Plogue bidule

[woodsdenis]

Hi All

Thanks to Simon Leadley who directed me to this. I have downloaded
this app to test. It is amongst many other things a rewire host for AU/VST plugs. It enables you via rewire to use AU/VST plugins in Protools.

This thread is really to discuss pro/cons of this specifically for PT

This was tested in PT8cs2/ Leopard 10.5. PPC Dual 2.5 HD 3

Plogue Bidule 9685. Issues.

Had a kernel crash while testing this. Could be this app or not ?
Repair permissions,Delete prefs, Diskwarrior and all is ok today.

While using it with Omnisphere vst it intermittently lost communication and I had to close and reopen the rewire plug for it to work again.

With Stylus Rmx AU there was no latency at all, amazing.

Is it better to use VST or AU in bidule ?

These are just preliminary issues so far Could some of you more experienced users chime in.

[HearInc]

I've just started using it... I'm running a full VSL orchestra in Bidule as AU VIs, and it's working quite nicely. I wish I had more than 16 audio/midi channels to and from ProTools.

That's as far as I've gotten.

[sleadley]

We just set up a colleagues DP setup to use all his VI's within Bidule. There are many improvements with this way of working:

1...There was a marked improvement in the efficiency of the VI's. We could load and run more than was possible in DP. (in his case it was impossible to run Ivory and Play at the same time in DP)

2...We were able to route it back to DP such that it was really simple to record stems by simply record arming the Audio tracks and doing a single pass without any glitches.

3...Memory management seems better and some 64 bit samplers can load huge amounts of RAM outide of Bidule without affecting its own memory allocation. I also imagine that Memeory fragmentation of Pro Tools and DP is improved as you are not constantly Opening sessions with VI's and having to reload samples into RAM all the time.

4...You can use VST and AU plugs on the outputs of VI's (you can only insert AU FX on VI's that comes back into Pro Tools as Rewire in Pro Tools is Master only and not Bi-diectional as in Live)

5...You can consider Bidule like the Logic environment but for audio (it even looks like it!)

6...There is a colleague of mine who is now running his 8 core to its full potential, he had been having constant crashes and RTAS inefficencies until he offloaded this stuff to Bidule and now he claims (chime in any time Jason!) that he can now work with great success without a single crash.

7...Once you have created a Bidule template sessions open very very quickly as they only contain Midi and Audio Tracks. The good (and Bad depending on your work flow) is that any imporvements in the Bidule template can be shared around among all sessions that use that Template (I can see how this is also a bad thing therefore you would save the Bidule in the Session folder).

8...You only load the Bidule once and then load times are greatly improved for Show and Tells.

I would suggest that you have a look at Bidule, it does not add anything that is likely to cause Pro Tools to misbehave as it is an app, when you quit it, it is gone. It only installs a Rewire Plug as far as I can see. Well worth a few hours playing anyway.
For us it has changed our way of working.

I am a newb with Bidule and there seems to be lot of very clever people that are creating things like audio to Midi converters and it is even possible to create an app that you wrap into a fully self contained VST Plug. But it generally seems like this is what I always wanted Max to be but infinitely less complex and more useable for the less technically adept.

my 2c
Simon

[tripit]

I've been using it for awhile now. I run it chock full of orchestra samples.
I also run RAX, but not through rewire, at the same time on the same machine.
I can pretty much load my mac up to the limit - I have 14 gigs.

[uno1234]

Bidule is great. Use it all the time. Without it I would have switched to Logic or Live full time by now.

[PhilBuckle]

Thanks Simon for bringing Bidule to my attention. (Nice to chat the other day) Apart from the obvious benefits of being able to run plugs of other formats I was more interested in the CPU hit compared to RTAS in ProTools.
Running BPM and Omnisphere in Bidule was EXACTLY the same CPU hit as running them in ProTools RTAS.
Am I missing something in the setup perhaps?
I note in the Bidule manual it suggests using the same buffer in both the host and Bidule and they don't include 1024 on Bidule so you are stuck with smaller buffer sizes.

Are people noticing a significant performance improvement?

Perhaps Bidule performs better on an Intel Machine?

[Matt_G]

Just to clarify, is it possible to use VST or AU effects only (not VI's) i.e. compresors, EQ's etc. with Bidule in ReWire mode with Pro Tools audio sending to Bidule for VST/AU processing then back into ProTools?

So far after playing with it briefly it seems you can only use it with VI's or process the VI's outputs with VST & AU fx plugs. As there is only a Midi in ReWire bidule & a 16ch audio output bidule.

Thinking about it logically it may seem that the only way to use Bidule for audio processing is to load the audio file into the Audio Player Bidule's audio file pool have it sync to ProTools with ReWire & then record the output back into ProTools which kind of defeats the purpose a little.

Anyone else have another way of doing this?

Matt

[sleadley]

Yes Matt you are correct you cannot use it as an au host for plugs as there is no way to send audio from Pro Tools (it is only a rewire master) You can do this in Live which can send bi-directionally. Would love to see this ability in Pro Tools.
Simon L.

[crizdee]

Originally Posted by Matt_G

Anyone else have another way of doing this?

Matt

Logic with a coreaudio soundcard, i've just setup logic with a firewire tascam 1804 which gives me 8 adat i/o from logic to PT via the adat i/o on my 96i/o and 2 stereo analog and digital i/o total 12 i/o if needed.

I'm using this to return the audio into PT from the logic VI's but there's no reason why it couldn't be used to send audio into a logic track to be processed and back again.

Might try it later! guess there's will be some latency though, but quite small with the digital connections.

Tried it and it worked fine! did have some delay so would be difficult for a tracking/mixing session unless you want to start moving regions back etc. but for mastering it would work ok.

Maybe with a bit of messing with settings the latency could be reduced!


Chris

[woodsdenis]

Originally Posted by PhilBuckle

Thanks Simon for bringing Bidule to my attention. (Nice to chat the other day) Apart from the obvious benefits of being able to run plugs of other formats I was more interested in the CPU hit compared to RTAS in ProTools.
Running BPM and Omnisphere in Bidule was EXACTLY the same CPU hit as running them in ProTools RTAS.
Am I missing something in the setup perhaps?
I note in the Bidule manual it suggests using the same buffer in both the host and Bidule and they don't include 1024 on Bidule so you are stuck with smaller buffer sizes.

Are people noticing a significant performance improvement?

Perhaps Bidule performs better on an Intel Machine?

Phil

I am only getting into this for the past couple of days.
With Omnisphere, I didn't compare the CPU hit with RTAS. I will try today.
What I did notice unfortunately was that in bidule Omnisphere showed the same RTAS symptoms. It suddenly was unresponsive to any midi input,stuttering playback etc.

Under RTAS hitting play in PT fixed this, in bidule I had to close and open
the plug to clear Omnisphere.

What makes this odd is that I was using the AU version of Omnisphere which
works fine in Logic 8. I had hoped this would be the case with bidule but
unfortunately with this plugin when running in PT, wether in RTAS or rewire, it seems to have issues.