More polyphony needed ?

I am currently running Free Edition V4 and I am staggered by the realism I am getting from my relatively modest setup. This consists of an old Technics PR300 digital piano, Core 2 laptop, Alesis IO2 Express interface for both audio out and midi, a Marantz PM44SE amp and high-mounted JBL Control 1 Pro speakers, as well as a bit fed through the piano's own speakers to provide some bass extension.

Anyway, my only problem is that occasionally whilst playing I get stuck notes, as though a midi note off message is not being received. This can happen even when only a couple of stops are drawn and is at its worst when playing a combination of fast moving melody over a relatively thick accompaniment. I do not get the same problem when using the Basic/Advanced evaluation editions so I suspect that this may be related to the polyphony limit of the free version.

Is this something that I should expect from the free version or is it likely to be linked more to my setup? With V3 I did not have this occur anywhere near so often and, as far as I can see, MIDI/audio settings are unchanged since the upgrade (which was otherwise very worthwhile). Would turning off ambient effects make a significant difference here and are there other things which can be done to improve polyphony (if that is indeed the problem) without being overly detrimental to the sound or latency.

I'm sure that when I'm able to upgrade to a licensed version then things will improve, but I'd like to know that the problems are simply due to the (understandable) limitations of the Free Edition rather than an intrinsic problem with my setup.

Any advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

Is this something that I should expect from the free version or is it likely to be linked more to my setup?

In my view this is almost certainly nothing to do with HW or polyphony. Stuck notes are pretty much always symptomatic of some problem with the MIDI
interface, particularly as you say it also happened (though less frequently) before the upgrade.

Nick

[mdyde]

Hello nsa66,

Many thanks for the interest in Hauptwerk.

Yes - stuck notes indicate a problem either with your MIDI hardware or your MIDI interface's driver (or, very rarely, with your computer motherboard's USB ports). They're a common problem with very cheap 'micro' MIDI-USB adapters, but a good-quality MIDI interface with sufficient buffering shouldn't suffer from stuck notes (=lost MIDI messages).

The polyphony limit setting (or which edition or version of Hauptwerk you use) shouldn't make any difference directly, but conceivably some difference in CPU load or memory usage might have an indirect effect on a misbehaving MIDI interface or its driver.

What MIDI interface are you using, and what's your computer's spec.?

Thanks for the help guys. I've had the chance to spend a bit of time playing around today and you're right; the problem does appear to be MIDI related. When I tried playing EXACTLY the same on both Advanced (evaluation) and Free HW using the piano's built-in sequencer, the problem was the same on both versions.

Upping the buffer size completely eradicated the stuck notes but at the expense of a little noticeable latency - still better than some pneumatic actions I've played though! It would appear to be a hardware issue and I'm not altogether surprised. The laptop is a low spec educational model (my wife's work machine) with only 2GB and a host of other problems and it is only being used due to melt-down of our home system. Also the interface is pretty bargain basement and using an ASIO4ALL driver. I do have a dedicated MIDI to USB lead which provides better performance but which, unfortunately, passes a lot of very loud digital noise from the laptop to the piano's amp.

All in all I'm satisfied that things will improve as hardware is modernized. In fact I suppose I'm lucky that I have a playable instrument at all with this cobbled together arrangement. I can certainly live with the limitations for a while.