Vienna Ensemble Pro

[d.f.]

Hello there.

Not sure where I should post this and I have done so in the Virtual Instrument section, but thought I'd post here too as it's where I normally gravitate to on this forum. Moderator - please delete me if not appropriate!

I have a dual 2.3 Ghz PowePC G5 running OSX 10.5.8. This is my main pro tools computer with Pro Tools 8 on it.

I want to have a standalone computer "slave" which will be a powerbook 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo which I was thinking will have Vienna Ensemble Pro on it.

Basically a sampler / virtual instrument computer.

I want to be able to run Kontakt 4 and various other NI instruments / Arturia instruments off Vienna Ensemble Pro

Will this work?

Is this a stable way to run? Is Kontakt 4 here as stable as in standalone mode?

Is it really as easy as one ethernet cable?

Lastly, how does Pro Tools see Vienna Ensemble Pro?

This is a matter of urgency and will purchase immediately if this set up will work!

Many thanks in advance...

Best regards,

David.

[Eric Lambert]

I can't speak on stability, but Ensemble Pro does work as advertised. Vienna software running on both computers allows them to communicate and pass data and this works well. There's a bit of latency, but it's not drastic. For most things it's a non-issue, however you're using an older computer which might pose a problem.

The demo is free for 30 days or so. Trying it is really the only way to know whether it'll work to your specs.

[Phil Buckle]

It works wonderfully well.
I've never run Kontakt 4 in stand alone mode but it's working perfectly in VEP.
Yes it works with one ethernet cable.....some kind of magic.
You install VEP on both computers and you will see an RTAS plug appear in your Protools plug list. You insert this in an instrument channel and connect to VEP.

One thing that caught me at first was forgetting to install the exact same version of the software on both machines. Watch out for that.

Warning...........you may experience a loss of interest in the development of PT in regard to the long standing VI problem.
This will result in a significantly reduced visit rate to the DUC.
You will also get more work done and discover the joy of creating music again.

Join the forum over at Vienna and welcome.

[d.f.]

Thank you Eric. Yes, the older PPC computer is a worry but I have downloaded the demo and will see where I can a key-thingy tomorrow to test it out. I think I may be able to get something other than a Vienna key for Trial purposes..?

Phil - looking at your rig it looks as though it is very similar to mine, except for the moment I will be running VEP off a laptop.

Your endorsement made me smile - it really does sound too good to be true and think I will definitely leap for it. I have been SO fed up with the way PT deals with samplers / VI etc.

I just want to get back to making music!

Did you buy from a store or download?

David.

ps just joined the Vienna forum!

[Siegfried Meier]

I have one quick question regarding some timing issues I'm getting with VE Pro.

I'm triggering some drum sounds from Battery 3 using VE Pro and a MIDI track in Pro Tools. If I save my session, and then restart at later time, VE Pro opens and seems to play everything back a touch early, must be only a few samples or so, but definitely, I can hear flamming. At times if I shut down VE Pro it fixes itself, but sometimes it doesn't...very random.

Anyone else experienced this?

Thanks,
Sig

[Siegfried Meier]

Hmmm, seems that I cured it this time by turning off Delay Compensation in Pro Tools and then back on again....

THAT is annoying.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Phil Buckle

Warning...........you may experience a loss of interest in the development of PT in regard to the long standing VI problem.
This will result in a significantly reduced visit rate to the DUC.
You will also get more work done and discover the joy of creating music again.

[xxicjoy]

I just spent about a month ringing out VE pro. The ups and downs of it are as follows.

Works great, does what it says it does, integrates into protools seamlessly, works equally well in Logic although there is some small workarounds needed to get logic to pass volume/mod equivalent info beyond the channel strip. I am equally impressed with the amount of automation data it is preset to recieive. Very cool. Works well and sounds good but here are the caveats:

First the gain structure is attenuated in VE pro on the instrument channel strip by 6 db approx. one of the first things I noticed about VE pro was that it printed very very low inside Logic, almost like there was a +4/-10 discrepency. A quick dirty test of this is to put two instances of Vienna Instruments instrument of your choice up, one inside PT or logic, one inside VE pro. In my case I only tested this in Logic, as my client was a Logic user. I could only get the levels to match by bumping the faders in VEP up to their plus 6db max. I set up a small Orchestra cue using about 18 instruments in VE pro. These were returned through stereo auxes , one for each section String, Wind, Brass and Percussion, and then one for each section's reverb send , so 8 stereo auxes in total, the reverb plugins were hosted within the DAW on the Aux inputs channel strip.
Neither the sections Auxes nor their reverb sends experienced any overs during this test with most of the orchestra going full bore and about 90-95% of dynamic volumes, but there was clipping visible and audible coming from the individual channel strips. This seems a little weird to me but I imagine VEP has some sort of limiter built into its outputs as well to facilitate the possibility of a lot of instruments being pushed through a limited number of outs.

My fix for this was to back off the individual channel strips to +3 db and everything worked well. Other approaches to this would be to goose the auxes either in the DAW by 3 db, or I haven't repeated this test in PT but wouldn't be suprised if there was some wierdness with on the Logic side of things affecting the gain structure of rewire type instruments as well.

A couple of other weird things came up as well, pretty parenthetical and totally work-around-able if thats a word.

The internal sends within VE pro if set to "pre Fader" changes the sent signal from stereo to mono. The fix for this being don't use prefader sends...

Also when sending automation to the VE pro's sends, the signal becomes intermittent and zippery when ramping up or down. Example, if you have a violin section instrument and want to automate reverb tails or an excessively wet or dry sound (eg between marcato strings and mute string sounds on a keyswitched instrument) you will get an artifact in the mix that sounds like distortion and can be traced to the reverb send submix. bypassing the reverb plug in and listening t the soloed aux will net a zippery intermittent signal on the uneffected sound. The fix here is to automate reverbs within the DAW, or not automate them at all, using preset redundant wet or dry instruments instead.

Every once and a while when moving between projects, and the preserve function is on, VEP plug in does not recognize the server and tries to initiate a new project within the metaframe.

Also VEP has a slightly jacked file hirearchy, being that if you open a project or metaframe you created yesterday and make changes to it, you can only save the changed version as a new project or metaframe , even if you only choose "save" rather than "save as" once you have done this you can save (cmd>s) further changes.

Again these are results I have found using VEPro with Logic. I would not be suprised if a few of these issues were on the logic side. I would suspect LP9 memory behaviours designed to facilitate moving between projects (keeping VI sample preloads in ram between projects) as a culprit in the occasional missing server issue, and the automation problem could be a simple as a lack of automation thinning in LP9, it might not happen in PT. In all it is a very cool product which I suspect will kill in a revision or two with some tweaking to the mixers behaviour.

BTW my relatively small orchestra template took up about 3gb ram so load up and if you are using a laptop to host, be sure to house your samples on an equivalent digi approved FW drive.

I have also been able to run an incredible amount of samples in stand alone instances of Kontakt, streamed into PT via a small firewire coreaudio interface, on a 2008 intel quad core machine with about ten Gb ram. and have had similar results running VEPro on a single machine too. You didn't say what PT you were running, but if its not HD, you might think about upgrading your machine first. IMO the all in one box is always the easiest approach.

[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

[Phil Buckle]

Originally Posted by 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.

What buffering did you have the VEP plug set to?

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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.

Interested to know why you had 2 instances of the plug?
Were you running a 32 bit and a 64 bit?
Why would there be a save time at all.....I mean it's just a plug and so there's nothing to save on the master machine other than your normal PT session. All your VI saving is on your Slave.

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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.

Did you watch the RTAS meter to see what was causing this? Are you running at 96k? Watch the meter as you deactivate VEPro and see if that's the culprit. Were any other RTAS plugs running?

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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.

I've requested this feature.

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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.

Agreed it's a PITA when that happens.

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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.

It's early days and it depends on what build you are using. I'm on Build 5207 and with every build things improve.

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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.

Haven't seen this yet.

Originally Posted by IO Composer

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

Fair enough but there are many people with outrageous numbers of servers and VI's who are working everyday with it. Those Orchestral guys take things to the limit.
BUT a lot of them DON"T use ProTools and I'm wondering if it's the RTAS plug that is the weak link. I'm betting it is.
Glad that Bidule is working for you. If I ever have problems I will try that again.

As far as the groove is concerned I wonder if you were toggling DC as a matter of course.
This has to be done on opening every session using VEP.