Regarding your first question you can indeed not switch all articulations with Logic key switches. There is a software called X- DAW from Audio Grocery which uses scripts in Logic which would enable more than 3 switches. You might of course also use different tracks for a main articulations like shorts, longs etc. and then use 3 switches for the additional options but some have 5 so you still are not able to get all options. By the way I counted 107 articulations in Art Director for Elite Strings. So even with 3 switches you have a large choice.

Regarding the negative delays I think the easiest is to also use separate tracks for main articulations and enter a delay on each track. to synchronize with the beats. You might be able to automate the delays in Logic if you put all articulations in the same track but itbis a lot of work if you have a lot of switches. Dorico 5.0 now has articulation sets where you can enter a delay per articulation.

Hi Andi, It is not so obvious as not all virtual instrument vendors use velocity in the same way as VSL does. On the other hand CC1 and CC11 are in general influencing the same parameters in libraries. So if you use a mix of libraries and sometimes may want to experiment by changing a library used for a player, you have to be careful what to adapt to improve playback. Maybe you can explain once if there is a possibility to improve playback in Dorico with VSL libraries using CC1 (or CC2 for Woodwinds and Brass) and CC11 on top of the velocities which are automatically generated by Dorico based on the dynamics indicated in the score.

So I have the velocity presets, and Dorico expression maps loaded as per your instruction, I also put the velocity XF on in the Synchron plugin and then I add the modulation (CC1 or CC2) and expression CC11 lanes in the Play mode and draw curves where I want to have changes like I would in a DAW.  I am not sure if this makes any sense however for the way the VSL Synchron is setup in Dorico. I seldom manipulate the velocity of the notes manually as you easily get lost with 30 or more players and a large orchestral piece with 400 bars per flow and sometimes multiple voices per staff. I tried it but often end up resetting all playback overwrites and start again which is time consuming. On the other hand with the CC curves you seldom get lost. 

I recently had this in Logic and Dorico but I did not check if the standalone version did show the libraries. It turned out that my iCloud iLok was not connected despite that fact I logged-in to the iLok app. Clicking  on the iCloud image in the iLok app solved it.  It sometimes seems to happen when iLok did an update. There is a thread in this forum on the issue.

I assume you did rescan for your libraries in the Synchron player as first try to find them, and that you did not move them since last opening the plugin. A possibility is that something went wrong in the recent update of Synchron and that the plugin in Logic is not the same version as the standalone (AU, VST3). You can check the version, rescan and load it in the Logic plugin manager or simply reinstall it in the VSL assitant.

They are already since a long time under Additionals in the assistent. Sub-chapter Notation

You have clearly listed the advantages of using the normal VEP Pro instead of the AU version.  I think the AU version was created to allow more than 16 channels in Logic but as you mentioned if you cannot individually mix those in Logic this is of little use. 

I usually organize VEP in orchestral sections and if there are more than 16 instruments or instruments + articulation groups I just create 2-3 VEP instances. Never needed more till now as I switched back to one channel per instrument to facilitate use in Dorico. 

Am I correct that if I want to write a playable piece using the free Fujara flute I can only use the notes in the scale of G or A? However I assume the instrument has a means to change the tuning from G to A which is probably not possible while playing. So only one scale at the time is possible. 

That would mean that all other notes sounding on the virtual instrument are electronically transposed.

Everyone seems to be in full balance. No comments to my post. In fact I recently saw two Youtube video‘s by Berklee discussing balancing different libraries. Their method is similar.

In view of the announced contest I was looking at the Hello Free instruments. I wonder if they are ballanced by VSL and if so what the reference point is. The Big Bang Orchestra is the oldest free instrument but it is massive even compared to the Fujara Flute. Not easy to combine in a natural way with the new ones. 

Good to hear that all instruments work again. The most recent BBCSO plugin is actually Rosetta and M1 compatible but you might still have had the beta version which had two separate versions for the modes.

Regarding Legato Portamento you have to reduce the note velocities to below 15. CC64 does not work. It only serves in a DAW to avoid that you have to overlap the notes to get Portamento but in Dorico it seems to work without overlap just with the very low velocity. You can still use Dynamics in Dorico to get the correct volume you want. The velocity in the performance legato preset has no effect on volume.

How to change the expression map to set these low velocities automatically when you write Portamento as articulation above the staff in the score I have never succeeded in doing. Velocity is not a CC nor a key switch,.it is a note attribute for which Dorico cannot give "instructions" to the plugin..

In fact these performance legato presets combining several articulations in Spitfire libraries are a pain if you do not play live. 

Hi VaSoline
In Logic I checked the articulation you mentioned with the three notes xB4, C5 and C#5 AT CC1 127, CC11 127 and velocity 127, CC22 attack at 0 with violins 1 and 2 with CC7 at the VSL instrument preset 101 and 95 respectively. I did not hear a ring. You indeed hear the accented attack. It is the same for all notes as far as I can hear.

I tried one octave higher, one lower and a few semi-tones higher. For Violins 2 the attack sounds a bit less agressive. In my articulation set (from Art Director) the setting you indicate is simply called Marcato however as you show in the plugin it is called Marcato/sfz.  A violon player should explain the exact difference between the two techniques which also depends on the period the music is from. For a sfz the forte "peak" is usually shorter I think than for a Marcato.  

What is interesting that under Dynamics you actually also have an articulation called "Sforzato". I cannot really hear any difference with the Marcato/sfz articulation under Long. Maybe the samples played are the same.

On my M1Max MBP the last version of VEP Pro works fine with BBCSO. I have a combination of 8 VSL and 5 BBCSO instances in my server project file. Do you see the channels for the BBCSO instance you are using loading when the project opens?

What does happen to me sometimes is that I deactivate channels or even whole instances with instruments I seldom use and when I do use them there is no sound in my DAW or Dorico as I forgot to press the on/off button for the channel or the whole instance in VEP. Maybe that is the issue..

What I do have but that is an old big which has been reported but never corrected is that if you open a VEPPro vesp64 file by clicking on it in Finder, VEP starts but the file  does not open.

This thread seems to be the newest on the subject so I would like to add another observation which came up working on volume balancing in my orchestral template which has a combination of BBCSO and VSL Synchron for WW, Brass and Strings.

I have seen several threads including this one where CC7 of all Synchron (or Synchronised) instruments was set to 100 (or all at the same value). As per VSL input in the is forum and also in a direct interaction with them, CC7 volume is used by the VSL engineers to balance instruments relative to each other together with the microphone presets for each room in the Mixer window. So changing the preset CC7 values ruin the VSL library engineer's (good or bad?) idea of orchestral instrument balance.

For this balancing act I have for now just used long articulation only for all instruments. 9 bars with a mix of half, quarter and eights notes all in the middle of the playable range for the instruments. I have left VSL at default CC7, CC11 (127) and CC1 (80/127=63%). I have used the Classical Room Mix preset.  In BBCSO I set CC11 and CC1 also to 127 (100%) and 63%. Zero reverb in BBCSO plugin and no reverb or other effects on the tracks. Velocities for both VSL and BBCSO are set to the Logic default 98/127.

To compare I have listed peak dBFS and LUFS of the whole 9 bars. Attached a pdf with my findings which might be interesting to discuss.

To get a volume balance, I  only adapted the volume in the BBCSO plugin for WW and Brass instruments (mostly downwards) to more or less match the VSL values. The strings I left untouched for now as the number of instruments are not the same. So arbitrarily I took VSL Synchron WW and Brass as "correctly" balanced however this might be questionable if we look at the peak and LUFS values I found for the VSL libraries .

There is the issue of pitch at which the instruments are playing of course but as an example I would think that a piccolo playing one octave higher than a flute would be louder than that flute. In BBCSO it is the case. In Synchron WW it is not. Same for a Trumpet and a Horn. Again BBCSO shows what I would expect Synchron Brass not. Also Cimbasso and Tuba seem very quiet relative to he other brass in the VSL library. 

Attached a pdf with my findings which might be interesting to discuss.

The download speed through the assitant is indeed not very fast compared to speeds in apps of other VST library providers. Even with a very fast internet connection it took some time to get all string libraries uploaded.  The speed you see at the bottom of the display in the app also varies a lot over time if you have a large library to download (I think you also see the number of servers change?).

Maybe this helps: If it seems to go asleep I noticed that pausing and starting again can wake up the process.

.You are exactly describing what all Mac M1 users experience. I have an M1Max with 64GB RAM but experience the same issues of peaking overloads and incomplete loading of VSL instruments in Logic in M1 mode. I even have fprojects with multiple VSL instances (10-15 Synchron instruments) which are not playable anymore in M1 mode. They open very slowly (1-2 minute) but if you start playback you get the infamous ball spinning eternally.

After a lot of experimenting with the setting s in M1 mode, I found that the only solution is to run Logic in Rosetta mode, Somehow they way the VSL libraries load is different. It opens very fast and actually see your Synchron player instances load during the opening of the project and although you might face an overload on the first playback after opening, the project runs smoothy after simply restating payback and you can work on it and save it.

I am not sure what is happening at VSL but there seem to be serious developer issues. The is a complete radio silence on M1 issue. Worse the last still none M1 compatible update of all major players and VEPPro was even withdrawn due to major bugs.

It is really getting time to at least issue an. M1 Beta version of the Synchron player as we all have thousands of Euros more or less blocked. in libraries which cannot be used properly since close to two years on M1 Macs. The last „no news and no deadline“ message from VSL was in August as far as I can trace in the many posts on this topic!

Many plugins now have separate M1 and Intel plugins and switching between native and Rosetta just to use a VSL instruments is very tiresome. Logic runs the Synchron player without Rosetta but CPU is peaking. at the first few notes and regularly gives CPU overloads even with 64 GB CPU. Versions of files with Synchron player tracks saved in Rosetta mode have difficulty opening and playing in M1 mode and just opening the plugin often leads to a DAW crash. I had to stop using VSL instruments in new compositions.

VSL team when will we finally have a M1 and now M2 compatible VEP Pro and Synchron player?

I use Addictive Drums2 which has a brushes and sticks jazz packages with loops and playable setups. Also nice for playing live with just a guitar or soloing for fun with guitar and or bass..

I was suffering since months from this issue. Up to a point that I switched back to BBCSO and looked into other orchestral libraries. Only VSL Synchron had the 100% core load peaks and especially in Rosetta overload issues but I might have solved it.

I noticed no relationship with the number of threads in the VSL settings. I tested 4-10. However the number of threads and other audio settings in Logic seem to be a key issue. On a Logic experts recommendation I used to the maximum for my M1Max 10 threads since some time. That gave reproducible overload points in Rosetta and other playback issues ( partial instrument articulation load) in native mode. So I switched back to processing threads on Automatic, I/O buffer size 256 samples and process buffer range Large in Logic audio preferences.

With those settings I stil get 100% peaks of in general one core per instrument when it kicks in which VSL should really work on as this only happens with their Synchron instruments but playback continues without clicks nor overload. Even if as many as 5 new instruments to let us say 10 already playing kick in.

I have also experimented with all sort of Synchron settings with between 4 and 10 threads and preload sizes but that had no effect on the overload issues. I now use the recommended preload for my SSD i.e. 3072 samples, 6 streaming and processing threads and force enable all slots. By the way I have an MBP with 10 cores M1 Max and 64 GB memory and 4T SSD.

I hope this helps.

I agree that the speed with which the VSL software is adapted to M1 is disappointing however they are certainly not the only company having problems getting their software adapted. Apart from Kontakt all Native Instruments soft and Hardware still needs Rosetta.

Do you really have such big issues using Rosetta with Dorico?  I am running a Dorico 4 project using Rosetta with 70 instruments in the VST rack, 49 VSL Synchron and the rest BBCSO and a few Kontakt Percussion instruments. It takes bit of time till the project is playable but I have no big issues when it is ready to play. Sometimes  a few clicks when 2 or more instruments are played at the same note for the first time in a session (a CPU peak). You also see it very well in the Logic CPU monitor. When you play it a second time there is no peak nor clicks.

Before my M1Max I had to use VEPPro for this size of project as I had only 16 GB on my Intel MBP but with the new M1Max and 64 GB this is not needed. 

I did test VEPPro with a similar size template but only with Logic (so no Rosetta needed). The main reason at the time was that the Synchron player did not work directly in Logic whereas it did work when accessed through VEPPro. Now the Synchron Player works directly in Logic. 

I absolutely agree. I just switched back to BBCSO for the strings for several scores which need longer con sordino passages because neither Elite, nor Pro, nor FX Strings have CS. I really do not want to use an additional library in the middle of a piece just for this articulation. There is a simulation app from numerical sound but I am not sure it works with the Synchron libraries. They only advertise VSL VI support. Sound is not bad however.

Hi Paul, that is not it, all my libraries are on my build in MBP SSD. I especially bought a large one to have all libraries at hand without having to carry around an external SSD. Just clicking on the instrument in the Synchron player loads theM correctly without having to specify a path.

Does the incomplete loading maybe have something to do with iLok? I  have my licenses in the cloud but do have it running and am signed in before opening a DAW or Dorico.

I have a annoying issue since I started using iLok. I open a piece in Logic or Cubase which has a number of Synchron instances and when I start playback an umber of instruments are not playing.

When I go to the plugin, it looks like the first screenshot. A number of articulation options are crossed out in red. Only solution I found it to go to each instrument and reload the it in the list by double clicking.  It is sort of random. If I have 10 instruments all VSL Synchron, 2 may load OK and the rest have to opened and with a double click the instrument has to be reloaded.

Hi Simon, as I mentioned I first checked this when I saw your post and  I already had iLok installed at that time. So I cannot confirm that it was also an issue with the eLicenser, on my Mac. I am sure it was as you indicate. 

I did find another a maybe related detail. When VEP is open with or without a file loaded and you click on a vesp file in Finder it does open up correctly in VEP. 

No-one any input on this issue?

Same here Mac OS 12.3.1 latest VEP. Version.I usually open recent projects so I did not notice. I think it has something to do with this VSL helper which seems run each time you open a .vesp file or also a VSL library in a plugin in a daw but which does not open when you click in the finder on the vesp file.

Hi Terence, a first reason for several instances not related to organization is that one of your DAWs might not support more than 16 midi channels per port nor multiple ports. I think the Logic multiport version is still a Beta. It might have changed but when I got my M1 MBP Logic did not accept it.  I had no time to further test. 

As you would normally use the same VEP file for multiple DAWs and multiple music pieces not always using the same instruments It is also of advantage to group your instruments in instances. I usually save a file with all instances on Off and based on the instruments I plan to use in a new piece, activate the instances with the instruments I want to use. Usually I have to connect 4-5 instances per piece linked to the template. 

I have five timpani slots in one SP instance, the 20-32", and am trying to play all at the same time to get more volume.

I have understood that if I activate the parallel mode at the top of the five slots and set all 5 slots to mix in edit they play together in unison.  If that is the case something seems not to be working as I do not notice any volume increase compared to the single instrument. Am I doing something wrong? 

To check I also loaded up 5 instances of the SP each with a timpani. That gives the desired effect. HZ like volume