I have MIR Pro up and running with Sibelius 6.0 and everything is generally working smoothly.   However, when I tried to add MIRacle x64 Stereo to Stereo effect it would crashed both the VE Pro 5 server and the VE Pro 5 instance as soon as Sibelius connected to it.  It crashed even with an empty VE project that had just the master bus in it.   Everything is running a my laptop with Windows 7 64 bit, i7 and 16GB RAM with the latest build 9753 of both VE Pro 5 and VI Pro 2.  The channel configuration for both VE and Sibelius is stereo.   Am I missing something in the setup?  Thanks.

 Thanks for your response.   I'm currently using the latest release 6.2 of Sibelius 6.  Sorry, I was not specific about the Sibelius release.

Hello EP!

Using MIRacle with VEP 5 and Sibelius 6.2 under Windows 7 was no problem here. If you want to, you can send us your Sibelius project and the according Playback Configuration (xml file and data folder) and I will have a look at it. On Windows 7 machines the Playback Configurations for Sibelius 6 can be found here:
Users\your username\AppData\Roaming\Sibelius Software\Sibelius 6\Playback Configurations

Best regards,
Andi

Hi Andy,

I tested a bit more and found out that MIRacle crashed with IDT High Definition Audio CODEC but did not crashed with the Asio4All driver.  However, I would like to use the IDT audio driver if it's possible.   I also just downloaded and installed the new VE5 Pro release (build 10068) but got the same result.  Thanks.

Hello EP!

DG is right. You should use an ASIO driver. The reason for the crash was most likely the driver you have used.

Best,
Andi

Unfortunately I think that you're just lucky that everything has worked so far. I doubt that development will spend any time trying to fix something that is really only supported with ASIO.

I think your best bet is to get a decent soundcard with properly written ASIO drivers, and then you shouldn't ave any problems. I know that this is expensive, but it is certainly cheaper than hiring the orchestra  to play your music.

DG

Hello EP!

I can confirm that Sibelius 6 also made VEP/Miracle crash here with buffer size 4096.

However, I would also recommend getting a decent audio interface. Of course you can turn off the integrated audio and use an audio interface instead.

Best,
Andi

Hi EP,

Thanks for your friendly words.

I would strongly suggest to use ASIO-drivers instead of any other method whenever working with professional audio software like VE Pro.

It's quite common for built-in audio hardware to do some processing on the original signal when used with their off-the-shelve "multi-media" drivers, starting with re-sampling to different sample rates, equalisation, dynamics processing, stereo-width processing, even some kind of reverberation (!) and so on. More often than not this processing isn't clearly identified and hard (or impossible) to switch off. - The less-than-stellar latency seems to be a negligible problem in this context.

This is even more true with notebooks. I've worked with four different Windows-notebooks during the last few years, and three of them had serious design-flaws in their audio signal paths when used with conventional drivers (wrong routing, excessive noise, signal interruptions, un-identified signal processing like mentioned above, etc.). Funny enough it's easy to overcome these limitations on behalf of the generic ASIO4ALL v2 driver you wrote about. While this won't make the cheap converters and noisy analog components become any better, it at least allows for a controlled signal path between the application and the audio output.

In the end, you ensure you that would be much happier with one of the semi-professional portable audio interfaces you can get nowadays, e.g. RME's "Babyface":

-> http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_babyface.php

Kind regards,