Hello,
I've been a long time user of Ableton Live. While I appreciate Ableton'e session view workflow, I don't appreciate the CPU overhead that's required and I find that I'm routinely running out of CPU power during projects. This led me to investigate Vienna Ensemble Pro as a potential solution to this problem.
Thus far I've been very impressed by the demo I've been using. That being said, there's one issue that seems to be a major drawback which has caused me to question a potential investment into the software.
Based on what I've read here and elsewhere, VEP supports offline rendering in several different DAWS. This doesn't seem to be the case with Ableton Live, as the VEP manual reccommends using Live's External Instrument device, which switches all rendering to real time. In my experiments when using other connectivity, offline rendering resulted in garbled, unusable audio.
This is a problem. I work with software synthesis plugins. They often allow for "draft" sound quality while working in real time to conserve CPU usage, while switching to oversampling modes to maximize sound quality during an offline render. Obviously, making use of this very useful feature would be impossible in this scenario.
I understand that implementing VEP with various DAWS can be a challenge. I would like to ask if there's any development planned to increase functionality specifically with Ableton Live? Offline export would be a priority for my uses, but the single MIDI port issue is something I'm also intereted in.
Thanks,
Matt