Notion 4 Bundled Sounds Download

[themeworks]

Whammy,

I've been reading (through) your posts to get to some real content on this forum for over a year now.

You seem like a nice guy, but dude, you talk entirely too much, and say very little. Take some forum etiquette lessons. I'd hate to read your emails - sheesh.

But to the point, your obvious analysis has NOTHING to do with our present problem. At. All.

The previous poster said it right - Notion simply did not QA or anticipate the load, full stop. It's a trickle. The download site needs to be mirrored and optimized for heavy concurrent traffic, like the big boys do - even if just temporarily. The issue is this costs money - and increases the cost of sale.

So - I shall order a DVD set, and get back to music.

[Surfwhammy]

I shall order a DVD set, and get back to music.

This sounds like an excellent plan, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!

P. S. The reason I suggest that there are other factors, is that the broadband cable service and regional infrastructure here is new due to Hurricanes Ike, Katrina, and Rita, and at this very moment I am downloading the sampled sounds with an expected download time of approximately 5.5 hours, where the worst case based on my experience downloading it yesterday during the day might be an hour more or an hour less . . .

In other words, when one focuses on doing the science, the key question is "Why can I download it 4 to 7 hours with no unrecoverable problems, but other folks in different parts of the country cannot do this?"

But regardless, I feel your pain, and I understand that this is frustrating, so try to be happy . . .

P. P. S. I stopped the download, because (a) I already have the sampled sound files and (b) I would be a jerk if I continually downloaded it just to get a sense of whether it is a system-wide problem or a regional and ISP-specific problem . . .

[elerouxx]

The previous poster said it right - Notion simply did not QA or anticipate the load, full stop. It's a trickle. The download site needs to be mirrored and optimized for heavy concurrent traffic, like the big boys do - even if just temporarily. The issue is this costs money - and increases the cost of sale....

So - I shall order a DVD set, and get back to music.

Disagree. It's a design problem. The installer is a bandwidth waster. It downloads files one by one, in alphabetical order, then fails and starts over downloading all the files again. At this point, hundreds of users have downloaded 'acoustic guitar.prox.zip' over and over, but about none yet has downloaded 'xilophone.prox.zip' or installed any instruments. The server can easily manage the needed speed, as far as they update the installer so it resumes instead of starting over, so people stops downloading the same files over and over again.

I have downloaded some 30 GB of data so far, and still have to download all 8GB of sound files.

[themeworks]

Now that's an excellent post!

I think we are all just simply trying to download the product we are excited about and paid for - following the instructions given.

It's raining truth up in here!

[themeworks]

Elerouxx,

I fully agree - but try downloading the new individual split instrument files - it's just as slow, if not slower, but now you have to keep on it, click or looping a wget for each file - same diff. At this rate, it will take 4-5 days to get them all.

I have not even gotten as far as the installer you refer to - so I whole heartedly agree.

[elerouxx]

There is a number of tools that allow you to schedule download of all links on the page. It will start or resume downloading as needed, so at least it's not something you have to worry about. You can force start the download of those instruments you really need now.

Of course this depends on your browser. I'm using chrome. I remember a cool tool called 'downloadThemAll' in firefox. Anyway, far better than the installer.

[Surfwhammy]

The previous poster said it right - Notion simply did not QA or anticipate the load, full stop. It's a trickle. The download site needs to be mirrored and optimized for heavy concurrent traffic, like the big boys do - even if just temporarily. The issue is this costs money - and increases the cost of sale....

So - I shall order a DVD set, and get back to music.

Disagree. It's a design problem. The installer downloads files one by one, in alphabetical order, then fails and starts over. At this point, hundreds of users have downloaded 'acoustic guitar.prox.zip' but about none yet has downloaded 'xilophone.prox.zip'. The server can easily manage the needed speed, as far as they update the installer so it resumes, and people stops downloading the same files over and over again. Now the servers are overloaded from repeated downloads.

I have downloaded some 30 GB of data so far, and still have to download all 8GB of sound files.

This is a very intriguing observation, and it is not the way I downloaded the sample sound library on the Mac Pro here in the sound isolation studio . . .

I used the sampled sounds single large file link for the Mac that Notion Music provided in the email they sent after I purchased the NOTION 4 upgrade, and it is a link to a single file which is approximately 6GB . . .

More to the point, I did not run the installer until after the single large file had finished downloading, since I did a "Save File", where the link I used downloads a single very large file named "NotionBundledSounds.pkg" . . .

And on the Mac with both Firefox 16.0.1 and Safari 6.0.1, I can start the download; pause it; resume it; or whatever, which includes being able to resume the download if the broadband cable ISP connection is interrupted . . .

[NOTE: Firefox and Safari can start, stop, and resume the download of a single file with no problems, but when an executable application separate from the web browser is downloading individual files sequentially, its ability to pause and then restart depends on the way the executable application is programmed, and yet another bit of information is that ISPs have sophisticated network management software that constantly monitors stuff, and in particular all of it will be suspicious of ".exe" files and constant streams of typically small individual files, which depending on the particular ISP can be a factor in disruptions, where depending on whether the particular ISP has a quota system, at some point when the number of individual files or the total downloaded data quantity reaches a certain threshold, the ISP network management software simply shuts-down the traffic, which generally is called "throttling", "metering", and a few other names, where a few years ago as an example Cox Cable was doing this, but it was not the only ISP that did it. The local ISP here has a network management system with quotas, and if you exceed the monthly allowed quota by 10 percent the ISP puts you in what it calls the "dog house", where for the next month all you can do is read email, and if you do it another time they charge penalties (which at one time was approximately $10 [US] per gigabyte over the quota) and eventually disconnect you from their network, but after the hurricanes with all new cabling, network equipment, and infrastructure, the monthly quota is very high, so it is not a problem any more, but for a while it was a huge hassle, since at one point the monthly quota was 20GB total, but now it is huge to the point that I can watch streaming movies from Amazon Prime all day with no quota problems . . . ]

There are no individual instrument sampled sound files being downloaded for Mac users, since everything is in one large file, and it specifically is a ".pkg" file, which according to wikipedia is a Mac thing . . .

.pkg (wikipedia)

Another thing I noticed when I reread the email that Notion Music sent is that the sampled sounds link for Windows users is entirely different, and instead of being a "pkg" file, it is an ".exe" file . . .

And this certainly can be a factor, where one hypothesis is that the folks who are having difficulties are doing everything on Windows machines . . .

Yet another thing I noticed is the the instructions in the email I received from Notion Music tells me to download and install the application first and then to download the ".pkg" after I have installed NOTION 4, which is the way I did it . . .

On the Mac, the application is installed with a ".dmg" installation package and as noted the sampled sounds are in one large file, which is a ".pkg", but for Windows users the application is installed using a ".exe" installation program, as is the case for the sampled sound libraries . . .

In other words, it literally and physically is done differently on the Mac than on Windows, really . . .

Really!

[elerouxx]

yeah, it's different in mac and windows, but no better. the best thing to do is to download the individual files.

[DaddyO]

Can I go ahead and install Notion 4 without all the sounds? If so, are there certain sounds I must download for things to work, or do I need to download only sounds I plan on using? I doesn't seem feasible to download all of those individual instruments individually.

I'm still hoping for answers to these questions so I know how I can begin to use Notion 4. I don't need all those sounds. My primary library is VSL SE Vol 1, so the symphonic sounds from the LSO will be helpful for layering. But I need to know if things will work OK if I don't download the sounds.

[Surfwhammy]

Can I go ahead and install Notion 4 without all the sounds? If so, are there certain sounds I must download for things to work, or do I need to download only sounds I plan on using? I doesn't seem feasible to download all of those individual instruments individually.

I'm still hoping for answers to these questions so I know how I can begin to use Notion 4. I don't need all those sounds. My primary library is VSL SE Vol 1, so the symphonic sounds from the LSO will be helpful for layering. But I need to know if things will work OK if I don't download the sounds.

This is what the email from Notion Music says:

Notion 4 Electronic Download

Instructions: First, download and run the application installer for your platform (Windows or Mac OS X). Then, download and run the sounds installer for your platform. NOTE: The sounds installer is large and could take several hours to download.

The first time you launch the product, you will be prompted to enter your License Number, given below. Please save this license number for your records.

I installed NOTION 4 on the Mac and ran it all day while I worked on various versions of "Over The Rainbow", which I used to test MachFive 3 (MOTU) running in 64-bit mode along with NOTION 4 running in 64-bit mode . . .

The only reason I installed the sampled sound library yesterday was to help someone with a problem, since for the most part I do not use the NOTION bundled instruments, although I use a few of them every once in a while for specific purposes . . .

Lots of FUN!