1 Computer for Hauptwerk, and 2. Free Edition Problems

Mates,

My first post here.

This has been asked in many ways, many times, but I wonder if there's any casual formula for specifying a computer for Hauptwerk use? I see posts where HW users with elaborate dual processor, multicore computers with huge amounts of RAM are still complaining- well, maikng note- about limitations of use. I did some research as to building a new computer: Asus MB, Core 2 quad processor at 2.66, 16GB RAM, 2- 1TB HD's and so on, but from the posts here, it seems a bit hit or miss whether this would be enough. I understand everything depends on the number of stops, effects, and notes anticipated at once, but is there a way to say something that quantifies: Sample set size squared over maximum number of stops at once plus maximum number of notes at once X 1.36= GB RAM and that number X .25 = number of cores and that number divided by 1.6 = processor speed and that times 200 = buffers? And as a check, the processor speed X 4.8 should be the organist's shoe size! - I know this example is silly, but it seems there could be some way to guide computer specification with less guessing or an "as much as possible" attitude- which is not an engineering principle I normally like- not at today's prices!

And, (I think) because of the computer specification issue, I've had a somewhat disappointing start with Hauptwerk. I tried to load the Free Edition to try it on my usual recording computer and synthesizer- Yamaha S90 > M-Audio 2496), but it would never install, ending with an uninformative "illegal operation" error message near the end of installation- the ubiquitous "stack dump". I had expectations that a Pentium 750 with only 256MB RAM wouldn't offer much in the way of a test, but I'd hoped I could still listen to individual notes and combinations. Thinking the problem was an Antediluvian computer, I installed Hauptwerk FE on my CAD set up Dell P4, 3 Ghz with 1.5GB RAM. In this case, Hauptwerk will not open at all, apparently as "No MIDI device is connected". Here, I thought using the "standalone", this should work without a MIDI instrument- isn't it possible to produce sounds using the mouse on the virtual keyboards or by keyboard input?

I have to say, the samples of Hauptwerk I've heard are promising, but MP3 over computer speakers is a waste to try and evaluate sound and in any event, both MP3 and the .wav demos are far too short- I tried a number but never heard a sample that had any contrasts- changes of sound. I did hear a couple of pieces done on Hauptwerk on YouTube, but as I can't at the moment try it, is there a place to download longer samples with more variety of sound?

Hauptwerk is an incredible project- culturally important even, but like many worthwhile pursuits- is very complicated!

Thanks!

Cheers,

Bambi B

[B. Milan]

Hello Bambi,

I've moved this post to the Free Edition forum.

Please see the Requirements page of our website:

http://www.hauptwerk.com/requirements

which lists the minimum system requirements.

You do need to have a MIDI device attached in order to launch Hauptwerk. Please have a look at the Hauptwerk user guide as well which lists prerequisites for running Hauptwerk.

http://www.hauptwerk.com/documentation

Hauptwerk standalone version will require at least one MIDI input to be present on your system - you could always try installing LoopBe or similar virtual MIDI ports if you don't have a physical MIDI adapter to test with. On the PC you couldn't install on - you don't mention what OS you are running? Latest service packs, updates etc.? With only 256MB of RAM you'll definitely need to make sure you've got either a large swap file or automatic swap file size configured.

It's hard to come up with a generic forumla which would be reliable in calculateing the PC requirements to run a sample set as each set has its own different performance requirements dictated by many factors, probably the most significant (pipe for pipe) being sample loop, and release sample lengths.

B.Milan,

Thank you for your reply. Despite appearances, I had gone through the requirements page and spent some time looking into the relationship of computer power and Hauptwerk use. The aspect that triggered my question were the posts on this forum with comments from those having computers of high specification who still felt limited. Someone- I can't find this post again at the moment- had a computer with 2- quad processors and 24GB RAM who still experienced constrictions and increased the RAM to 32 GB. Again, I'm beginning to underatnd the various influences of particular use, so I think I can find a reasonable level for the hardware- neither too frugal nor overkill. So far, I've been able to find motherboards supporting 16GB RAM- most are 8GB maximum. My current 3Ghz Dell can use a maximum of 2GB.

I believe most of my use would be relatively simple- but as I'm also hoping to work on Mahler Symphonic transcriptions using three or four manuals, and am looking into the various large scale instrument sets, I may need a hot rod computer.

I was hoping to get some feel for this using Free Edition, but that I couldn't get the demonstration/evaluation version to work made things seem more uncertain. I'd forgotten I retro-ed my recording computer from XP Home to Win98 to use a particular piece of hardware. My plan now is to temporarily move the M-Audio 2496 to the Dell 3 Ghz with XP Pro. I can connect the S90 and perhaps can make some sounds to try it.

Do you have or know places to download longer .wav samples having a variety of sounds and contrasts, effects, etc? I'm especially interested in the Silbermanns and various symphonic and French romantic sets.

Thanks very much!

Cheers,

Bambi B
Los Angeles

PS: Not everything in the World is worse than it was. My first computer was a 1993 IBM 486 / 25, - no math co-processor, using DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 this had only 2MB RAM and the HD was 85MB! The 15" NEC 3V monitor cost $450 and adding 2MB RAM cost $180. It took about 6 months with Wordperfect 6 DOS and AutoCad 10 DOS to fill the 85MB HD!

[B. Milan]

Hello Bambi,

Do you have or know places to download longer .wav samples having a variety of sounds and contrasts, effects, etc? I'm especially interested in the Silbermanns and various symphonic and French romantic sets.

You can find full length demos for most sample sets by visiting the producers websites for those sets. The Hauptwerk website has some full length demos here:

http://www.hauptwerk.com/demos

however the instrument database pages on the Hauptwerk website just have short clips for each instrument to give you an idea of the sound it produces.

Bambi,

I admire your attempt to try and calculate what sort of computer you will need. However, I do not think that it will get you very far. It is rather like saying: If I know the maximum engine rpm, number of cylinders, brake mean effective pressure, axle ratio and the wheel size of a car how long will it take me to get to work? I had a 5.3 litre V12 and a 1.0 litre in-line 4 and they both took the same time! Traffic proved to be the most important factor.

My current PC is "last year's version" of the one you are proposing: Quad core 2.66, 8GB ram and 1TB disk. I picked this on a "sweet spot" cost/performance basis. Supermicro do a board which supports 192GB and 4 quad core Xeons, if memory serves - but it costs about as much as my whole PC and needs a special (read expensive) rack.

My PC will run probably all Hauptwerk organs in some form. I will have to reduce the features on the bigger ones. It is a bit like computer games. You have to lose some realism if you want to play the latest, biggest ones.

The problem you will have with the free edition of Hauptwerk is that the polyphony is limited to 256. If you pick a fairly dry (ie not much reverberation) organ and play some hymns using only a few stops then it should not be a problem. If, on the other hand, you pick, say, the SP Caen organ and want to use its surround sound ability and upset the neighbours with a fully registered rendition of Widor 6 using all the realism features then you will be greatly disappointed.

You mentioned "notes anticipated at once" in your post. It is not quite that simple because for a wet (ie lots of reverberation) organ, Hauptwerk not only plays the original notes it also plays the reverberation. So imagine the SP Caen set with 50 stops drawn using surround sound. If you played a 10 note chord using all 50 stops then Hauptwerk gets the job of playing 10*50*2=1000 samples at 44 kHz through the sound card. If you stop playing that chord then Hauptwerk continues by playing 1000 reverberation samples. If you then play another 10 note chord then Hauptwerk could still be playing the previous set of reverberation samples and the current chord - 2000 samples in all. The more notes you play a second the greater the load. (Note that the first 1000 samples would blow the 256 polyphony limit in the free edition.)

I expect you noticed that 256MB is below the minimum spec recommended for Hauptwerk. That might be the cause of your problems on that machine. However, I did manage to load Hauptwerk into my AMD 1700 with 256MB some time ago. I did not try a full version of the St Anne's organ but I did try a manual's worth. The sound was good even through a Creative Labs sound card. The Hauptwerk CD arrived before my new PC and I just had to try it out!

Details of the requirements for the Hauptwerk organs can be found on the sample set provider's pages. If you click on the Products tab and then go to Instruments you should be able to drill down into the sample set provider's pages from there once you have found an instrument. The memory requirements for, for example, the MDA Metz vary from 11.5GB with everything switched on to about 1.3 GB for a minimal mono only set up.

I hope this helps,

Richard,

I appreciate your explanation of the polyphony problem- something I had a taste of even with the S90 and reverb- yes, the long reverberation time means that whole sequence of repeated samples plus decay.

As I had the problem of not being able to try FE due to a lack of MIDI connection on my CAD computer, 3Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, XP Home Dell. B. Milan mentioned "Loopbe", a virtual MIDI port as a solution. Since I posted, I installed LoopBe and Hauptwerk is now a going concern. - And a lot of fun!

Your post and the fact that was able to play individual notes (I'm on the mouse) with full organ including the tremulant switched on, is encouraging. I also tried the "polyphony tester" and was able to play notes with 100 pipes sounding. There were some periodic tics, some occurring even when there was no note playing. Even through my Logitech Z-2300 2.1 computer speakers- the timbres were distinct, and the pipe, action, and stop sounds proportional and realistic. I have played CD-R's of the S90 pipe sounds many times through this computer and the Hauptwerk sounds are the difference between pipe organ sounds and the trio of asthmatic accordion, harmonica, and bagpipes of the S90. Very nice.

I'm also going to look at a Rodgers with MIDI on the weekend, but this one is probably too big for my house- just the speaker cabinets would fill the living room- which already has a 6'8 grand, a harpsichord, clavichord, and the S90/recording Computer. I was thinking of organizing a stack of MIDI keyboards and converting a digital pedalboard to MIDI, but the time, fuss, and cost- $4,000+ make just getting a good used organ as the controller seem reasonable. How do you control Hauptwerk? Do you record?

Cheers,

Bambi B

There are a lot of examples of Hauptwerk users playing on http://www.contrebombarde.com, some good, some not so good, but all well worth a look and listen.

To evaluate the Free edition, you should be able to get away with a decent P4, 1Gb RAM, an external soundcard/MIDI interface that supports ASIO (to get the latency down), a midi keyboard and a pair of headphones.

Beyond that, the sky's the limit with you PC, but I have a Core 2 Duo with only 3gb and XP32, and have the ability to home practice a wide range of organs with decent quality. Of course I want to expand, but I can't have everything and realistically I need to spend money on lessons, not a bigger organ.

[mdyde]

Hello Bambi,

Thanks for the interest and enthusiasm.

Not sure if you've already seen this, but the 'technical info' PDF near the top of the prerequisites web page has some detailed information on how to estimate the polyphony and computer hardware you might want:

http://www.hauptwerk.com/prerequisites
http://www.hauptwerk.com/clientuploads/documentation/PDF/TechnicalData.pdf

There were some periodic tics, some occurring even when there was no note playing

The 'performance tuning' section in the user guide covers those types of issues, but basically you shouldn't have any problems if you get a reasonable-quality semi-pro/pro audio interface, e.g. one of those we list in the technical info PDF above, and use its latest manufacturer-supplied ASIO driver, and have enough RAM to load the sample set in question (1.5 GB is fine for St. Anne's).

I'd forgotten I retro-ed my recording computer from XP Home to Win98 to use a particular piece of hardware.

Yes - Hauptwerk definitely won't install or run on Windows 98, and the 256 MB of RAM you have in that computer wouldn't be enough.

However, your other (3 GHz, 1.5 GB, XP) computer should be fine to run Hauptwerk with smaller sample sets if you add a reasonable audio/MIDI interface.

I find this topic extremely interesting, as it sounds similar to the conversation topics my other hobby site has had.

My other hobby as some of you may recall is Flight Simulation, I have a full and complete Airbus (A340) cockpit (fiberglass shell). It ran on 12 computers, all communicating with each other, simple data shared with each other, such as midi information (didn't require allot of network bandwidth). Each computer had it's own function for in the cockpit, mostly display information, which takes up most of the computer tasks.

The intriguing part is the outside views, which was tasking on the CPU, not the Graphic cars as some may think. This is similar of memory and CPU tasking as to the playing of extremely large wave files. It wasn't to long ago, for best performance, from a single PC was to only have a single view output. That would be a problem if you wanted a 160 degree outside view.

A third party developed a program to allow multiple computers (unlimited) running the same Flight Simulation program and synced with each other so that all views would be aligned. Imagine having unlimited views, you can go 360 degrees, horizontal and vertical.

So what does this have to do with Hauptwerk and this topic?

Imagine the capability to run multiple Hauptwerk software on different computers. A thought; one for the Pedal organ, 1 for the Great, etc. Let's say a Four manual organ, would requir 5 computers and you would not need the powerful and processors for each computer. You can even go down to the by rank level.

At this point you're imagination must be going wild, the endless opportunity that this presents.

Now, our friends at Hauptwerk must be going wild Multiple copies of Hauptwerk???? Must be crazy, lol. There is a way it can be done and security controlled.

Anyway, maybe I'm off base, but I thought if you want it all, this could be the way. It was done in my other world and I thought, just maybe here too.

Matt Olieman

[mdyde]

Hello Matt,

For the commercial Hauptwerk editions you can potentially run instances of Hauptwerk on several computers, but you need a separate Hauptwerk licence for each computer (and potentially for each sample set, depending on the relevant sample set producers' licensing), since Hauptwerk is licensed per running instance.

The licence for the Free Edition specifically disallows use on more than one computer at a time (otherwise people could use multiple computers to get around the polyphony limit of the Free Edition, which wouldn't be fair on us).

If you do want to run licensed editions of Hauptwerk on multiple computers you'd need to feed an identical MIDI stream to each of them and load subsets of the ranks on each.

We did originally plan to include native functionality within Hauptwerk for it to run distributed across several computers but withdrew it because we felt setting it up and maintaining it would too complex for some users (and consequently for us to support) and because in most cases we thought it probably wouldn't work out much cheaper than buying a single powerful computer, by the time you'd bought additional audio/MIDI interfaces (assuming you already had additional spare computers and operating system licences), and with additional Hauptwerk licensing cost.

However, we might possibly consider resurrecting it at some point in the future if there's sufficient demand and if can be made viable, in terms of ease of configuration/maintenance and cost.

Martin, thank you for your wonderful explanation, and it certainly makes much sense and it's nice to hear the options are available.

But, as I tell my fellow cockpit builders, as they ask me a similar question as the original topic question here, the bottom line is, it all depends how much time and money you want to contribute to your project.

Matt Olieman

Bambi,

How do you control Hauptwerk?

I had an 88-note keyboard and sound system before I discovered Hauptwerk. After discovering it I did not know whether it would be a flash in the pan or something longer lasting. So I purchased some pedals, a bench and an expression pedal of ebay for just over £60. I midified the pedals and hooked it into my existing keyboard - the new pedals were playing the sounds of the keyboard.

The pedals were not as difficult to play as I had imagined so I added some sounds from my expansion module to get the full effect. The Boellman toccata was starting to sound good. By this time I was listening to the pre-release demos of Milan Digital Audio's Metz set. So that Christmas I added a cheap midi keyboard and purchased Hauptwerk Advanced and the Metz. The Boellman was now truly wonderful!

I went for the advanced version because I knew that I would not be happy with the reduced polyphony of the basic set. The free version was not available at the time or I would have tried that first. The voicing features of the advanced set are useful, too.

So the appearance of the setup is not first class but it works and makes beautiful sounds. I still have a long way to go to catch up Joerg Glebe's system.

Do you record?

Not seriously. It is very easy from Hauptwerk, though. I sent a recording of me to a musical friend by email and have also converted a recording into a CD for another. The CD sounds so good that it makes me think that it is worthwhile doing some more practice!


Regards,

Mates,

Thank you all for replies so far. The enthusiasm for Hauptwerk projects is encouraging.

I was enjoying Free Edition just pecking out notes with the mouse and even with my Logitech Z-2300 2.1 computer speaker system the sound was impressive. I should have liked to put some recordings to CD-R just to try it through my main (Audio Research tube) audio system where I can hear the timbres more accurately, but some of the sources for demo/samples mentioned here have helped form my idea of the sounds and possibilities.

After a few tries with F.E. I did have an odd computer glitch in which the soundcard de-installed itself and the computer no longer recognised the CD drive. I went through all the resetting and virus scanning and so on without results. Unistalling Hauptwerk and using System Restore back to the day before I installed Free Edition got everything working again. I don't ascribe the computer problem necessarily to Hauptwerk as my soundcard is a bit quirky, a 1995 Audiowerk2 with third party drivers to let it work- or werk- with XP. This also had to work with the virtual MIDI port software Loopbe as recommended by B. Milan and who knows what conflicts were setup.

I've been considering these options:

1. Add a Hauptwerk-capable computer to my Yamaha S90 (88 note MIDI with integral sounds) recording setup. The computer I'm thinking of would be a quad core, 8GB RAM (and the Asus MB allows 16GB), 2-1T HD, Vista 64.

2. Buy a couple of M-Audio MIDI controller keyboards and arrange a MIDI pedalboard and suitable computer.

3. I'm going to see an ex-church 3- manual Rodgers with MIDI- which would save a lot of construction labour, MIDI/interface/control fussing, and time over option 2 in which I'd have to get a pile of independent parts to work. This is however quite expensive instrument, and with 7 amplifiers and 7 speaker cabinets- probably too large physically and sonically for a 13 X 21 living room that already has a 6'8 Kawai, 6'9 Flemish single harpsichord, a clavichord, and the S90 with computer and monitoring amplifiers!

I'll see. The easiest thing to do would be to add Haptwerk to my S90, but the logical option is to buy the Rodgers- get back some pedal technique- I had a 20+ year gap in organ playing- and then add Hauptwerk later. However, the Rodgers is probably too expensive at the moment and too large physically.

I'm curious as to how many here use Hauptwerk with a MIDI keyboard(s), how many have MIDI pedalboards with MIDI keyboards, and how many used it as an extension of sounds to with a MIDI-capable organ like an Allen or Rodgers?

Thanks again for all replies!

Cheers,

Bambi B

To give you another perspective, you can see what I did to convert (MIDI-fy) a Rodgers 3 manual Theatre Organ analogue console. http://site.virtualorgan.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=694
While it was somewhat of a chore and more costly, I can say now it was very well worth it. The experience playing a "real" organ console has it's own rewards. Even tho mine is a Theatre Organ, I have many classical sample set as well.

Rgds,
Ed