to speed things up?

Topic

[Richard Kitt]

The only thing I can think of is if you installed the ‘sounds’ on a seperate harddrive that is particuarly slow.

[John Green]

Thanks for responding. No, all the sounds are in the default location, i.e. along with the programs on C: drive.
NB: I saw in support that sample rates higher than 44.1 can cause load times to be 3 to 6 times longer. But I always use 44.1 so it’s not that.

[Veech]

It takes about one full minute for EZDrummer to load on my machine, but my box is an older dual-core unit and had always assumed that was why. 

I have a ton of add-on midi packs and I bet that’s a big part of it.

[Richard Kitt]

For what its worth just timed it loading in reaper, about 11secs.  Thats on an Intel i7 with 6G and a fairly fast harddrive.I guess one other possibility is that your hardrive is badly fragmented, have you checked that?

[John Green]

Thanks Veech. Even more mysterious then with my Intel Sandy-bridge i7 3.4GHz, 4 cores, 8 threads, 6Gb RAM, and only one add-on MIDI pack.
Thanks Fretbuzz. Being a brand new machine, (I received it late April and installed all my stuff over a period of a few days after that), it shouldn’t be that fragmented. But I’ll check that and see just in case.

[John Green]

Pop Rock Kit takes 55 seconds to load its 303MB, Nashville Kit 65 seconds for 334MB.

[Dave Modisette]

Do you have your SONAR project set at a bit rate and depth other than 16bit 44.1 khz?  It could be that SONAR is doing a sample conversion.
 
EDIT: Missed your previous post.

Dave Modisette www.gatortraks.com www.plasticsamerica.com http://www.gatortraks.com/forum

[John Green]

Bump.
Is it just me that has this problem then?

[Scott]

Pop Rock Kit takes 55 seconds to load its 303MB, Nashville Kit 65 seconds for 334MB.

This sounded a bit odd to me because when I load the default Pop/Rock kit at a 44.1kHz sampling rate, it loads in at 268MB. As a test, I changed the sampling rate in Reaper to 48kHz and loaded the default Pop/Rock kit. It loaded in at 303MB. I then loaded the Nashville EZX default kit and it loaded in at 334MB when it normally loads in at 293MB at 44.1kHz.

I can’t think of another scenario where those kits will load in at those higher RAM use numbers other than with a sampling rate of 48kHz.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Vagif]

I can confirm that the same thing happens to me: I have a powerful machine with i7, SSD and 12 GB RAM, and each time I change a drum kit (I have several EZX extentions) it takes about a minute to fully load the instruments. I can see a megabyte counter: 104, 108, 115… etc. This is a creativity killer. Sometimes I am afraid to try another kit because I know I’ll have to wait so long.

My host is Cubase and projects’ sampling rate is 96 kHz. So it there anything that can be done? I’ve never experienced such delay with other plugins.

Vagif Abilov Oslo Norway

[John Green]

ORIGINAL: Scott

Pop Rock Kit takes 55 seconds to load its 303MB, Nashville Kit 65 seconds for 334MB.

This sounded a bit odd to me because when I load the default Pop/Rock kit at a 44.1kHz sampling rate, it loads in at 268MB. As a test, I changed the sampling rate in Reaper to 48kHz and loaded the default Pop/Rock kit. It loaded in at 303MB. I then loaded the Nashville EZX default kit and it loaded in at 334MB when it normally loads in at 293MB at 44.1kHz.

I can’t think of another scenario where those kits will load in at those higher RAM use numbers other than with a sampling rate of 48kHz.

Scott, you’re right. I hadn’t noticed the project I was working on was started a long while back and it was at 48kHz.
However, kits still take a very long time to load in 44.1kHz despite my high-spec machine and I don’t see why XLN’s Addictive Drums kits can load in five seconds or so and EZDrums in four or five times that. I see from the post above I’m not the only one who finds it poor, sorry.

[Scott]

I don’t know what else to tell you guys other than pointing to the FAQ:

EZdrummer was designed to operate best at 44.1K. It can of course be used at any sample rate but the engine will have to recalculate the samples to compensate for the resulting shift in pitch.

In order to guarantee no loss of quality the above procedure requires non trivial computation and loading time will rise significantly, by up to a factor 3 to 6, depending on computer resources available.

Note also that operating at high sample rate will unavoidably increase the memory requirements. A 96K project for example will require over twice as much physical memory (RAM) to operate, this is strictly no fault of the software.

I don’t find the loading times of EZD at 44.1kHz a problem at all. It takes about 50 secs on my laptop loading from a USB hard drive. After the first initial loading, any secondary load time will be around 10 secs.

The reason why AD seems to load faster is that it streams samples initially from the hard drive. EZdrummer doesn’t.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Vagif]

Scott,

Thank you for the clarification, that makes sense.

Now since all my other tracks come from MIDI and VST instruments and not audio sources, should I be able to improve performance by setting initial sample rate to 44.1 and only changing it to higher rate before I start producing audio tracks? This way I will keep things fast while I am at composing stage. This will work, won’t it?

Vagif Abilov Oslo Norway

[Scott]

I never change sample rates in the middle of a project so you’ll have to tell me how it works out for you. 

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Vagif]

I never did either, and I don’t think it will do any good in case the project has audio tracks. What I would like to try is to change it before generating first audio track. Should work, but I see that it’s not an ideal workaround: even if I only have MIDI and VST instruments, it’s difficult to separate work process to “composition” and “recording” stages: of course I will want to come back and redo some parts. So perhaps this is not as useful as I thought it might be.

Vagif Abilov Oslo Norway

[Author]

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