Hi Paul,

Indeed, what a great instrument!

May I add a request for demos? I'd like to hear some pieces or excerpts that feature very soft dynamics and the middle register!

The loud stuff with lots of very high, low and fast notes always sound impressive, but the real challenge for sampled pianos for me is in that center register that can often sound flat and dull. I'm sure the Steinway will have a beautiful tone in that range, but it would simply be nice to hear it.

Pick the Debussy Rêverie, a Bach prelude, or a Mozart Sonata...

Thank you!
Tobias

Hi Everyone,

In the process of setting up comprehensive VE-templates for Dimension libraries I came across something that I am really missing in VE:

An object that receives MIDI-Input and can transform and forward it to other objects. Say, you have 8 Dimension solo-violins on channels 1-8 that you can all address separately from your sequencer (which I do a lot, and it's GREAT). For quick input purposes it would be good to be able use channel 9 to play all of the violins together, maybe channel 10 to play the odd-numbered, and 11 to play even-numbered. That way you can instantly play tutti, div à2 and all individually, without loading any other samples or creating any more objects on MIR's stage (thus conserving CPU-power). This is even useful for quick key-switching articulations or riding CCs for all of them at once, instead of having to copy MIDI-data across all tracks individually.

In Logic, I usually place a MIDI-Instrument before the VE-channel-strip that addresses these respective MIDI-channels. However, when doing track-imports, these lose their cabling, so it becomes cumbersome. It would be great to have that self-contained inside the ensemble.

Getting more creative - with a MIDI-processing-object in the VE-Mixers like that you can create custom doublings and combinations that you don't need to set up separate instruments for. Even better, with re-routed MIDI each instrument is playing from their respective position on stage through their Instrument profile. If you then have the ability, by means of KS or PrgCh, automate the routing, you can switch doublings on the fly. Would be amazing.

Is there a chance for some MIDI-processing inside VE?

Best from Alaska (currently),

Tobias

Yes, that's an interesting concept. A colleague of mine works with the MIR like that. The other benefit is, MIR instances on audio tracks appear on the same stage as the other instruments, much like it used to work with feeding audio from a DAW to the Ensemble before the plugin came out.

I'll do some experimenting - it comes down to load times between session, I believe. The 'preserve' feature does have its benefits.

Best,

Tobias

Hi Dietz,

Thank you for responding! Yes, I agree - no orchestral seating scheme is the same. Maybe the ability to set icon positions without loading instruments is a good one, thus allowing the user to create seating-templates.

While there is definitely a playful sense of creativity in taking an instrument and positioning it on stage, it gets to become quite a workload with each individual player of a 40-60 piece orchestra, if you start from scratch.

Best,

Tobias

Hi everyone,

I ran into this phenomenon yesterday for the first time. Yesterday is also the day I upgraded from MIR Pro 24 to MIR Pro. I had more than 24 objects on stage - a newfound sense of freedom. After repeatedly trying to pursuade my escaping violin section to come back into the hall the Ensemble eventually crashed. Felt like mutiny for a minute. Eversince I have not come across this problem, nor have been able to reproduce it. All I can say is that it happened after I edited some of the object parameters to a group on stage.

It seemed for a moment, the incredible realism of MIR extended from spatialization to musicians sentiments. Maybe I should write other music, or plan more breaks. :)

Here's a few specs:

VE Server 64 bit 5.1.12010

Mac Pro Octacore 24gb RAM

Logic Pro 9.1.8

Best,

Tobias

Ha! After taking all this time to write this post, I managed to change various parameters including direction for a group of objects... well, that one is solved!

Tobias

The only glitch: at some point while moving objects around a bunch of violins decided to leave the rehearsal and dash off into open space, probably where Lothringer Straße would be (MIR doesn't show that street though). I had to drag them back into the hall like some angry conductor. I kid you not.

Hi VSL,

With instrument setups in MIR getting larger and larger (i.e. Dimension Series), it would be very helpful to be able to adjust a few things to a group of objects on stage:

1. Setting an instrument profile, character, direction, and width to a selection of objects.
2. While one is able to move a selection group, it would be GREAT to have them stay in line to a single point (i.e. the main mic tree). That way you can shift sections left and right, and don't have to adjust the direction parameter for each one.
3. A default seating position could be part of an instrument's profile. Re-seating objects on stage could be done with a simple command to snap them to where they would normally go and then adjust to taste.

As is, if you decide after you're done setting up you want your violin sections in spezzato seating flanking both sides, you're in for moving and re-directing some 20 objects on stage. That might actually keep me from doing that.

In the meantime, thanks for bringing MIR into our lives. :)

Tobias

Hi Dietz,

Thank you - just dropped the sales-dept an email. It's not like I needed to set up my other system with all rooms, bells and whistles on Sunday night! I will patiently await their answer.

Looking forward to mixing at Sage Gateshead. :) Keep up the great work.

Best,

Tobias

Hi there,

If I had all 4 roompacks licensed and wanted to get an additional license for each of them to run on a secondary system, can I purchase those as a bundle?

Does the special promotion price in April apply to the additional licenses as well?

And finally, where do you order additional licenses on the website?

So many questions!

Best,

Tobias

Hey Guys,

I really need some help on this one! There are several sessions where I don't have sound coming back from the MIR as soon as I have a second instance inserted. It's actually somewhat arbitrary: earlier, I had two instances up and running, and it failed on the third. Since then, I can only listen to one channel of MIR coming back to Logic's mixer, even if I take all instances out and start from scratch.

 Opened a backup session and had two instances running fine. Inserted a third one, and that one went mute. Then took out two instances and re-inserted one on that last channel that didn't work, and then it sounded (two instances running). A third one on a different channel went mute again. So I went back and cleared two instances and tried another channel, and only got dry signal, but at least sound. The top-most instance in Logic's arrange window always seems to work fine, not matter whether the other do or not. It's really hard to trouble-shoot.

THEN, I took one instance that wasn't working and turned Room-Tone button ON and OFF. It suddenly started putting signal through again, with reverb!! Unfortunately, with that I lost the ability to edit the WIDTH parameter in the MIR application for that channel! I did that with each instance that wasn't working and got the sound back, at the sacrifice of the width button for each channel (you can't even drag the sliders or enter numerical values in the parameters box as it is greyed-out). For someone determined to use the MIR under these circumstances, you need a good therapist to recover.

 Tried all kinds of different buffer sizes in Logic and MIR, restarting Logic, rebooting the Mac, repairing permissions and rebuilding the directory using diskwarrior. I'm running out of ideas. To my gut instinct this problem has BUG written all over it.

 Please help. I have two film-projects due tomorrow morning, having to mix and master all night. I would love to use the MIR as it really ties in my live-instruments with the rest of the ensemble. It's nothing less but GREAT when it works.

 Best,

Tobias

Hi Karel,

Thank you for your response. In fact, the latency of MIR was set to 512, as was Logic's. I now set the MIR's to 1024, leaving Logic's untouched. Still, the problem persists: I moved an instance of the MIR one slot down and lost that channel's signal. Have to restart Logic now to get it back. It feels more like a bug than anything else.

However [takes a deep breath], the other day I had no problems with multiple MIR instances in another session of a different project, opening or moving instances, and still getting sound from each one. The thing is, the sessions aren't all that different. I use a lot of UAD plugins in either case. One session gives me problems, the other doesn't.

Best,

Tobias

Hey Guys,

While I abslutely LOVE the new MIR plug-in, I have come across a little problem using it in Logic on audio-tracks. If I instanciate it on one track it works just fine. As soon as I add an instance on a second (or more) audio track I get no sound from that track until I bypass the plugin. In order to fix the problem I quit Logic and re-open that session. Then everything is working again.

Performance of my Mac Pro is not an issue. I usually use all available instances of my MIR Pro24 without problems. I'm on OS X 10.7.4 with Logic 9.1.7, 24GB RAM in an old soon-retiring Mactopus.

Any clues?

Many thanks,

Tobias

UPDATE: As soon as any MIR-Plugin is either moved in Logic's mixer (i.e. to a lower slot), or a new MIR instance is added, only the first instance will put out sound. The other are all muted until the session is restarted.

Hi Paul,

Yes, same problem here. With my MIR Pro24 license I'm not allowed to access the download. Great update - I can't wait to use it. An exercise in anticipation, so it seems.

Best,

Tobias

And that's a good way of doing it. I set transformers up in Logic. But these are all cumbersome workarounds. Even moreso if you want to have varying start- and end values from instrument to instrument (which would not be uncommon). It's ironic that the VI Pro software is extremely advanced in so many areas. It's not like the Play engine that does not even have CC assignment, save any sort of sample manipulation other than, say keyswitches and reverb. I could go on...

Best,

Tobias

Hello there,

The issues I brought up in my post a month ago are something I consider important. It would be great to get some sort of an acknowledgement from the VSL team that you guys have actually seen this post.

Sorry for bugging. Thank you!

Tobias

Hello VSL team,

I have been looking for a way to use aftertouch to control VI Pro parameters and realized that it is not available as a modulation source. It would be great to use it to, say crossfade between slot 1a and b (if you want to introduce a growl, gradually add vibrato or tremolando playing as you sustain a note).

Also, the ability to set modulation depth would be very very useful to have. If I route AT to, say humanize, but I want to retain a basic level of humanization of 40 as the bottom end of the scale, AT would then only add to this value as pressure increases, but never dip below. This could be achieved by making the end-points of the curve-graph movable. That way you can introduce floors and ceilings to modulations.

No to put any additional "pressure" on you guys , but it could really help making performable instruments. In the meantime, I'll use Logic's Transformers to do this, which is a little more cumbersome.

Thanks for reading,

Tobias

Hi Karel,

Thanks for your reply. I checked that box.

One more thing - when I set up a template and assign, say 36 destinations to various automation parameters, the ensemble gets really slow and sluggish. It all goes back to normal after reloading the particular ensemble. That feels like a bug to me.

However, in general, is there a CPU-drain on having volume and dry/wet sliders of 16 instruments assigned to automation parameters?

Many thanks,

Tobias

Hi,

I just wanted to tell VSL, and rest of the world, how blown away I am by MIR. It has, again (after you guys introduced legato), completely changed the way I work. I can get great sounding results fairly quickly. And it's so much fun to use.

I also realized I need a new workstation pretty soon. Thanks for that!

In all honesty, until I was using MIR, I recently favoured other libraries for their sound. Particularly LASS did very well. However, when I ran my VSL instruments through MIR, they went from being a 10-12 year-old library to sounding top notch. I'm back to mostly using VSL. In fact, I went through the pain-staking process and re-programmed the entire score for a feature film entitled "Inuk" that was mixed by Greg King in LA. He quite liked what he heard. It took me almost a month without sleep, but it was worth it. ;-)

http://www.inuk-film.com/

Seriously, as far as I know, people out there do not realize that the whole VSL concept really only makes sense with the MIR. I ask my colleagues, and they frown when I tell them that VSL is on par with the other current libraries in terms of sound. They think of it as an 'expensive' reverb that will cater only one library. Marketing-wise, I think VSL could benefit if the MIR becomes a more integral part of the whole package. It's your secret weapon in the world of sampling libraries that no one else has (or ever will have).

I would like to add my vote to re-introducing some of the functionality of the old style groups in VE-Pro and MIR. Selection groups are great, especially for complex selections. However, most of the time, I want to be able to grab one instrument or fader, and move it together with the other group members. Having to select them manually, or go through a contextual menu to do so, and then holding ALT is cumbersome (think of the extra sleep you could get!). It would be great to enable and disable all groups for individual adjustments (or using a modifier like ALT to do the same), or, even better, have a floating window with a list of the groups which one can click to select, Pro-Tools style. That way, you could select multiple groups as well.

Lastly, when are you going to sample the Großer Sendesaal at the Funkhaus Nalepastraße in Berlin? What a great sounding room...

Best,

Tobias

You know, I had always worked with the advanced view, so I never realized that the basic view does show the values. Well, that's at least something, albeit a little annoying having to switch.

However, looking at numbers now, I did notice that the smallest distance between two matrix-control-bar-values is 3, not 1. The problem is, that if I have a short-note patch in the violins, and wanted to add the "harsh" samples at vel 127, they would start playing at minimum 123. Although somewhat minor, it would be nice to be able to set it to smaller values.

Best,

Tobias

That's been a problem I always struggled with. I sometimes even end up not inserting more cells because of the inconvenience in re-creating the control bars. The only problem is, where would you insert the new cells in the control bars. If there were crunched into the top portion, one could expand them by hand after inserting, thus leaving the lower ones intact.

Best

Tobias

Hey All,

I have been looking for an option to bring back the numerical values in the X- and Y-axis of the matrix control bars. I find it extremely important to know, say, at which exact velocity I wish to switch to a different cell, or to make sure the speed value is the same for every instrument in my setup. This is something I really miss form the old VI's. Please bring it back!

Someone else had suggested to have numerical values for powerpan. I would agree - this could be helpful as well.

Best,

Tobias

Hello Cyril,

So sorry - this thread is so old. I was swamped with work and had no chance to solve the problem until now that the storm has passed. Back then, I did try what you had suggested, but somehow without success. However, not too long ago, I went ahead and updated all the Vienna software, deleted the directory manager entries, re-inserted my places, et voilà!

Thank you again - I did not want to leave this unanswered.

Best,

Tobias

Hello,

I have been trying to find a thread that covers this, but was not lucky yet.

There seems to be a problem with the licensed content recognition in VI. Eversince I installed VI Pro my older sessions do not load sounds for the regular VIs anymore. When I open the server window I can see which patches were loaded. I can even save a matrix or preset and open it with VI Pro afterwards (try doing that with a few dozen tracks and an approaching deadline).

The problem seems to be that VI does not scan for licensed content anymore eversince there is VI Pro now (i.e. when in preset view, the list of all installed content on the left is empty and the patch browser is empty as well). This problem does NOT pertain to VIs instanciated in VE Pro - there it works fine. I tried running the directory manager again by hitting "rescan". Neither that or restarting solved the problem. According to the build-numbers I use the latest version of each software.

The Standalone VI (not that I would use it) gets stuck on booting and does not even show the main window. Logic freezes if VI was instanciated before VI Pro (this seems to be due to the faulty content scanning process).

Any ideas? Anyone?

Thanks,

Tobias

––

OctaMac 10.6.4 , Logic 9, plenty of RAM

Hey there,

Thanks for chiming in. The direction a lot of library designers are taking is a kind of articifial intelligence through scripting. Kontakt's scripting engine delivers a good foundation for that. It's less about being able to manually switch between hundreds of articulations, but more about interpreting the performer's gestures, with certain articulations and nuances made available through keyswitches, in particular latch-keyswitches for note-endings. It's the performer's approach versus the programmer's. The technical requirement that this takes is timbral coherence between those articulations, something that I run into prolems with when I put together diverse patches in a VI instance.

There is no other player software that gives you the flexibility VI does. But at some point it becomes overkill. It's great to have 128 matrices available with 128 cells each. Do I need it? No. What I would need is a more musical way in which the instruments programmed so that differences between patches are smoother. How would you like for instance to be able to assign a slider to evenly control the length of a short note: from a long detaché to a staccatissimo. Why not being able to have one matrix mod-wheel controlled velocity, and the other one set to velocity (i.e. a Vln leg and a pizz patch). Some of it would have to be done on a software level (I think a lot of instrument developers use artificial vibrato for instance.)

The Garritan Violin was an instrument that did exactly that. Although its sample pool did not sound good, the concept was great. I was able to perform my lines, and they came out much more musical. I have emulated its functionality by putting together quite a few matrices, but it's the timbral differences in the patches that become evident when they switch.

Just putting these thoughts out there...

Best,

Tobias

Hi everyone,

It's probably already late in the game now that things are announced, but I wanted to know whether there is a particular forum where we can discuss new features or workflow issues for feedback with the developing team.

I have a few suggestions, potentially for future updates of the software:

1) it would be great to be able to cross-fade between more than 2 articulations. Say, you wanted to build a violin sustain patch that can transform to either a tremolo (x-axis) or a ponticello sustain (y-axis). You'd need two controllers assigned to move either vertically or horizontically between at least 4 slots, but it would be a bit like being able to fade between matrix cells as opposed to switching between them, just at the cell-level. With the wealth of articulations available in the VSL it would open up so many textural possibilities.

2) Morphing-transitions for solo instruments (I keep bringing this up): the ability to move from one articulation or velocity level to the next without the doubling-effects of two instruments sounding instead of one. I know that this requires a lot of analysis, but with manufacturers such as Samplemodeling and the likes producing stunningly playable and realistic instruments the VSL has to stay current.

3) A refresh-button for the preset- and matrix lists. Sometimes one wants to use a newly created matrix or preset in several other MIDI channels as well. In VE Pro these lists are not updated, and it makes loading newly created matrices into several channel strips cumbersome.

Looking forward to the new VI Pro. The new features look great as is already.

Best,

Tobias