Hey, this is unbelievable- I’ve been waiting for this software forever! I have been doing this by hand/ear for a while
and now, I will be able to finally get some occasional sleep! Thanks for this.
This may be a naive question, but it just occurred to me that the database that I am currently downloading is massive.
Are all of the sounds actual sound files, i.e. wavs aiffs? If so, I was wondering if it is best to follow the same
setup one would when using a DAW, wherein the audio files are stored and called from a (fast) external hardrive
while the software runs on the main drive. In the past, with traditional DAWs, having the same drive both run the program,
and store the audio files it is using can cause a bottleneck. Would there be a problem keeping the database on a different
hardrive, assuming the connection and the external drive are fast enough.
Ok, thanks again, look forward to your answers and posting more questions once I get moving.
-E
Dear Ez,
Thanks for the support 
In this case, I would recommend the opposite (ie. having both the program and database on the main hard drive). Indeed, the computing aspects of Orchids do not rely on the sound files (rather the pre-computed spectral features embedded inside the app). The sound files are used solely for “previewing” the solutions. Hence, there will be no bottleneck for computation, but having sounds on a separate drive might cause some glitches in the playback (even though it can also run perfectly fine ^^)
All the best,
Philippe
Hi all,
I’m trying to download the “SOL_0.9_HQ.zip” file after Orchids download/installation (mac os 10.8.5).
I tried already three times and finally the uncompression process doesn’t work, always giving an error. The downloaded file never really reaches the 9,7 GB that is indicated, stopping between 6 and 8 GB. When the download process appears to be finished, the browser ( firefox) , indicates 9,7 GB (but is not correspondent while observing the file from the Finder). Obvsiously every download is a slow process, due to such a huge file.
Any idea about the problem?
thank you in advance
Diego
Hi Diego,
I had the exact same issue. I had to first, re-download the file, because I think my disk was close to full and it simply stopped downloading. In any case the download was incomplete, and I needed to start over- it would not let me resume the download after I freed up space- just to let you know- maybe there is a way to do this but I could not find a solution that worked, so I just had to deal with it. I think you need (a lot) more space than the 9.7 gigs for it to download it completely, and you will certainly need at least 15 free gigs (probably more) to unzip the file. Here are some things to watch out for when you get the full download-- dump the incomplete one and empty the trash before you download the new one-- a) you might need the space and b) if you make the mistake of trying to unzip the old incomplete one, it will cost a lot of time. Also, as I said, for me, I freed up a little over 20 gigs to make extra sure I had room for it- the actual unzipped file will be around 15 gigs. If you don’t have that much free space it will just give some error message- after idk how many hours of unzipping!
Thanks Philippe,
actually it was running great after I had put it on the external hard drive, I think the preview was running better that way, but it is also, I think an issue with running a machine with the memory almost full, especially an older one, that causes strange behavior. Unfortunately, I made a big blunder, I think: I later launched Orchids without the external with the database mounted- and it seemed to have initialized the program. It looks like I now have to re-drop the database- yikes. Is there was a way that it can somehow reestablish the connection or is that data all lost for good? Also, will it initialize after quitting even with the hard drive mounted or is that just because it is on a different drive? In any case, I think I will just take your advice and keep them on the same drive to be safe, because I definitely do not want to wait a third time.
-E
Dear all,
The downloads problems are quite unrelated to Orchids, as for all huge downloads, this is only a matter of your connexion robustness and the corresponding FTP server. I can strongly recommend that you install a download manager as an add-on to your browser (many free ones exist), that can handle connexion failures and keep downloading at the last save point.
Dear Ez, this is indeed an extremely strange behavior … In fact, you should never have to drop the database twice, and even less analyze anything from the “SOL_0.9” database ! (this is why the .app is already ~2Gb as it contains the full pre-analysis of this huge database). Basically, at first launch, the app only asks for the DB path, so dropping it is just a way of giving the DB path as a string ! Do not worry, you can otherwise manually edit this path, just open the .app as a folder and open the file
Contents/Presets/orchids_folderpaths.txt
You can see here that the path to SOL is hard-coded in this file, so you can change it if you have any problem
All the best,
Philippe
huh, yes, I just got a chance to finally work on it again- I just launch it, drop the folder and it just establishes the connection right away and works perfectly. What I think happened the last time was I must have done something where when I tried to link the program back up to the database, it thought I was giving it all new sounds and then was trying to analyze all of it again! That freaked me out, but it’s all good now,
Thanks for the reply!
E
Dear Ez, glad to know everything is now up and running
All the best,
Philippe
Is anyone able to point to where I can download SOL for orchids?
there was a command in the terminal to download the files, maybe try to reinstall Orchids?