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  • Audio over LAN - your experiences

    P
    P

    Hi All,

    I'll soon be making the switch to VE Pro, Snow Leopard and 2 Mac Pros (from my current setup, a G5 PPC dual 2.5 GHz computer and a MacPro slave running multiple VE2s).  Would love to know how usable VE Pro's audio-over-LAN feature is turning out to be in terms of latency and reliability.  I've read a few posts here, but I thought it might be interesting to more people than just me to get a sense of how people are liking it, and if not, what set-up works better.  I realize, of course, that every setup is different and every composer's needs and style of working is different.  Nevertheless, would love to know what a variety of people think of this feature's implementation and usability.  Anyone care to comment?

    Thanks,

    Peter
  • D
    D

    Do you really need 2 Mac Pros? With just one you would have far less latency in your system.

    DG
  • P
    P

    Thanks for the suggestion.  I do need two Mac Pros for a variety of reasons, and even if I didn't, I'd be interested in what the experience has been.  This is a major feature of VE Pro - I'd like to know how it's working for people, and I'm guessing there are a fair number of others who'd be interested as well.

    PL
  • K
    K
    I've been using a 2 Mac Pro setup with VE Pro for about a month now. It was very problematic in terms of audio/MIDI dropout until this newest version. Now it's working beautifully, finally. My starting template includes a 32 bit instance and a 64 bit instance on the slave machine (8 core Mac with 16 GB RAM), simultaneously. I'm not running VE Pro on my master machine (3GHz. Quad Core) as a rule, though I have before and it seems to be stable. I have found that latency is not an issue, even when playing percussion on the slave machine. I use Digital Performer 7 with the buffer set to 256, which would have introduced too much latency until version 7, where they have apparently fixed all that. VE Pro doesn't make it worse at all. I leave the buffer settings in VE Pro on the default (2 buffers), because it doesn't seem to make any difference when I'm actually playing VI's. I think that setting has more to do with delay compensation when recording audio tracks from MIDI. It's great software! I chose it over MIDI Over LAN because I wanted to be able to bring everything from the slave into the sequencer "in the box", without having to have another interface going into my digital console. Also, it's a very capable host with a lot of mixing power.
  • J
    J

     I really like the mixing software but for me the audio over LAN is too inconsistent to trust in day to day work.  Even the latest build gives me dropouts every few minutes. 

    I would get it and just do a test on your system to see if you can live with it.  Latency is just a little bit sluggish running at 256 on my main machine and running 2x buffer over LAN.  The software is good, but the audio over LAN is not that great imo.  Also, I've heard that the instability increases as you add more machines.

    I don't fault VSL for the less than adaquate performance of audio over LAN.  I've used FXteleport audio over LAN and it also has the same problems.  LAN just isn't well suited for the work that we do.

    But VEPro is a more than capable mixing host.  Probably the best one out there.  I plan on using it in standalone and using IPmidi and using ADAT for audio back.  Kind of combersome but on initial test it seems to be the most stable solution with no dropouts at all and extremely low latency.

    best,

    Jose
  • P
    P

    Thanks to both of you - very helpful.  Got a chance to check out a system today.  Pretty good latency-wise, I thought!  Knowing me I'll probably end up going the more expensive road and figuring out a hardware connection, but it was way better than I feared.  Still love to hear more comments if anyone's got 'em.

    Cheers,

    Peter