NOTION Music Forum

I'm finding that Notion's bundled instruments are very slow to respond to live MIDI input when first loaded. After I've played all the notes used in a particular piece at least once, and sometimes several times, the instrument starts to respond with only the latency of the ASIO buffer (128 samples) and MIDI transmission delay. I attribute this to some sort of disk-streaming process as Notion loads samples into RAM only as they're called for, and maybe not until they've been used repeatedly.

Have I got that right, and is there anything to be done about it? By comparison, the TruePianos VSTi plays with low latency right from the first note as I would expect.

BrundleFly wrote:I'm finding that Notion's bundled instruments are very slow to respond to live MIDI input when first loaded. After I've played all the notes used in a particular piece at least once, and sometimes several times, the instrument starts to respond with only the latency of the ASIO buffer (128 samples) and MIDI transmission delay. I attribute this to some sort of disk-streaming process as Notion loads samples into RAM only as they're called for, and maybe not until they've been used repeatedly.

Have I got that right, and is there anything to be done about it? By comparison, the TruePianos VSTi plays with low latency right from the first note as I would expect.

I have not experienced this issue. How much RAM do you have on your machine?

I have 4GB. I know this is getting to be considered puny these days, but the entire Notion Piano is only 690MB, and with the Piano loaded in Notion, and this browser running, Windows Resource Monitor still shows 2.5GB available.

However, I just checked, and I the smaller instruments do not exhibit this initial delay, so it is apparently a problem with getting all the sounds loaded into RAM. But if I add next 10 largest instruments to the score, the RAM footprint doesn't change at all, and they all respond fine.

So it seems to be some issue with the Piano, specifically. It is the largest instrument, but not by orders of magnitude, so I think there must be more to it than just size. There must be some programming difference between the way the Piano and other instruments are handled.

In any case, even if more RAM would resolve it, I'm out of luck for the moment 'cause this old motherboard is maxed out.

P.S. Just checked published system requirements for Notion: 2GB RAM minimum, 4GB RAM recommended. I should be good.

FYI - After trying some suggestions from tech support to no avail, it occurred to me to try re-installing just the piano.prox file. The file name and date did not change, but apparently something got reset somewhere, because the problem has all but completely disappeared. There is still the slightest extra delay when playing the first few notes after loading the piano, but nowhere near as severe or persistent as I was seeing before.