From various posts by Steinberg and VSL employees on various forums and support posts, here's the situation as I best understand it.

There was an issue internal to Cubase which has been fixed. However this won't do anything until VSL update VE Pro, which they cannot yet do. The VST2 version is incompatible with ASIOguard. The VST3 version VSL cannot update until Steinberg updates the SDK, which has no time frame to be done. So until that unknown time, users are unable to use VE Pro with Cubase 8 without severe side effects.   Its probably best to disable ASIOguard from VE Pro in the plugin manager until this whole issue is resolved.  Unfortunatly it looks like this whole issue won't be fixed any time soon.

This post has been interesting reading. I had never used Ensemble before in previous versions, so v5 is my first experience. I have pretty much been unable to use this (running slave on same machine as DAW, not had opportunity to try via networking but suspect the results will be the same or worse). I found similar advice re disabling asio-guard in plugin manager on the steinberg forum, this hasn't stopped VSL from corrupting any project it's inserted into along with causing other mysterious issues (although I'm still to 100% confirm it's VSL doing it, the first project I've made deliberately not using VSL seems to have solved this issue also). Really hope Vienna & Steinberg can sort this out between them, as it's looking like going back to having to open a new project for anything involving kontakt libraries.

As it seems the answer to when it'll be fixed is "when the new SDK is released ie we do not know", where would be a good place to lurk occasionally to receive updates on this issue? It's disappointing that to use the program I bought to solve my RAM-problem, I have to turn off a feature that then gives me a huge CPU problem :)

This sounds like good news that a new SDK is posted.  Can we get a response from Vienna?   Do you now have the information to fix VE PRO 5 to behave correctly with ASIO GUARD 2?

Originally Posted by: paaltio

Originally Posted by: MS

Originally Posted by: dlpmusic

VE PRO VST2 does not support ASIO-Guard 2 you have to disable ASIO GUARD, also VSL has to implement a VST-3 interface that supports ASIO- Guard. 

They have been informed about this. 

The latest VST SDK available for download is 3.6.0, built 22 nov 2013. There is no way to inform the host of ASIO Guard support within this SDK, beyond setting the instrument as an external instrument - which also disables offline bounce. Last I heard, you planned to release such an update last month. If you have any updated information, I would love to take part of it.
 
Thanks,
 

I thought I'd bump this thread since I'm sure many are eager for this fix -- looks like Steinberg has version 3.6.5 up from a few days ago. I couldn't find anything on this topic in the documentation with a quick look, but hopefully it's buried there somewhere. Any news on the issue?

Can we get a reply from Vienna on the status?  It would be great to get a comfirmation that you have what you need to fix the ASIO GUARD 2 problem so we can stop making requests to Steinberg.

Originally Posted by: noiseboyuk

It's looking hopeful.  Fabio Bartolini from Steinberg posted this today:

"The new extended VST SDK (v3.6.5) has been released a few days ago. The new version supports the scenario described above by Mr. Seleteg.

http://www.steinberg.net/en/company/developers.html"

Would be great if you can let us know if this is indeed what you've been waiting for, Vienna.

Please keep us posted Paul.

Many of us have not chimed in on this issue, but it's a huge deal for anybody usiing Cubase 8 and (in my case) Nuendo 7.   Here's hoping the new SDK allows you to resolve the issue.

Jules

Martin or Paul....any word on this yet?

Thanks for the post Paul.

However, I'm not entirely clear on what this means and would be very grateful if you or Martin could clarify.  This is my current understanding:

Selective disabling of ASIO Guard on a per-plugin basis (e.g. just for VE Pro) is already available in Cubase 8 and Nuendo 7.  I have tested this (and tried to work with it) in Nuendo 7, and sure enough it does stop the issue whereby audio drops out every time a different track is selected.  HOWEVER, it means that CPU usage jumps dramatically, to the point where templates which run comfortable under previous versions of Cubase and Nuendo no longer run at all in Cubase 8 and Nuendo 7. 

In short, the efficiencies which ASIO Guard brings to Cubase 8 and Nuendo 7 are basically essential in order to keep large templates running at all.   If ASIO Guard is disabled for VE Pro, the loss of CPU efficiency renders many large templates unusable, and massively handicaps the usefulness of VE Pro.

My understanding of the situtation was that VSL needed to implement a VST-3 interface which supports ASIO Guard.  Your statement below appears to suggest that a new version of VE Pro will simply disable ASIO Guard support within the plugin, which leaves us in the same situation we're currently in.

Hopefully I have misunderstood.

Jules

Originally Posted by: dlpmusic

It would be great if you can clarify what this means.

 

Hopefully.....does this mean we can change tracks in Cubase without the 2 second hang/pause in the audio?

You can already do this in Cubase - you just need to disable ASIO Guard for VE Pro.

The problem is, the loss of ASIO Guard means VE Pro uses signficantly more CPU resources than it would otherwise, leading to CPU overloads etc.   Which is why we've been waiting for VSL to implement a VST3 interface which correctly supports ASIO Guard 2, so that we can re-enable ASIO Guard for VE Pro, not suffer the CPU issues of having it disabled, and also not suffer the audio dropout problems.

Whether this is what VSL are looking to achive remains somewhat unclear (in fact rather unlikely) from my interpretation of Paul's post.

Originally Posted by: dlpmusic

So......if we still can get the benefit of the low CPU and no audio muting that might be good enough.

I didn't really get that out of it, seems like there's no other way except to disable ASIO Guard for VE Pro.

 I really dislike that idea, because with Cubase 8 the performance with all VSTis including VE Pro hosted ones has gone down, and only with ASIO Guard enabled does the whole thing make any sense. So there needs to still be a way to manually enable it for heavy sessions, even if VE Pro will default to disabled.