I’ve jumped into the deep end with Gig Performer. I got involved with an 80’s synthwave band and I’ve been programming rackspaces almost non-stop for two months now. I’ve done scriptlets for automation and triggering and all sorts of stuff. I love GP!
One issue I’m running up against is when using Predictive Loading though. It seems that if I forget I have it on and jump around too much outside of the preloaded rackspaces GP freezes and I get the spinning beach ball until I force quit the app and relaunch it. I’ve even left it alone for awhile to see if it recovers, but it doesn’t. I shouldn’t need to jump around on a show but as I’m programming rackspaces I try to keep the load on the computer light as well. So I predictive load 5 racks.
I am on a 2023 MacBook Pro running an M2 Max chip with 32GB of RAM running Ventura 13.6.2 and GP 4.8.2. All of my AUs consist of Arturia V-Collection, Roland Cloud, Modartt, Keyscape, MusicLab RealStrat and NI Guitar Rig. I ran into an issue with Kontakt with predictive loading so I removed it from the gig file and am not using it.
Has anyone else encountered this? Is there something I can do to mitigate this? Thanks for any advise and thanks Deskew for such an awesome product!
Regarding predictive loading, some plugins don’t like being reset so that could be an issue once they have been loaded. Try the VST versions of your plugins. I find VSTs tend to be more reliable, they tend to get tested on a much larger range of plugin hosts.
I wrestle with this same issue from time to time. Because my Surface Pro 8 has just 16gig of ram, I use predictive set on 1 as I jump around as you do when I’m using a large set of 400 songs. The gig file takes 4 minutes to load, and once loaded, rackspaces can take 9 or 10 seconds to be ready to play. With the large set, the best solution is to be patient and just wait for it to fully load.
So you could try predictive on 1 to see how that works.
Other times I will use a much smaller set of 20 songs which is ideal for an hours playing. In this case, I will turn predictive off as I have enough ram to load all 20 rack spaces. Hope this is helpful
Right now, nothing much would happen if I didn’t run predictive loading but in the not too distant future, I’ll have more rack spaces than I’d have resources for. I’m hitting around 20GB of RAM utilization without it now and I have a max of 32GB.
I’ll give VSTs a try. I’ve been using all AUs so that could play into it as well. Thanks for the reply.
You suggested I try the VSTs instead of the AUs so I was simply agreeing that if the AUs aren’t as well tested as VSTs then it may play into the issue I’m seeing.
One obvious point is another option to Predictive Loading is to set up different Gig Files. For example, if you are in different bands and there are songs that do not overlap, you could create one Gig File for one band and another Gig File for another band.
That would have been the direction I would have gone had I not upgraded my laptops to 64GB ram (with an option to upgrade 128GB, or maybe even more).
Of course, in addition to ram, there is the related issue of the loading time. But as long as I can work on other parts of my set up while its loading, I am okay in that department.
Unfortunately this is the only band I’m using GP for at the moment. I will be implementing this rig with other bands though and I will build different rackspaces for those bands. My first gig with this setup is Saturday. This band has a break after early December and I’ll have more time to explore other options before the next gig comes up.
Just following up on my thread here… What I did to mitigate the issue was this. Since this band (unlike a lot of the others I play with) structures their sets and sticks with the order of the list, I simply made a different gig file for each set containing only the rack spaces and songs I need for it. Each set break I simply load the next set. Doing it this way, I’m not trying to load a ton of AU synths and effects and I don’t need to even turn predictive loading on.
I read another thread on this forum somewhere where someone also suggested running a separate instance with just the basic bread and butter sounds (piano, E.P. Organ, strings, clav) and when those are needed simply use that instance for those and only use the primary instance for the crazy songs with a billion sounds in them.
Hopefully this advice may help someone else experimenting with this who is in a similar situation.