MeVsWorld

Ok, I posted the below onto http://www.soundsonline-forums.com, its about issues with PLAY that tech support confirmed they can’t help with as the cause is a problem with the software that has been fixed in the upcoming version, the upcoming version tech said was imminent 4 months ago.

This post - although before it got removed was supported by others with the same issues got me banned from the forums: see what you think.

POST

Ok, I have to be very careful how I word this as I really want to be as diplomatic as I can, I also need to say that my play libraries are absoloubtly invaluable in my work, there is no competition for the expression range of emotion I have at my fingertips when I have a couple of instances of PLAY loaded into my template. That said, I find myself a little annoyed while writing this. Doug’s development update was very welcome, nice to have some rough time scales, I still however have some concerns.

There were 6 pages of suggestions, and gripes regarding PLAY voiced by a wide range of paying customers, many of whom rely on PLAY for their everyday work and this was deleted by admin. While I understand that they do want to avoid certain types of threads, I was a little disappointed. It did feel like a two fingers up to all those who have been struggling through technical difficulties, working around problems and faithfully waiting for an update.

Doug says that PLAY works for most people. Play does work, however I’m finding more and more that its the cause of most of my instability when it has to co-exist with other plugins in a project. Both EWQL, MOTU and Vienna have looked extensively into my crash reports and the only way around this instability is to ether put up with it (things have got a lot more tolerable with other manufacturers updates) or work around it.

DP has issues with a small handful of plugins, Halion being one… the work around for me is simple, put halion in an instance of VE Pro and once set up, it will load up with my project seamlessly every time I load it. Any incompatibilities with DP or any other plugin I have within the DP project will be sorted.

After looking deeply into certain projects and crash reports from my system, MOTU identified PLAY as one of the main issues and suggested running it in VE Pro to work around the problems while they communicated with EWQL regarding the issues. I WISH I could, doing this would solve so many problems for a lot of people and I would love for EWQL to simply acknowledge that this is a very important point.

When I’m spending a day troubleshooting a project that has suddenly decided to crash at a certain point every playback, I systematically remove all other plugins, and I’m left with PLAY and VE Pro. Only removing one or the other allows for crash free playback. This is a huge problem.

I understand that EWQL are not keen in resolving issues with VE pro as their own alternative product is iminant. But the fact of the matter is that VE Pro is out and being used widely now. EWQL’s product is not.

I now only have one major plugin that is confined to DP in terms of hosting and memory usage. It has come to the point where I try to find alternatives, even if they are not as good because I know that adding a couple of instances of PLAY to my template creates all kinds of intermittent instabilities.

I know I’m not the only person out there with these issues, and I know that they will settle down…. but as a paying customer, I feel that simply deleting the comments of anyone who expresses this opinion is not only rude, but indicative of the wrong attitude. I get the feeling that these issues are not being acknowledged by devs, and in not being acknowledged they will never improve. This makes me a sad panda.

There have been 7 updates to VE Pro since the last PLAY update. And from being problematic when I 1st started using it, it is very close to being rock solid now. This frequncy of fix releases and updates is something that really is required at the moment. Example: PLAY cannot co-exist with VE Pro in a DP project without causing serious instabilities (albeit intermittent). Tech support informed me that this issue was known and had been fixed. The fix would be implemented in the ‘imminent’ play update. This was back in 2009. Had there been a hotfix or patch available it would have saved me hours of my life!

So where am I now, I use PLAY for most every project I work on, I try and bounce PLAY tracks early and remove the plugin from the equation as early as poss to ensure the stability of my project… and I don’t feel like I should have to do this.

I very much want to invest in more PLAY libraries, but I feel that I cannot until things improve, and a lot. The thing that worries me the most is that this post will probably deleted and no one will contact me to reassure me that issues are acknowledged and being taken seriously. A Dedicated Dev Blog would be nice - we have all invested time and energy into PLAY, especially those of us who adopted the product early so it would be nice to have something like this.