Ah, my partner seems to have used Sylenth lately. I'm booting in 32 bit. My bad!!!

I'm on 64 bit in Logic and in Pro Server. 

I've rescanned the plugins several times in Ensemble Pro (v5.2). The list of UAD plugins appears in Prefs/Plugins window of Ensemble but not in the channels of the mixer.

Mac OS 10.7.5

I have tried the slur patches and they do help a bit, as well as adding slight variation, which is always a good thing. But somehow, often, the scale runs sound either too edgy or a bit sloppy (not slurred but sloppy). This isn't a moan at all. Maybe it's the hardest thing to get. Easier somehow with wind instruments - why I dodn't know, maybe the sound is simpler in structure than strings.

Herb - would you commission a demo to be made aimed specifically at showing off fast string lines made not from chopped up scale runs but triggered notes? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would find it interesting to see what can be achieved.

I've been using VSL for years now and have never been happy with my fast scale runs in the strings. Every time I use the fast legatos they lag behind the beat and sound unnatural and messy. I've tried using the delay function in Logic many times but that's not the problem. It's jst plain unnatural and mechanical. There must be a way with the software now being so powerful in VSL to make a matrix that can simulate that nice smearing sound but while still retaining rhythmic pulse. I'd rather not have to chop up actual audio. There are developers out there now such as the people who make Orchestral Runs Builder that seem to have cracked most of the problem, but I have VSL and its sound is superior. So I'm hoping there is a way to do this.

In the John Williams Adventures on Earth demo there are a few rapid scale runs coming in around 40 seconds in. I wonder if they're from scale runs patches and chopped up to fit or if they're played in like all the other parts. 

If anyone has suggestions of patches or matrices for these kind of string parts that would be very interesting and helpful. A VSL tutorial on this would also be very cool.

Hi Paul

I've deleted and then reloaded the Imperial folder. Still same response. Imperial Standalone or Logic. Both can't load the position file. The Imperial01.dat thru Imperial77.dat are on a fully functional SSD. I've rescanned existing many times.

I get this notice when I try to call on Imperial. Anyone know why this may be?

Let's say you want to find the right woodwind for a section of a piece. You think you know the patch. You load it, but it's not the right sound. So instead of loading different patches, you say to yourself I'll load a preset and select from inside the loaded preset. It will save me time. 

My request is this: VE Pro presumes you are after a woodwind preset, since you've been looking for a woodwind patch/ So instead of presenting you with the last used/opened preset section (might be anything from the entire library on your drive) it directs you to woodwind presets.

At the moment you have to collapse trees and open the one you need, which more often than not will be in the same section (in my theoretical scenario: woodwinds) as the one you've been lookin into.

Does that make sense? Anyone else have this need? Hope so!

My apologies in advance if there is a way to do this already. I'll feel pretty stupid....

As far as I can tell, nothing has changed in my setup. Same Logic, VE Pro software.

The instances were not preserved. 

Using a new hardrive with all the newset versions of plugins and VE Pro, MIR Pro etc , Lion 10.7, a recent Logic 'song' won't load its instances. The server application doesn't trigger a load. 

The instances were saved with the song, not saved as separate files manually. I thought they would get loaded as they did on the former hardrive - ie when I open the song, they load up.

Windows used to support the Rosetta and X Symphony. I imagine Apple's deal with Apogee was an excercise in monogamy. I run VE Pro in the Mac that I have at the moment, yes. Good news that I won't need an audio interface on a slave PC.

So this forces me to consider a workaround. It cost thousands for the Apogee gear, so I'd rather not have to replace it with another converter. As an aside I find it wholly repulsive of Apple to force Apogee (and eMagic for that matter) to ditch any support for Windows and force loyalty to their brand rather than encourage it. Anyway, I don't want this thread to go off in a Mac vs PC argument, so lets not let that happen...

If I can use the Mac as my front end, so to speak, my 'interface', the master, and a Windows driven PC doing lots of the audio processing, that might do the trick, correct? Can you have a network where the PC is the slave and the Mac is the master? Are there any disadvantages, even if that is possible?

Could another way be to have a more powerful PC at the front and the Mac as the slave, or would that make routing audio through a Mac-dependent Apogee system impossible?

I feel like a heretic slagging off Apple, but the way things are going it doesn't look like they give much of a damn about its pro users and perhaps Windows isn't such a bad thing. 

If I had to run Windows as my OS, I would also have to dump Logic and learn and buy a new software, which obviously I'd rather not have to. All the above does take me and anyone else in similar shoes away from the most important activity, namely making music!!! 

I would welcome any advice from the very helpful VSL community.

Many thanks for all of the above. 

A slight spanner in the works I've found out that my audio interface (Apogee) doesn't support Windows.

I'm looking into buying a powerful desktop PC and wondered if anyone had any recommendations / warnings about various setups. Any system is only as fast as its slowest part, so on that basis, what is the priority: SSD, processor speed, core numbers, RAM. Is there an answer, a balance I wonder.

No point in spending money where it's not noticed in performance...

The Dell Precision T7600?

I need a PC to run 3D software, which is part of the reason for considering a PC instead of my Mac Pro. Another is perhaps Mac is pulling away from the high-end market. But perhaps the most relevant reason is that I could use the PC as a slave for my VSL setup.

Question: is there a difference in performance depending on master and slave order (Mac or PC as the slave)? 

Any advice gratefully received!

Activity monitor shows only a few blocks green on each core.

Recently  I invested in an OWC SSD and transferred my VSL to that. Load times are still slow (10Mb a second) until I reach about 50% of load, which at present is about 3000Mb and then it rockets. Can anyone tell me why?

...if that's the correct term. Is there a way to program the VI Pro software so that the user stays in the same instrument group when switching levels in the browser? By that I mean going from patch to matrix for example. At the moment, if you're in Brass under matrix and you want to look for a Brass patch, you may find you're in another instrument family (the last place you looked) in the patch browser. It would be great if VI Pro could track your last move so to speak and open the instrument group you were last in, even though you're in a different tier of the browser.

My buffer was at 128, so I'm trying it at 256. Seems a bit better.

Thank you Karel. I am fairly new to VE Pro and am getting on well with it but my methods don't fit the template formula some have recommended. This is because of RAM. I have now 24 Gb but I feel wary of loading any more than about 5500Mb into VE Pro (should I be??). If I load a big template into say 3 instances that may seem convenient but I won't need most of the patches and it feels like an unnecessary load on resources. But perhaps I'm wrong.

My organisation of instruments in the instances has developed on a 'need it now' basis, ie I might have a flute in Ch 2, a violin section in Ch 3 and a Horn in Ch4, then a wind in Ch5 - you see the almost random structure building up. Each song needs a different set of instruments. So instead or preserving the instances (why? if they are usually different in each song) I resort to saving and loading Metaframes. 

Hitting Save under File in VE Pro Server doesn't overwrite the file, but performs a Save As function, in that it asks me what I want to call it. Why? It does a Save (overwrite) if I Quit the app and it asks me do I want to save changes to the metaframe before quitting. Confusing to me...

Often if I quit the server, I get a crash report (the server app crashes on quitting).

Should this procedure work for me:

1. Fire up VE Pro.

2. Boot Logic and open a song with Instances

3 Load instruments into an instance if it's an empty one or let the saved one load itself.

4. Edit, add etc instruments in the instance.

5. Save the Logic song.

6. Save the Metaframe.

7. Close the song.

If I do this with every time, will the right data load into VE Pro every time I load a new Logic song or do I have to push the data to VE Pro using the arrow icon in the instance? I may have things confused, I know. By the way, I have read the manual, even if I may have missed something or not understood...

Downloaded overnight.

I'm at 7 Kb per second. Should I give up for now? It says 52 days ETA !!

I love Imperial. But I keep getting major overload in the CPU indicator in the transport bar of Logic. Polyphony just 80, no 2sus activated. Standard settings really. Activity monitor isn't showing a problem, but Logic crackles like crazy. 

Any ideas? It's streaming off an SSD by the way.

I'm not sure what to do to start using certain presets (that must have come with an update) which have complicated matrices. The cells are greyed (or light-blued!) out and no sound comes out, to put it bluntly. VI 14 Preset VI PRO is an example. Do you have a link or a thread that explains?

Many thanks for your reply, Karel. So a Metaframe is an umbrella if you like to the Project(s). It's the largest possible 'container'. Correct?

If you save a Metaframe is there any need to save a Project as well - when might that be a good idea?

Normally when you hit Save, an application overwrites the current version. With the Metaframe and the Project this doesn't happen for me. I get a Save dialogue box come up when I hit Save, as though I meant to choose Save As. Is this a bug or intentional?

I understand (at least I think I do!) the concept of Preserve, Couple, Connect, Raise...

But then the term Metaframe and Project seem indistinguishable in my mind -they have different names and they live in different parts of the software, but I'm unclear as to how they are different and when I should be applying their attributes to a session. The music I'm working on at the moment uses the same template in each Logic song. So I preserved the Instance and swapped happily between each song, which called upon the preserved instance and it worked fine. I then made a 2nd instance and preserved that with a different name.

Now I need to bust some jargon - am I now, as far as VE Pro sees it, in the world of a Project? VE Pro allows me, under the File menu, to save the Project, whereas in the Server it refers to Metaframes, not Projects. 

At the end of the session I would like to save the Logic song. I do this and quit Logic and VE Pro. The preserved instances start up again when I reload VE Pro and Logic's song. OK, all good there. But say I want to open that song on another computer, which I did, it doesn't load the instances correctly, even though they were Preserved. I thought VE Pro would find the data...

So I said to myself, perhaps it's because I hadn't saved the Project within VE Pro, or saved the Metaframe from within the Server application. So I do both. Is that what I should do?