Warning - this is an audio geek post. Casual listeners / surfers please move on!

I recently began extensively using Redmatica's EXSManager now that my sample library is growing rather large (around 100,000 instruments). After some issues getting the thing installed, I was too eager in pressing buttons, and I'll begin by reminding you all to BACKUP FIRST. I am now in a position where my instruments are 'organised' in an unintuitive way, and I might have liked the chance to revert to a backup, but stuipidly I pressed first and asked questions later.

To be fair, organising instruments is a huge task, one unsuited to automation. Would you classify a basson in 'woodwind', 'pipes' or even its own folder ? What about 'Aarons attack'? The default Logic folders have some semblance of organisation, but once you start mixing all kinds of instruments together trying to keep some level of cohesion proves difficult. In hindsight, I ought to have had a top-level folder for the producers I'd worked with, followed by significant libraries (such as VSL), as I tend to look for things in that way rather than searching for a random woodwind instrument.

Looping trouble

When you throw the recent upgrades of EXSManager (to 3.1) and Logic (to 9.1) into the equation, things are even more compicated. Logic has a new EXS format, which affects the way the instruments are stored and accessed, and this has given rise to problems for some users, particularly with Gigasamples (not exs). I was experiencing a problem whereby some of my piano samples were not looping properly. The notes would not sustain, giving an abrupt 'pop' when the sample ended. I checked to see whether the instrument was complete in EXSManager, which it was; all the samples were in place and there was seemingly nothing wrong with the instrument.

After a helpful post on macosxaudio, I solved the problem by disabling virtual memory in EXS. Within the EXS instrument screen, press 'options' and select virutal memory. Disabling virtual memory was presumably by-passing the cached version of the instrument, which had likely changed during the upgrades to the software. Now that the instrument runs from memory, everything works as expected.

I'll see how far I can get without enabling VM; does anyone know of any adverse affects of leaving this setting off? Obviously the RAM usage is likely to increase but are there any other gotchas I should know about?