Pro Tools / VEP6 outputs

[stuey]

Hi all, I'm fairly new to Vienna Ensemble Pro 6 and I have an issue with routing and i'm trying to work out if this is a limitation with Pro Tools 10 HD or if I'm doing something incorrectly.

I have a small netork of machines running VEP 6. My machines are listed below.

1x Mac Pro 12 core 5,1: Pro Tools HD 3 machine running PT 10.3.10 and OSX 10.8.5 connected to 2 x Aurora 16 AD/DA. 32 i/o in total. 48Gb RAM, 5TB SATA RAID over 3 internal drives.

1x Mac Pro 8 Core 2,1: VEP Slave machine, OSX 10.9.5. 8Gb RAM, 4TB SATA RAID over 3 drives. Kontakt library plus other kontakt instruments.

1 x late 2012 Mac Mini VEP Slave machine, OSX 10.12.5. 16Gb, 9TB Promise RAID over Thunderbolt. This is my main slave machien which runs Kontakt, East West, Arturia through VEP etc etc

I'm running VEP 6.0.15864 on all machines as to keep the same version. This is due to my Pro Tools HD machine being on mountain Lion and I can't upgrade that machine due to Pro Tools 10. I have all machines over CAT6 cabling via a Netgear unmanaged 1GbE switch. All machines IP's are statacally assigned, the network and performance is very good, the problem I am facing is the routing anf the amount of outputs avaliable to me.

Currently I set up a single instance in VEP, add 15 more channels via the + sign, Shift Control Cmd the outputs so they appear as 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 until 32-33. Add my samples into Kontakt, assign the oupits to the Kontakt instruments which gives me 16 diferent articulations or instruments.

Now in Pro Tools.

I create 16 Insturment tracks, on the first track I create a multi channel VEP plug and connect to my VEP instance. I route my MIDI to correspnd to each track and I selet my inputs to correspnd to my VEP outputs 1-2, 3-4until 32-33. This gives me 16 channels. This all works absolutley fine, but. Is that it? Can I not add more outputs in Pro Tools to at least give me 32 stereo tracks instead of 16? seems very restrictive to only have 16. Is this a limitation with Pro Tools 10. I have tried to increase the number of outputs via the VEP prefs and I can see the track count increase within VEP but in Pro Tools It just crashes and it seems that I can only get 32 channels. 16 Stereo.

I'm sure I used to have more channels before. I have recently rebuilt the Pro Tools HD machine from the ground up. New OSX install, new fresh and clean Pro Tools install so I had to redo my Kontakt outputs and VEP outputs on the Pro Tools HD machine. Since that was rebuilt, I can only seem to get 32 channels.

I have a Mac laptop running Pro Tools 12 (non HD) and I have experimented with rasing the channel VEP count and I have been able to get 256 channels so far, surely my HD rig should have more outputs than a 10 year old Mac Pro?

Is there another way to route instrumets from VEP, via Kontakt into Pro Tools. I have experimented with using for example, 16 kontakt instrmets each with their own MIDI in VEP, all out of a single pair of outputs 3-4, then in Pro Tools HD, create 16 Instrument channels, configure the MIDI for each and route them all so they have an input of 3-4 but I'm getting no sound from Instrument channel 2 thorugh to 4. All sound comes from the channel I have teh plug in connected to.

My original explination of how I route things would be far easier although It doesn't really represent how to mix an orchestra in the real world (you wouldn't have different mix channels from each different way a player bowed the cello ) But it makes sence in a virtual instrument world and I'm happy to proceed like that, if only I could get more outputs into Pro Tools.

I suppose my question to PT10 HD users is, Can I get more than 32 channels out of my multi channel plug ins? Kontakt, VEP6 etc


Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks, Stuart

[stuey]

Here's the same post via the VSL website

https://www.vsl.co.at/community/post...ons#post265207

Anyone with Pro Tools 10 using VEP 5 or 6? Would love to know your experience with using VEP to get audio from Kontakt or other VI. I'm guessing it's just a plug in restriction because PT12 gives me 256 outs from the same VEP6 plug, but I'd like to have that verified for sure.

Cheers,