Vienna Ensemble Pro

[IO Composer]

I've been using VE Pro with PT8 for the last month or so and have decided to abandon it for several reasons.

Reason 1: Latency. I've had my PT buffer set to 128 and I still get significant latency, both from external servers and from servers on the same machine. This may be acceptable for some, but not for me. It's not a lot, but it's enough to keep things out of the pocket.

Reason 2: Saving kludge. When I had 2 instances of VEPro on inserts in my PT sessions, saving sessions would take 8-10 seconds to save. I had to turn off background saving because every 15 minutes my workflow would just stop. I was not able to find any workaround for this problem.

Reason 3: inconsistent buffering resulting in pops and klicks. Not too frequently, but enough to blow track printing every now and then. Still, any is too much for me.

Reason 4: inability to rename midi channels. Again, not a huge deal but enough that I would have to think about something other than the task at hand while I try to remember which midi channel sent what to where.

Reason 5: The connect/disconnect kludge with every session. This is just a bad design on Vienna's part. Sometimes when I would load up a new session, it would try to load another linked bank on my external server, which would dump my 6Gb bank (that takes 15 minutes to load) for no reason. Oh.. and it usually crashed my external server.

Reason 6: flaky launch errors on server. Could never figure out why, but every 3rd or 4th time I would launch a server, it would go into confusion mode. When I quit the app, then it would get its act together and launch... whatever.

Reason 7: Address violations when removing VEPro plugins from PT sessions. No idea what's up with this, but would regularly require me to force quit PT. Cardinal sin.

So from my thorough evaluation... VEPro sucks. Big time.

Since going back to MOLan and Bidule, the air is so much easier to breath in my studio. Rock solid... it all just works how and when I want it to and I don't have to wait for any audio to catch up with my groove.

YMMV...

Cheers,
Jamey