HOLLYWOOD ORCHESTRA
13Chapter 2: Hollywood Orchestra, An Overview
One required item not usually included is an iLok security key. If you already have one
from an earlier purchase of software, you can use it. Otherwise, you need to acquire one.
They are available from many retailers that sell EastWest products, or you can buy one
online at Amazon.com.
Hardware Requirements
See the PLAY System manual for a complete list of the Hardware and Software Require-
ments for installing and running any PLAY System library.
Because both the size and complexity of many of the Hollywood Orchestra instruments
are greater than in some other PLAY libraries, you will likely need an even more capable
system than is recommended for those other libraries:
• Intel or AMD quad-core processor, or higher, running at a minimum of 2.66 GHz
• 8 GB of RAM or more
• a 64-bit operating system; and a 64-bit host when running PLAY 4 as a plug-in
Note that this is a recommended system, and is more powerful than the minimum of
what is required.
Solid State Drives
There is no doubt solid state drives (SSDs) are a revolution for storing and streaming
samples. While currently more expensive than traditional hard drives, the seek and re-
trieval times are almost instantaneous, which means you may be able to create even
larger projects and/or to use lower latencies without needing workarounds to avoid dis-
ruption of the audio output. When using multiple products from the EastWest Hollywood
series, SSDs may be your only option (in some cases, “light” patches are provided for
other users), and the number of mic positions that can be accessed simultaneously may
also be dependent on solid state drives. Installing 2 or more smaller SSDs with a true
hardware RAID 0 solution offers the best performance. For professional users, we recom-
mend consulting computer system specialists to achieve the best performance.
EastWest has done extensive testing in which PLAY 4 running with solid state drives for
the samples and instruments was able to reproduce over 700 concurrent voices without
any pops, clicks, or other artifacts that can occur when the same sequence streams from
a traditional hard drive.
This data indicates that it is not the PLAY 4 software that provides the bottleneck in the
data flow, but rather the “seek time” required to locate the many hundreds of samples on
a traditional hard drive when they need to be streamed to the CPU all at once. For those
composers and orchestrators looking to build large projects using the kinds of instru-
ments that add realism through the use of complex cross-fades, solid state drives (along
with more than 8 GB of RAM) can help make that happen.
Requirements for Sample Storage
The available space on the hard drive required for an installation of Hollywood Orchestra
(Diamond Edition) is approximately 680 GB (Gigabytes).