NOTION Music Forum

Just wanted to start a thread on EastWest libraries and Notion4. My main interest in Notion4 was to be able to utilize these libraries in native 64bit and I had hoped for better integration with EW. It looks like the integration effort may have gone towards to VSL. I'm fairly new to Notion so my experience is minimal and I just got Eastwest Complete Composers Collection (CCC) which comes on a dedicated hard drive. So far I have have had mixed results. I expected to be able to load the full template and just have it work. Well not so easy I think. So I tried the lite versions and same result. I'm not savvy enough to tell if its me, EW or N4. I did find out from EW that Notion is NOT a supported platform. What? You don't support platforms that support you? Pretty amazing stance to take for a samples company. But whatever.

Anyway post your experiences here.

FWIW My system:

Win7 64
Intel i7 3770
16gig ram


a basic 2012 desktop.
sample libraries
Eastwest CCC
Halion Symphony
Komplete 5
Miroslav etc.

What exactly was the issue loading EW?

I just loaded up a standard orchestra with full patches, and it seems to be fine. Uses about 5.5GB of RAM

Yes they load fine after you tell it where each sample library is. But when trying each staff I notice some of the sounds are not there, (ie no sound) or instruments get mixed up. Flute samples being in the Oboe staff, even though the staff setting says Oboe! So you make the manual change back to Oboe and the Flute staff now has the oboe sounds as well! Not exactly correct, yes?

Did you check each staff to hear what you expected?

Also some sounds cut in and out during playback. For instance I loaded the bass clarinet, cello and piano instruments and while the Bass clarinet and Cello sounded fine, the piano cut in and out for no obvious reasons.

Since I'm new to a lot of this I'm just hoping to learn from others experiences using EW's libraries and Play engine with Notion4. I'm also not blaming either product for my problems as I don't know enough to say what specifically is the causing it.

To hear that Notion is not a EW recognized platform is disconcerting to say the least. I mean exactly what is required to be a EW recognized platform? Crazy. Of course I bought the CCC specifically because I wanted the full meal deal to work with N4. Oh well. Hopefully its just learning curve issues on my side but its confusing. The mixing of samples between staffs is just strange. Hence this thread.

All instrument are assigned properly for me...

How do you have the CCC disk connected to your system?

Don't worry about what it says or doesn't say on the EW website. That just means they haven't bothered to test with Notion.

CCC comes preloaded on a single drive (esata/7200). I have it as my internal drive D:. I'm glad to hear its working for you. That gives me hope that its just me.

wcreed51 wrote:All instrument are assigned properly for me...

How do you have the CCC disk connected to your system?

Don't worry about what it says or doesn't say on the EW website. That just means they haven't bothered to test with Notion.

Why I wonder would they not bother to test it? Its curious alright. I have to believe there are 1000s of potential customers.

And it was not posted on their website, it was communicated to me by EW Customer support.

I noticed you are on the Play4 thread on their forum. Are you a P4 beta tester? I've asked Josh to get a copy to the N4 team to test it as well. Hopefully they will get a copy to ensure it 'plays' nice. The EW sounds are superior to be sure, but not so much if they don't work well. Do I have to be an engineer to get this to work?

Anyway I'm gonna give it a rest for now as Its aggravating me too much. I will blog this thread as I suffer through my learning curve.

The good news is I still love Notion and much prefer it, and its quirks, to the alternatives. Seamless integration of the major libraries is demanded at this stage. YMMV as they say.

Anybody else using N4 and EW with the latest Play?

No, still using Play 3.0.40. Was supposed to get the Play 4 beta, but it seems to have been pushed off into the future. Haven't heard anything for a couple of weeks.

Things work ok using Play in standalone? With other sequencers?

Bill I can play the standalone players using the virtual keyboards, but that tells me very little. I have not tried it with my keyboards or with another sequencer as I got EW basically for use in N4. I will try it though. I'm giving it a break for now. I solve problems in spurts. Thanks, I will report back after I get back into it.

I also have problems with the default templates not finding samples which is probably the cause of the intruments not being assigned properly or not loaded. I'm running Play 3.0.25.

I was wondering are you using Symphonic Orchestra Gold or Platinum? I'm using Gold and I wonder if it is the source of the problem, since they seems to have created the template with Platinum edition.

Thanks.