I know this has been talked about before, but I'm digging the subject back up to possibly renew interest.
Vienna Ensemble Pro solves a lot of problems for me. And it's utterly amazing how it's changed my work flow. The fact that you can do off-line bouncing with it is a huge timesaver and changes the way that I set up my sessions because I don't need to do a lot of bussing to print things. I recently discovered something that it doesn't do that I really, really wish it did.
One of the libraries that I use is 8Dio's Adagietto. It sounds really nice and is very expressive. Its main flaw for me at the moment, besides some pitch issues, is that the articulations are generally separated into discrete patches, such that the sustain patches are not key-switchable with staccato patches, for example. So I ran across this fabulous app called TransMIDIfier, mentioned by many on this forum, which allows very sophisticated internal MIDI patching, routing, filtering, layering and mapping via IAC bus. It has allowed me to have a single track in Pro Tools for Violins I, for example, that addresses every articulation for that section via keyswitches or program changes, even if they were to span multiple Kontakt instances or VEPro instances. Great so far. But when I go to commit a MIDI track offline, I can't because its target is an IAC bus.
So - what I'd love is if VEPro had a sort of Vienna-Instruments-type shell available inside VEPro, in which I could point each cell to a channel of an instrument inside VEPro. The shell would be a single MIDI channel target that would address any and all instruments loaded into VEPro. Imagine being able to address all those PLAY articulations any way you wanted to, or EXACTLY like you address the VSL stuff - or build layers of all the string libraries in the ways you use to make the rest of them work - like, say, adding VSL chamber short staccato strings to HS for sharper attacks, only controllable with a CC, and so on. Or even taking the complex VIPro chord patches further by adding other libraries to them. These are the kinds of things I do with TransMIDIfier, but I'd love for it to all be inside VEPro so it could happen offline, without IAC, and be platform-independent so I could have the same capabilities in the same way with the same keyswitches should I choose to work in Logic or Cubase or DP or whatever. Expression maps from the host would still work with these, of course, but could actually be a little "dumber", perhaps.
I recall a post earlier where someone suggested TransMIDIfier because they wanted to do keyswitching with VSL instruments, and the reply from Paul (I think) was, essentially, "why would you want to do that, when Vienna Instruments already does all that?" The answer is, because nobody else does as well as VSL, and I'd like them to be able to.
Thoughts?
