Is it planned or technically even possible for ve3 to become a host for 3rd Party - plugins ?

[ingmar_2373]

The thing why I´m thinking about it is that I´m using EWQLSO and NI Kore - and a couple of other plugins like EZDrummer and RMX. Now i´m planning to add some vienna instruments to my collection ( I already own the "old" Chamber strings - wich I really like) Now you guys at VSL did the giant step and presented with VE3 a server-solution which - as I can read in the different posts - seems to work pretty well. I am kinda shure that NI(hopefully) and EastWest (once they have their play engine fixed) will come up with similar solutions in the near (well....maybe not so near but...) future. Will it be even possible for three different engines to stream audio over ethernet? I don´t know the answer - but something tells me that this is not going to work. I´d love to have an iMac as the machine for my sequencer and a one mac pro slave running all the samples. VE3 seems to make this possible - I´m just curious if I a Setup like this will work at all once EW has their Play engine out. Would be having VE running those engines even make sense?

[cm]

basically it would be possible to insert third party plugins into VE2 or VE3 but there is a lot to be considered ....

 

- plugins coming with a sequencer/audio host are bound to this app and cannot be inserted at all

- other plugins need to support the respective platform (32 or 64 bit)

 

inserting sample streaming engines as plugin might become tricky .... in your sequencer a track is routed to a channel of Vienna Ensemble - now loading *nothing* but inserting a sample player would limit you to this channel with this instance of the sample player ... not sure if this is a usable setup in most cases

 

i feel it makes more sense to insert seperate streaming samplers seperately into your audio host - those streaming engines all are trying to get as much CPU as posssible for their own, so you will have to find out *who wins* depending on your configuration.

VI/VE doesn't need too much CPU, but is heavily relying on a good data throughput on the disk, so you should at least split the storage locations across several drives then

 

gigabit ethernet as such will not be the bottleneck unless you stream several hundred tracks ...

christian

[ingmar_2373]

Thanks for the answer -

@cm said:

gigabit ethernet as such will not be the bottleneck unless you stream several hundred tracks ...

christian

that was actually my main concern - having different applications sitting on my main computer trying to stream audio over ethernet and blocking each other. Thanks for making this clear - maybe I just have to accept the Miracle that all the Audio and MIDI Cables are replaced by this one little Ethernet-thingy. Amazing

[cm]

the quick math: 44,1 24bit stereo is ~ 250 kB/s this equals to 500 stereo channels over gigabit ... leave 40% free for overhead allows 300 stereo .... you should rarely have such a large orchestra ;-)

christian

 

edit: according to the specs martin provided the numbers change to:

44.1 32bit stereo is ~ 345 kBit/s this equals to ~ 380 stereo channels over gigabit ... leave 40% free for overhead allows 230 stereo

 

christian

[MS]

VE3 is actually sending the data as 32bit float, meaning that a stereo pair uses 345kb/sec of network traffic. A VE3 instance using all 16 stereo outs thus uses 5.4MB/sec of network bandwidth.

Martin

[DG]

@cm said:

i feel it makes more sense to insert seperate streaming samplers seperately into your audio host - those streaming engines all are trying to get as much CPU as posssible for their own, so you will have to find out *who wins* depending on your configuration.

VI/VE doesn't need too much CPU, but is heavily relying on a good data throughput on the disk, so you should at least split the storage locations across several drives then

christian

However, with the advent of VE3 it makes sense to users to be able to stream all their samplers across the network, much as I already do with FXT.

DG

[DG]

[quote=MS]VE3 is actually sending the data as 32bit float, meaning that a stereo pair uses 345kb/sec of network traffic.

Is that true? Why would it be beneficial to do that as the samples are only (I say only...!) 24bit? I previously asked about the player clipping, but if it was going to convert to 32float it would be much better to do this in the player rather than just to transfer over the network, IMO.

DG

[MS]

DG,

processing in the VI engine and the VE3 mixer is applied before transmitting the audio data over network, so the data is kept in 32-bit float format , to avoid any truncation and conversion issues during transfer.

Martin