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  • MIRacle crashed when connected to Sibelius 6.0

    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.


  •  First things first; is there any reason you're not using the final version of Sibelius 6? I find it works much more reliably than the release version.

    DG


  •  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.


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    Sorry to hear about your problems, EP. I don't have Sibelius installed on my development machine, so I can't try to provoke this behaviour myself right now, but I will make sure that our support team takes care for it after the weekend.

    Ideally you would write a short mail yourself to , with all the steps that are necessary to reproduce the crash. Please make sure to include as many information about your system as possible (OS, CPU, RAM, audio system and driver versions, software versions of all involved products etc.)

    Thanks a lot in advance!


    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • 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


    Vienna Symphonic Library
  • Hi Andy,

    I just emailed you the information regarding the crash.   Thanks. 


  • 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.


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    @EP said:

    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.

     

    You should use the ASIO driver. ASIO is the Windows standard, I'm afraid.

    DG


  • 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


    Vienna Symphonic Library
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    @andi said:

    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

     

    Hi Andy, 

    My question is that if all the audio components (with the exception of MIRacle) and everything else in VE5 Pro, MIR Pro and VI2 Pro work perfectly fine with this IDT driver so why not MIRacle.   I don't mind using ASIO driver but because ASIO driver does not share the device it's harder for me to quickly switch between audio applications.   Also,  with ASIO VE5 would pop and crack a couple of times during a playback and I have not been able to find a right setting that could fix the issue.   Not being able to use MIRacle is not a big issue for me but I hope this issue will be resolved in a near future.

    Best,


  • 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


  • DG,

    Thank you for your advise.  This is running on my 15" notebook (which has a very decent configuration -64-bit Windows 7, i7 and 16GB RAM) so it's not possible for me to replace its integrated audio circuit.  Fortunately, I made some adjustment and the ASIO driver works better now so I can switch to ASIO if I need to use MIRacle.  

    Andi,

    Is it possible for you to test MIRacle with the buffer size set to 4096 in the client?   I just want to see if MIRacle crashes with large buffer size.  Because Sibelius continued to function properly after VE5 had crashed, I didn't think the audio driver could directly cause it to crash but maybe some other settings such large buffer size that caused it.

    Thanks.


  • 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


    Vienna Symphonic Library
  •  Hi Andi,

    Thank you for looking into this issue.  My guess is it's now fairly easy to track to the location where the memory exception occurs.  Because the 4096 size is commonly the smallest buffer size offered by generic audio drivers, fixing it would give users a better experience and enhance the overall stability of the software. 

     

    By using the ASIO driver, I have found a acceptable work around.  My configuration is running entirely on a slim 15" notebook computer so there is no option for me to put in an audio interface.  My workflow does not required low latency as long as everything is synced up properly.  The main concern is to keep a small memory footage and low CPU usage.  In this case, a large buffer size is not a bad thing.  My template has about 50 instruments with more to be added.  It takes about 13.5GB and uses about 50% of the CPU which I find reasonable. 

     

    Despite the issue with MIRacle, I'm truly impressed with VE/MIR and VI.  The integration  is solid in working with Sibelius and also in hosting Kontak Player.  I would like to congratulate the entire a team at VSL for their outstanding effort.


  • 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,


    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library