Originally Posted by: Bill

And then you'll just have to download all their content

Very true - but I don't mind the downloading. I have a separate machine for that. The issue is that taking stuff off SSDs and then rewriting to them gradually degrades their performance. Obviously software evolves, and I don't mind the disruption of keeping up with updates, but to have a developer tell you you need to wipe your system and start again because they had a moment of whimsy is another matter. Who knows when they will have other such moments, and you'll have to rebuild your system yet again to stay with them?

Thanks Paul,

sadly, not a chance. The disruption of pulling many GB of samples off my SSDs, then installing them all again, just to change the licensing method isn't reasonable. I'm just gonna use what I've got till it finally doesn't work on the latest OS, and then go with a manufacturer who doesn't fart around so much.

Hi,

Sorry, I'm sure this has been a hot topic somewhere, but I don't come here very often, and searching has only turned up threads that kind of fizzled out. I vaguely remember seeing an announcement that VEPro now supports VST3 plugins, so I've installefd the latest build (ELicenser) in the hope that this was true. So far I can't get it to show any VST3 plugins though. Was the announcement for iLok only? If so, is it ever coming to Elicenser?

Thanks Paul,

that's kind of what I assumed it was for, but, as I said, it didn't work. I allowed it to activate the default path, but it refused to download until I turned off the download only mode, and allowed a full installation. 

As a hobbyist, I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to make the switch to iLok. If I do, though, I will want to download the libraries and software on my laptop, which is connected to the internet, then install them on my various studio machines, which aren't. I thought I'd give the downloading part a trial run with the Fujara (since I haven't converted any licenses yet, so can't download anything else). So I installed the new assistant, and selected 'Download Only' mode, which I assumed would allow me to download the package, without installing it. But the assistant told me that there wasn't enough disk space (not true), and wouldn't start the download. When I switched off 'Download Only' mode it was happy to download it. The problem is I then have to select an installation folder, and allow the product to unpack itself. If I do that for everything I own that's going to leave me installing and deleting a whole bunch of stuff on my laptop, just to be able to get at the compressed packages.

Am I missing something? What is the 'Download Only' mode for if it actually prevents downloading?

Thanks Paul!

I already have Dimension Strings I and II. At the moment I can complete the bundle either by buying Dimension Strings III, for £155, or by using the 'upgrade to bundle' option, for £122. If I use the upgrade path will my previous 2 licenses get swallowed into a bundle license - i.e. will I have to install all 3 libraries on a single machine?

I'm just about to build a new DAW. Last time I did I had many issues with VEPro having audio dropouts, glitches, pops and clicks. After several back and forths with support, the best guess was that the specific chipset of my LAN connection was one that didn't play nice with VEPro. 

So is there a list of chipsets known to have issues, somewhere, so I can avoid repeating this problem?

Do you have MirX? Having this turned on on an instrument adds anothers 2 buffers.

Well, I went on my system this morning, and could only get it to glitch once in three hours, even before I change the card. The things I've changed in  the last week are:-

• Turned off Windows Updater (turned out the firm who built my machine thought that Windows constantly looking for an internet connection wouldn't be an issue)
• Turned of Acrobat Updater (again the boneheads who built it. My music network doesn't have an internet connection, but Acrobat updater was opening up a TCP connection every couple of minutes in the hope that my switch was a router).
• Turned off WindowsMediaPlayer Network Streaming Service. None of my drives were set up to stream media, and I'd never opened Media Player on any of the machines, yet this service was still opening itself and establishing connections periodically.
• Turned off ASIO Guard. I don't know why this creates any improvement, since Steinberg's description of it says that Virtual Instrument tracks don't open in ASIO Guard mode anyway, but Vienna recommend shutting it down, so I did, and have almost erradicated the dropouts.
  

I have exactly the same issue. I've spent months exploring network settings, turning off background processes and swapping hardware in and out. Every time I think I've solved the problem it comes back after a couple of days.

I finally emailed support yesterday, and Bernd told me to check what network adapters my machines are using. Apparently Intel 82579V (which it turned out I do have on my main machine) doesn't get on well with audio streaming. So I'll be buying a PCIe network card this weekend, and hoping like mad that this is the cause. I was doubtful, since I also get the problem when using VEPro on the local machine, rather than across the network, but I've just read that this mode still uses the network adapter to move information between Cubase and VEPro, so I'm quite hopeful.

Hi,

I may be getting to the bottom of the audio dropouts I've had for months. Contacted support and it turns out I have an inbuilt network adapter that is known to cause issues. I'm still not convinced the network is the root of all my problems though, so I want to make sure that the adapter I buy to replace it is one that's tried and tested, so that I can rule out the network in future diagnosing.

Has anyone got recommendations for PCIe gigabit adapter cards that have been completely reliable for VEPro use? I'm on Win7 64 bit SP1.

Thanks Bernd,

I'm using the internal gigabit connectors on all 3 machines. I'm guessing the next port of call is to look into whether they're at fault - it's just that the weird mistakes in the buffer display have persuaded me that VEPro itself is doing something odd, rather than my system. I have tried turning off interrupt moderation, flow control, large offloads, etc, all of which had no effect - in fact it's possible it made it worse. And I am using static IP addresses.

I'm just about at the end of my tether with VEPro now. I've spent months trying to investigate why I get audio dropouts, without any success.

I'm running 3 PCs, each of which is absolutely rock solid by itself. They look like this:-

DAW: i7 12 cores, 64GB RAM, 4 SSD drives, Echo Layla, Win7 x64

Slave 1: i5 8cores, 24GB RAM, SSD Vienna drive, Win7 x64

Slave 2: i7 8 cores, 16GB RAM, SSD Vienna drive

Some of the time they behave absolutely fine, but then they go through periods where I get audio dropouts whilst playing across the network. I did think it was a network issue, but I no longer know. I've sat and watched the resource monitors on each machine for hours, whilst playing just a single VIPro, and there is a dip in network use each time a dropout occurs (from 7MB/s to 4MB/s), but I can't tell whether something is killing the network, and thus preventing VEPro streaming MIDI and audio, or whether VEPro is simply ceasing to function, and thus network use is dipping.

Last week I turned off some background services (Adobe updater, WIndows Updater, WindowsMediaStreamingService) and upped my VEPro buffers from 2 to 3, and had several sessions without a single glitch, but today they're back.

I noticed a couple of odd things, which I'm hoping someone will have seen before, and have a solution.

• I have latency set to 128 samples, and 3 VEPro buffers. On the GUI for the VEPro plugin, for some time, it suddenly said 3 buffers - 1152 samples - latency 38 msecs, which is actually 9 times my soundcard buffer rather than 3. When I tried scrolling down to zero buffers it still only went down to an added latency of 512 samples. I don't really have any way to tell whether it's actually adding the number of samples shown, or whether it's just a mistake on the GUI, but even adding 3 buffers didn't solve the audio dropouts (and I'm still only playing one instrument, on slave 1 - not a large mix or anything). After a while it suddenly went back to behaving correctly, showing 0 samples when 0 buffers were added. More to the point, when it did go back to displaying properly I could play with 0 buffers, and not a single glitch.
• I thought I'd try the old fashioned presets for VI, as opposed to VIPro - as a new user I'd never really seen them. I loaded the 3 bassoon preset 1, and started playing. I noticed it seems to decided, in real time, whether to use the sustain samples or legato. Every time it switched between the two there was a very loud pop. Looking at the resource monitor on my DAW it was clear that these pops were happening because the network was being absolutely killed - dropping immediately from 7MB/s to 1MB/s.

Any ideas?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. They are on separate drives, with SATA III interfaces. But it's just become clear that EVO840 drives have some issues where older files have massively longer retrieval times than new files. So samples that have been stored a while may not stream very well. There is a firmware update coming, which should fix it, and hopefully fix my glitching issues.

I may be getting to the bottom of my problems at last. I think I had two completely separate issues, that just happened to have the same aural results. I went through all my machines, and turned off a bunch of background services - in particular Media Player Network Sharing service, and Acrobat Updater - then turned up my VEPro buffers to 3, and it seems to have dealt with all the dropouts from one machine.

I think my other machine may have some capability issues, since I have a Samsung EVO drive for both the system and my Vienna samples. This one is still causing problems, but I'm hoping the promised firmware update for the EVO drives will help.

Sadly no - they're all static.

Hi

I've just spent a very, very frustrating day battling all kinds of issues with my studio, some of which I believe are Cubase bugs, possibly some hardware issues, but a couple which I can't solve, that affect VEPro - I'm hoping some network experts have seen these issues before and can help.

I have a system with a win7 DAW and two win7 slaves - all completely built from scratch, everything installed very carefully, and set up identically. Yet slave number 1 is behaving differently, on the network, from slave number 2. When exploring the network from the other machines it appears as both a PC and a media streaming device, even though media streaming is turned off on all three, Media Player has never been run, I don't have iTunes installed, nor anything else which might want to stream media, other than VEPro. I don't know whether it's a problem that it appears as both, but it does have issues with playback. When I use it as a slave there is a regular 'pulsing' (somewhere between a click and a pop, but constant at about 80bpm) in the audio that comes back. It's not related to the bpm of my Cubase project, nor the clock on my keyboard, nor anything else that transmits a MIDI beat - as far as I can tell. And I discovered today that it starts occurring when the machine appears in the 'Media Devices' list on the network. So long as it doesn't (and I still don't know what makes the difference) this pulsing doesn't happen.

Secondly I have audio dropouts in the streamed audio from both slaves. This varies from being an extreme problem to non-existent, and I also can't find a reason for it. It's not that there are dropouts ON the slaves, but in the capacity of the network to return the audio. This can happen when I'm only loading one instrument, and playing one note on the slaves,with only a single stereo output on VEPro, so it's not a capacity thing. So far no amount of fiddling with network settings seems to make any difference at all. I've tried it with JumboPackets on and off, Green Networking on and off, every possible combination of enabling collision management, etc, but it just doesn't stop. It's usually worst when the network has just been turned on, but sometimes it doesn't happen at all, and sometimes persists so long that I give up on doing any work. Anyone else having similar issues?

Cheers - I shall update immediately then.

So this turns out not to be true. I installed the basses, but they are using a default solo instrument preset in MirX, since the bass presets aren't there yet.

So back to my original question. I do remember once seeing a post saying that MirX had been updated to include presets for various libraries - so I'm assuming the presets are a part of Mir, and not installed with the instrument itself. Since I don't like installing more updates than necessary, I'd like to know whether the Dimension Bass presets are in the current build of MirX (and hence whether I can install now) or whether they're yet to be included (and hence I should put off updating). Could anyone who is running DM Basses with the last build of MirX comment?

Just a quick query, since I don't like updating software too often. Does the current build of MirX (from March 2014) already contain presets for the Dimension Basses, or is that to follow?

Just starting work on building a template, and am wondering how best to load stuff. On my slave machines there's obviously no question - I'll be using VEPro to load instruments into. But on my main DAW I'm wondering what's going to work best. Should I simply load tonnes of instances of VIPro onto Cubase instrument channels? Or should I run VEPro on the machine, and host the instruments in that. A lot of people seem to do the latter, but I can't imagine what the advantage is - in fact it seems to me that this must add to the processing load.

On a related note, I'm looking to run fairly big instances of VEPro on the slaves, which I believe is better than lots of small ones. I read that, when using the VST3 plugin, the number of MIDI inputs appearing in Cubase would automatically match the inputs per instance on each machine - but this doesn't seem to be the case. No matter how many MIDI inputs I set per instance, on the slaves, in Cubase I can only see 8 inputs per connection. Am I doing something numbskulled?

Thanks guys, you're quite right, I'd completely missed that it was possible to send audio in separate channels - I assumed that VEPro just had a stereo out. On the other hand I don't think that will be the issue, as I'm only running one instrument per slave so far, and just letting it go through the main out of VEPro.

Hi MWE,

I'm not sure about the number of audio streams. As I understood it the summing of audio happens on each machine, so that all that is being passed over the network is a stereo channel, and the load remains fairly similar all the time. In any case, so far I'm only experimenting with one instrument at a time, so the load must be reasonably minimal.

The only other thing I'm aware of running on the network is Synergy, which shares the mouse and keyboard from my main machine. I guess it's possible that this is the issue. I always ran it when I was on XP without any issues, but have been out of the game for a bit, and Synergy is now completely rewritten for 64bits, so I guess it's not safe to assume that it's ok.

Not sure about the router idea - I might resort to trying it.

THe problem is definitely on the network. I have a USB audio interface which I can use to get audio out of the slaves, and playing them as standalones doesn't give any issues.

Hi again Cyril, and thanks for taking the time

I think the load's OK. So far all I've done is load a single instance of VEPRo on each, with one plugin inside it. On slave 1 the CPU indicator in VEP tends to sit at about 5%, going up to about 10% if I play a Kontakt instrument, and about 7% if I play a Vienna instrument. Slave 2 sits at about 9% even without loading an instrument - I need to look into that - possibly I have the number of threads set wrong?

I spread everything purely to take the load. I'm the kind of composer who likes to be able to tinker with everything up to the last minute, so the idea of bouncing stuff doesn't appeal. I figured I would split the Vienna stuff so that I could run quite a large orchestra, with MIRx turned on. Then I spread everything else too, for scenarios where I'm not working with orchestra. So if I'm doing pop, my basses are on one machine, guitars on another and drums on another, etc. I don't have that much Vienna stuff - I just believe in a lot of redundant space on drives. I'm guessing my SSDs are about half full.

No, I didn't raid the SSDs, but I really don't think my issues are down to the performance on individual machines.

On Slave 1 I also run Kontakt 5.3, SWAM, ARIA, Engine, Superior Drummer and Chinee Orchestra - but the dropouts don't seem dependent on this either. When they occur at all they can occur with only VI loaded.

No MIR - just MIRx.

I'm fairly sure all the drives are on SATA III - I checked the manuals to the motherboards. They're set to IDE rather than AHCI, but I believe Intel processors don't support AHCI anyway.

I'm not sure how to run speed tests. I ran the system rating thing in Windows, which returned a 7.9 out of 7.9 for data transfer speeds on each machine. Also not sure how to check the speed of the SSDs.

Sadly the problems don't go away when I just connect up two machines directly. I did that when setting up the first two, and things seemed to get better for a while - to the point where I was about to buy a new switch - but then the problems came right back, and only went away (or at least got a lot better) when I turned on jumbo frames.

And yes I do mean fixed IP addresses.