Well, what a coincidence; I have just done the same thing, and hit just the
same problem!
I have already posted a host of questions to the Csound.support@analog.com
address, but having already started to delve into the inner workings, I can
say the following:

the problem arises when the drivers cannot allocate memory on the host (the
PC) for the samples required for the MIDI support. Unfortunately, the
commandline which launches midi.orc (in the Windows directory) is not
available (to enable me to disable the MIDI), so the only compromise I have
managed so far is to edit the 'preprogs.1' file (also in the Windows
directory) to reduce the number of samples loaded. I have 32MBytes of RAM in
my machine, which one would think would be more than enough, but Windows
takes a surprisingly large amount of that ('because it's there'), and quite
often my memory monitor program (from the Richter Book 'Advanced Windows')
shows nil RAM available!

This is not as alarming as it sounds, because Windows pages RAM quite
efficiently, and the space can magically reappear for no obvious reason. It
would appear that the drivers do not lock the memory into which the samples
are first loaded, but ARE asking for physical RAM, not virtual memory, (or,
they do, but unlock them again), so all reinits of the Universal Orchestra
take their chances.

I hacve not done this yet, but an alternative strategy would be to edit
midi.orc to remove the MIDI-related instruments altogether, which should
temporarily solve the problem. In any case, even with the samples loaded I
have been unable to play a MIDI file from Media Player because of problems
with the MIDI MAPPER, which I have never learned how to configure, and
haven't figured how to yet!

You will need to press analog yourself about MAC drivers; I am busy pressing
them for 32bit dlls, support for 4 and 6-channel soundfiles, and myriad other
things, so you and I might have a slight conflict of interests! :-)

For a bit of fun (?), try changing the sample rate of any orchestra which
receives sounds from disk, to 44100 or 48000, and see what happens.

 Good luck!

Richard Dobson



Tony Grimwood wrote:

> Hi.
> A question for any Extended CSound / Sphinx users (if there are any
> besides me out there):
>
> I'm a Macintosh person and I've been given the job of installing the
> Sphinx DSP board and supporting software on a Wintel box @:/.
> Everything's working OK except that the driver s/w sometimes has trouble
> uploading the default orchestra to the board when I quit out of the
> launcher program. This causes paralysis of the Sphinx board, recoverable
> only by rebooting the computer. Anybody had a similar problem and fixed
> it?
>
> Some nights I dream about the Mills team announcing the Power Mac version
> of the Sphinx support software... Well, it *is* a PCI board...  nudge, wink wink :)
>
> BCNU
> tg