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  • My experience of using VEP6 on a Macbook Pro in Cubase (single computer)

    Hi folks,

    I am writing this because I think it will be worth other potential VEP customers to hear my experience.  I apologize if it's a bit long, but I wish I had read something like this before I invested in VEP.  I have been using VEP6 on a 2015 Macbook Pro with 16 gig ram 2.8Ghz i7.  

    My studio computer is a more powerful 12 core Mac Pro, but I travel a lot and I do most of my production on the laptop and mixing in the studio.  I believe I am not VEPs primary target audience as I do use a lot of Kontakt instruments, but the vast majority of my VSTs are synths in which I do a lot of automation and I use a lot of audio plugins-again with a lot of automation. I work with a template that is maybe around 100 tracks and I have 40 various synths and samplers loaded in to the template.  I also already have most of my insert plugins loaded.  Before I tried VEP, my template was just organized in to 8 folders and I would keep all the tracks disabled and I would enable tracks as I got to that section.  It was always a bit of a balancing game because evenually I would run out of processing power and I'd need to start freezing and rendering tracks.  We all know the story.  

    I got VEP6 because I was hoping that I would be able to easily disable entire sections at once (which I can) and I wanted an easier way to feed a single MIDI track to multiple synths (which I sort of can now).

    To make the long story short, I find that using VEP6 is MUCH more taxing on my computer and I can only get through a fraction of where I used to get on the same template without it.  Using VEP actually greatly complicates the amount of work that the computer must do (in my case).  Instead of having a single instrument track with a VST loaded and all the audio inserts there I now have a MIDI track that feeds into a Rack instance going in to VEP6 and then an audio track that is receiving the audio.  So instead of one track, I have two.  AND now I can't disable my audio track with the inserts.  I need to disable inserts one at a time within cubase whereas when I was using an Instrument track I could disable the whole track.  Trying to do automation of synths that are inside VEP6 is a nightmare because every parameter is just named "parameter x" in Cubase.  Plus automation of that rack instrument is not tied to any actual tracks so if I move the track around, the automation doesn't move!  You have to copy automation manually. In general I have also found VEP6 to just be really unstable and crashes at least a few times every day while I'm working and then I need to decide if I want to restart Cubase or reopen VEP and manually reconnect every instance for the project.  

    I imagine that something like VEP6 must be a difficult project because of all the different types of software that needs to be supported, but unfortunatly I do not feel like it is appropriate for large project work in a single machine setup.  I imagine if I was solely doing Orchestral libraries-like most of the VEP videos I see people making- with very little automation and effects then things would be going a lot more smoothly.  I hope this little "review" will be helpful to someone