Pro Tools Trouble

[tinycomet]

Hi everyone,

Could someone please help me with this? I can't get VSL to load as an instrument within PT (I know Vienna uses VST and Pro Tools uses RTAS), I don't have (and can't afford) a slave computer and I can't find any confirmation on the forum as to whether FXpansion's VST to RTAS 2.0 plugin will solve the issue. I've read the "Good news for Pro Tools users" but I can't get past step 1 to launch VSL and then launch PT because PT tells me that the digidesign hardware is already in use.

I have yet to compose a single melody that I didn't play live using the Standalone Player since I got VSL months ago! I'm running Vista x64 and I'm still currently forced to run the player in standard mode (not 64-bit) because the Standalone Player (64-bit) (as well as the 64-bit version of Ensemble) won't let me choose my MBox 2 hardware to play through it instead of my regular speakers...

Someone, please help!

Raji 

[nick.halliwell]

Hi there Raji,

First the bad news: Pro Tools is only directly supported on the Mac, there's no PC RTAS version of the software (most PT users have Macs). I believe some people have had success with the Fxpansion wrapper, but it's a bit of a risk because other people have failed to get it going at all. I tried it myself (on the Mac) before VSL's RTAS (Mac) version came out and it didn't really work for me. It might work for you - but then again it might not, which isn't very encouraging.

The "Good news for Pro Tools users" thread you mention was a pre-RTAS workaround for Kontakt on the Mac - it's dated 2005 which was before the VI player was launched so I'm afraid it wouldn't apply to you.

However there will be workaround solutions. Nowadays we've got Vienna Ensemble (you'll want version 2, which is free to registered users, rather than v3 which is for networked machines) which allows you to run more than one instance of the VI player outside your sequencer. I'm not sure exactly how this would work on a PC but one fairly simple solution (can someone who's using PCs please come in and clarify here?) would be to run Ensemble and then simply route your audio back into PT. To do that you'd need to run a line from your PC's soundcard output into one of the Mbox's inputs. It's not ideal but a lot of people used to do something similar on the Mac before RTAS support came in a year or so back.

Feel free to e-mail me privately and I'll try and find some more info for you. As I say, I use Pro Tools|HD on a Mac so I'm not going to be able to give you totally infallible information. But there will be a way around it, I'm sure.

Regards

Nick

[dirk]

Raji / Nick,

Sorry for the late reply.  Yes - there are some hassles getting Ensemble/RTAS/Win to co-exist. I currently have 2 solutions, which I use together:

1) Use Forte (V-STack works as well) to host the VST version of Ensemble. I use MIDI over LAN to pipe the MIDI from PT to Forte. In this case, I am using Ensemble 3, which then connects to another (64-bit) server for a large orchestra.  The only down-side is that you are limited to the number of audio channels supported by your soundcard.  In my case, I pipe ADAT (8 channels) out of my sound card back into PT (using an 003 Factory). I say down-side because using Ensmble 3 in native RTAS should allow as many audio channels as your PT license allows.  There is no reason this shouldn't work as well for Ensemble 2, but I have not tried it.

2) In addition to the above, I supplement my standard orchestra with a single instance of Ensemble running under RTAS, by using the FXpansion RTAS to VST adapter.   This works well for a single instances.  But beware using mulitple instances with PT. The problem comes when you close a session.  Closing a session with a single instance does as expected - it closes the corresponding Ensemble 3 server component.  But with multiple instances, the server components do not get closed.  At this point, PT and the server appear to be waiting for each other in a hard lock.  The system becomes totally unusable - requiring a re-boot! 

The #2 behavior above is very likely tied to the network and Ensemble 3. Ensemble 2 behavior is likely different.  My gut reaction is that the problem is with FXpansion, and not with VSL.  FXpansion is looking into it.....

Also, to be clear, by "instance" above I mean an instance of Ensemble, which in turn will support up to 16 instances of Vienna Instrument.

--Dirk

[nick.halliwell]

Hi Dirk,

Yes, this discussion was a little while ago and in the end Raji and I did manage to get a system up and running by using a MIDI Loopback utility to send MIDI from PT to VE and then we took advantage of the fact that Raji's PC had a S/PDIF digital output to feed the audio back into his Mbox, thus keeping it within the digital domain. It took a bit of doing because I was trying to offer advice blind (from several thousand miles away and I'm a Mac PTHD user) but we did get there in the end. Obviously it's not a perfect solution, but the idea was to get something that would at least allow him to use the Special Edition and PT on a single PC without spending any more money on additional hardware or software unless it was absolutely essential and we did manage to achieve this.

It's interesting to hear that the FXpansion wrapper works with VE on the PC. I've got a copy on my Mac and a year or more back I tried it with the VI but couldn't get it to work, but then VSL made me very happy by releasing a Mac RTAS version so I've not needed to take things any further. I think a single instance of VE would be enough for Raji, so if the wrapper does allow that on the PC then this might be an option for him if he finds the rather Heath Robinson contraption I talked him through ever gets a bit too frustrating!

Thanks for the info, in any case

Nick