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

[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.

[xxicjoy]

I have actually been using this with Logic exclusively. I don't know about performance-wise but in terms of integration it is much more graceful in protools due to Logics multi instrument quirks. what do you want they only have near infinite apple development resources, :). Anyway My client and I still get occasional wierdness, mostly due to logic 9's new ingenius plan to not clear out ram when switching between projects. Sometimes VEP opens redundant projects in the metaframe. Good stuff. Seriously, the funky gain structure, low headroom and aux bussing aside, it s pretty good. With a couple revisions ad some heat from Garritans Giga move VEP will be great.

[T-Low]

I bought a dongle and gave it a try last week.
After 3 crashes in 15 min, i think VEP will not improve my system stability ...

[Ad Sluijter]

I've read on some forums (including this one) that a lot of users experienced crashes in the beginning but solved these with changing some settings in VEPRO. Have you tried this yet?

[T-Low]

With this behavior right from the beginning,
VPE seems like more chaos to me .. no thanks

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by T-Low

With this behavior right from the beginning,
VPE seems like more chaos to me .. no thanks

If the default settings need to be tweaked for your system, that behavior would be expected right from the beginning. It's not uncommon to play with settings in most streaming plugins with so much functionality and, often, they work much better afterward.

Ultimately, VE-Pro may not be for you, but why not adjust the seat and mirrors and maybe it'll drive better? It could end up being a very simple adjustment.

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Ad Sluijter

I've read on some forums (including this one) that a lot of users experienced crashes in the beginning but solved these with changing some settings in VEPRO. Have you tried this yet?

Were there specific settings being changed or was it more complicated? I don't recall seeing that thread.

[T-Low]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

If the default settings need to be tweaked for your system, that behavior would be expected right from the beginning. It's not uncommon to play with settings in most streaming plugins with so much functionality and, often, they work much better afterward.

Ultimately, VE-Pro may not be for you, but why not adjust the seat and mirrors and maybe it'll drive better? It could end up being a very simple adjustment.

Hi Eric,
don´t get me wrong: Yes, it´s not for me !
I use VI rarely and i thought this could be a good solution to kick out all the RTAS VIs and improve system stability.
For those of you with large scoring setups it might be the solution

[Phil Buckle]

I also think it works best on a multi computer setup.
Even using Bidule and another interface on my G5 and streaming it back into PT on the same machine just killed my G5 dual 2.7.
There was no point in me doing that.
But the 2 machine thing is a different story.

Remember this in regard to VEP.
You DON"T need an interface.
VEP gives you 32 channels of VI audio streaming back to your main computer via an ethernet cable. Those 32 channels can be brought in on separate channels into PT. (you read correctly)
In fact I think you can take it up to 64 channels but I haven't tried that yet. (I don't need that many channels)
With Bidule you will need another interface or 2 to do this.

If you aren't prepared to dig a little deeper or don't have the time to trouble shoot then perhaps you should be cautious about trying VEP.