It might be worth mentioning that the Konzerthaus Organ's instrument manual lists all available pre-configured registrations in detail:

-> https://eu.vsl.co.at/?FileID=13428

The good thing about them is not only their sound, but also the fact that they need considerably less voices than individual registrations.

Originally Posted by: William

[...] Also, to get the basic organ sound without the concert hall with the Vienna Konzerthaus organ you can turn off the release samples, and it works pretty well.  I remember doing that,  putting the organ into a different MIR venue and it sounded just like being in that venue.  It is not strictly kosher perhaps, but works because it is very difficult to detect the difference within the sounding sample, as opposed to the release.  

Purists will cringe, but I did this quite often, too, with great results. :-)

You can do this already, as long as you are in MIRx-Mode. You can easily recognise a "MIRx-ed" Icon by the little red X above the Positioning Handle. .... there are much more parameters involved than just Instrument Profiles, which makes the creation of these presets quite tedious.

Right now there's no change for the GUI of MIR Pro to announce - sorry to say so.

I'm not sure that I understood the question correctly ...? Of course you can use Imager Pro to adapt the signal coming from MIR Pro if there's the need for it. :-) What I tried to point out in my previous answer was that the signal chain described wouldn't allow for any meaningful results due to a simple technical fallacy. 

HTH,

Thanks for your friendly feedback, Jan! Highly appreciated. :-)

There is no easy way to present individual Characters, sorry to say so. The development tools used for their creation aren't accessible with MIR Pro's commercial version. This was a conscious decision as some of these settings might look rather extreme. 8-)

Re: RoomEQ - This EQ is the main tool to sculpt the wet-only part of MIR Pro's output (... opposed to the Character EQ which affects the dry signal component, too). If you need to get rid of certain resonances, brightness, or - quite contrary - the typical "muddiness" of large halls, you will reach for this EQ to tame these issues. Just click on the "E"dit button to open the EQ editor window.

You'll see that there's a bank of 32 settings for the RoomEQ (actually 33, including the "Default"-setting). You can assign one of these settings to each and every Icon on a MIR Venue's stage, typically one for each instrument family. At least that's the way I use this feature for the creation of MIRx- and MIRx-mode-presets. 

HTH,

Short answer: Character Presets are solely made of hand-crafted EQ- and filter settings, applied to the dry signal component before it hits the convolution engine. (They are simply called “Pre EQ” in MIRx, therefore.)

Long answer (… skip if you’re in a hurry):

Writing a manual always means to weigh between technical completeness and ease of comprehensibleness. Legacy Vienna MIR (MIR Pro’s predecessor) lent itself to the first approach, and consequently there were complaints about the complexity and technicality of the manual. I tried to stick to the second approach when compiling the manual for MIR Pro, separating parts of the engineering background to addendum texts - which of course means to omit some of the more technical aspects. 

For your convenience, the following except from legacy Vienna MIR's manual contains the Character Preset typology I mentioned above:

BTW: MIRx-specific Characters (a.k.a. "Pre EQs) are the most elaborate ones, as they are ready-mades for a single Vienna Instrument in a unique position in one specific Venue. It took me literally months to create them. 8-)

In cases like this one it's always a good idea to get in contact with directly. VSL support staff can look up your licenses and solve any related issues. :-)

Kind regards,

Hi Mike,

like mentioned by fellow user Dewdman42, the easiest way to use MIR Pro with any kind of audio source is its plug-in version, which can be instantiated in your DAW as a conventional track-insert.

If you prefer to stay within Vienna Ensemble for one reason or the other, then the way to bring in your audio source is the "VE Audio Input"-plug-in that gets installed with VE. You have to use this plug-in as an audio insert, too, but it will interrupt the audio stream in the DAW´s track and send it over to VE where it will be available as additional input source. - Just be aware that this puts quite some strain on the CPU, because VSL`s software engineers had to use massive code magic to make this happen at all. 8-)

Kind regards,

Actually it's quite simple:

The "full" version of MIR Pro you find in Vienna Ensemble Pro's selection of "built-in" plug-ins will open new MIR Venue for any instance / tab of VEP. You can import settings from instance A to instance B, but they are not connected, thus you might use different Venues, too.

The "plug-in"-version of MIR Pro is the one you could also open in other hosts like Nuendo or ProTools. It will open one single Venue for all instances.

Both approaches have their pros and cons, so it depends on the task at hand which one you will choose. If you want to de-clutter your MIR stages I would suggest to make use of MIR Pro's "Hide" feature, though.

Kind regards,

Hi David,

there's nothing wrong with it per se . You know the old saying, "If it sounds right, it is right!". But read on. ;-)

The reason that you aim for that solution might be very well solvable directly within MIR Pro, though, by selecting a Main Microphone settings that gives you more width, and/or by adding a Secondary Microphone with capsules aimed towards the side- or backwalls of the selected Venue, or by choosing a different Main Microphone position in general (... most likely one closer to the source).

The answer to your second question is quite obvious: You can't change the width of a signal with a processor that's working _before_  the actual sound source, routing-wise. :-) Using the Vienna Suite's Imager on the dry Bassoon signal will widen the instrument's sound itself, but this effect will get lost to a large extent anyway as soon as the signal enters MIR which takes care for its position, width and rotation itself, by definition. The reverb can't be affected by the Imager like this. 

HTH,

Originally Posted by: Kai

[...] standard Midi functions for 40 years [...]

... uh! ... make that 35 years, please - otherwise I'm feeling even older than I am. 8-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI: "The MIDI 1.0 Detailed Specification was published at the MMA's second meeting at the 1985 Summer NAMM show."

Hello Ram,

sorry to hear about your problems.

Please get in contact with , including as many information about your system as possible (OS, CPU, RAM size, audio system & drivers, version numbers of any other active audio software, etc.). VSL's support team will take care for the issue ASAP.

Kind regards,

Originally Posted by: Kai

[...] why would a newer audio plug-in standard not provide a full Midi implementation anymore?

Long story short: The company who is defining the standard (Steinberg, in this case) decided to drop this MIDI command, for one reason or the other. Much like Apple/Logic decided to cut corners in their Audio Units format here and there.

... not much a 3rd-party manufacturer like VSL can do about it.

Groups are definitely high up on the list of features for the prospective update of MIR Pro.

In MIR Pro, VE/VE Pro, and in most other professional hosts and DAWs there are always way to link or group volume faders themselves, either temporarily or permanently, so you don't necessarily need to use Group Tracks (a.k.a. "Buses"). They are useful when you want to process this sub-mix as one single entity, but they bring in their own idiosyncrasies and potential problems.

In MIR Pro it might be sufficient to make use of the "Selection Group" feature, which mirrors a parameter change o all selected Icons on a stage when holding "Alt" while doing so, or by activating the Preference to always treat selected Icons as a (parameter-linked) group.

HTH,

Originally Posted by: plowman

That’s a good answer. I did not know about re-rendering.

You're welcome! 

Here you can find a few sentences on this topic: 

-> https://www.vsl.info/en/manuals/mir-pro/think-mir#positional-ir

All the best,

No other reason than "Nobody took the time to implement it", to be honest ... 

The feature would be _perfectly_ useful, and as a matter of fact it is on my personal wish-list since a very long time (... since the days of legacy Vienna MIR, actually). For one reason or the other it never found the way into the engine`s code, which is a real pity.

That said, I have to point out that sometimes the better-sounding solution is _not_ what looks nice on a MIR Venue`s stage, and I find my Icons looking in other directions than the Main Mic surprisingly often. :-)

All parameters which trigger the re-rendering of the position-dependent IR-sets were excluded from automation intentionally (i.e. position, rotation and width). The re-calculation would cause little glitches in the audio signal.

I understand that you might just to use some remote control device without the need for actual automation, but there`s not much we can do about that ATM.

I`ll keep it in mind! :-)

Absolutely fabulous! Thanks for sharing this little cinematographic jewel with us, William. 

... and I had a good laugh when I saw that framed map of Vienna's city district on the wall. :-D 

Interesting question, but I'm afraid that there's not one simple answer to it.

When you run two reverbs in parallel, the reverb time will be specified by the longer one, more or less.

As soon as you run them serially, there will be many variables which have an influence on the overall reverb time, like their  order in the signal chain, the relative volumes, the specific frequency-dependent envelopes and so on. The only thing we can take for granted is that the reverb time will be longer than each of them alone, but most likely shorter than their sum.

In short: Trust your ears! :-)

Kind regards,

Originally Posted by: Seventh Sam

[...]

I have no clue how I missed those presets.  I blame too much coffee.  I just A/B'ed using those MUTE presets and I have a much clearer idea of what the second mic array is bringing to the table.  What an indispensable feature.

You're welcome! :-)

Well - for now it is, but there's a workaround (see below).

Yes - just create a surround setup (Quadro might be all you need, actually) and send the Secondary Mic to the rear channels by means of the Output Matrix in the 3rd tab of the Output Editor window.

Regarding separate RoomEQ: Due to the fact that the Secondary Mic is "wet only" by definition you can employ any kind of processing on these channels to sculpt the audio signal derived from this array. Just be aware that the RoomEQ will still affect the signal, so you might be better off without it.

Hi Sam,

ad 1.: The good news first: The mutual interaction between individual Icons happens on a purely acoustical level, due to the typical amplification of certain frequency ranges, while other frequencies will cancel out or increase the perceived width according to the phase and runtime of the surrounding IRs. In other words: As long as you use identical settings for different instances of MIR in two independent VI Frames, the result will be the same as the sound you would get from a single instance.

ad 2: This one is trickier. While I consciously adhered to a conventional audio engineering nomenclature in the GUI, things behave very differently in the background, technically spoken. We would expect that there are indeed individual audio streams happening in real-time for every capsule which we can "solo" instantly by pressing a button. Things are much more demanding in MIR, though: Each virtual "capsule" is the result of 32 individual IRs*, which means that you could run into scenarios where the engine would have calculate up to 512** convolutions (!) in real-time for a single (!!) instrument in a full-blown 7.1 surround setup (... 128*** in case of a ordinary stereo setup with Main and Secondary Microphone.

... it goes without saying that this would easily overburden even the most advanced CPUs with very small arrangements. The MIR-engine introduced an extremely clever (but rarely talked about) technical solution to overcome this hurdle: "Positional pre-rendering"  (... you can read up more details and even more numbers here -> https://www.vsl.info/en/manuals/mir-pro/think-mir#positional-ir ). In short: MIR pre-calculates an instrument-specific set of impulse responses in the moment you put an Icon on a certain position on a stage, taking into account all the individual parameters like chosen Output Formats, the instruments's Directivity Profiles, its Width, Rotation and so on. This set is really small, by comparison (e.g. only 4 IRs for a stereo instance). Like this, MIR Pro is able to run hundred and more Icons in (close to) real-time without busting your CPU. ;-) 

This also means that there is no easy way to "solo" a capsule on the fly as all the pre-rendering calculations would have to be re-done. But I'm fully aware of the problem - which is why I implemented a workaround for those cases were we absolutely need to listen to the Secondary Mic in solo: At the bottom of the list of my Factory Presets for the Main Mic you find three "MUTE" entrances. Choosing one of those will of course trigger the re-rendering of all Icon's impulse responses, but when things are done you can in fact listen to the Secondary Microphone's output.  ... just don't forget to save the settings you've made for the Main Mic before! ;-)

_____________________________

*) 8 directions from each position, recorded in 4-channel Ambisonics = 32

**) 32 IRs per "capsule", 8 capsules Main Mic, 8 capsules Secondary Mix = 512

***) 32 IRs per "capsule", 2 capsules Main Mic, 2 capsules Secondary Mix = 128

PS: Maybe I'm pointing out the obvious - but I forgot to mention that there is the actual "File > Merge Projects"-feature available, too, of course. 8-)

Hi Havergal,

if you want to use MIR Pro across several instances of Vienna Ensemble Pro (on the same machine) you would have to switch to the "conventional" plug-in version, not the one that comes as dedicated part of VE. Sonically you wouldn't lose anything, but some of the Vienna Instruments-specific automatisms (like Profile guessing) won't work anymore, so VIs might need more manual work.

If you want to keep your workflow untouched you could either save MIR Pro' so-called Engine Settings and import them in other instances. Sound-wise the result would be identical, then, but you wouldn't have all Icons visible on one Venue Map.

To share individual instrument settings you can save and recall Channel Sets within VE Pro's - they will appear in any instance.

HTH,