Great !

Ok !

Yes I saw it. Cubase developpers ars so irritating (or at least, they have stupid orders).

Thanks for all these answers and clarifications !

Ok you're right, let me explain all from scratch.

• I would like to use instrument tracks in Cubase (actually, for the moment I want to compare with having a template in VE Pro, and see pros and cons of each method).
• And I want 5.1 for ALL my tracks.
• As I haven't super-skills in mix engineering and as I own MIR Pro, the natural way is to use the MIR Pro plugin in order to spatialize my instruments (placement in the room, reverb, 5.1 output)

The only problem I have is that the majority of my instruments (Kontakt, Zebra, Massive...) are stereo. In VE Pro, it's not a problem, I put them in MIR and they are in 5.1, voilà ! But in Cubase, with instrument tracks, Cubase sets automatically (without the possibility to manually change, which is bad IMO) the outputs format according to the plugin format.

For the Kontakt instruments, I have a workaround since Kontakt (the plugin) has surround capabilities (we can set the number of channels and outputs we want) even if the instrument/library is stereo :

• I set Kontakt with 1 output of 6 channels
• with this (and with a routing to a 5.1 bus), Cubase is happy and sets automatically the ouput format of the Instrument Track in 5.1. The most of the trick is done.
• but now the stereo output of the instrument is duplicated on the 3 pairs of channels of my 6 channels output (I see 3 stereo pairs side by side). I think can't send this directly in MIR. So I have to filter it, with Vienna Matrix Mixer for example, in order to be in stereo again
• then, after the Matrix Mixer, I insert MIR Pro plugin, set in 5.1. So I have the same situation as in VE Pro : MIR with stereo in input and 5.1 in output

Now I have 2 problems :

• maybe having an instance of Matrix Mixer on each of my tracks, so several hundreds instances, is a stupid loss of CPU power.
• for the other stereo-only plugins, I don't see any solution.

I hope it's clear, indeed english is not my mother tongue :-)

Thanks for your help and your time !

Matthieu

Thanks Dietz,

Actually I misunderstood your first post.

Ok, very disappointed. Even if I can't believe in this situation in 2019, I have to accept software limitations and bad designs (from Cubase).

So I will do my stupid workaround : set 5.1 output(s) in Kontakt, then put a Vienna Matrix Mixer Pro instance to reduce it to stereo, then put MIR Pro plugin...

And I will not be able to use MIR for the stereo-only instruments, which is a little bit against one of the aims of MIR...

Thanks again,

Matthieu

Thanks very much.

Maybe I didn't understand something, but it doesn't work.

Following what you said :

• I created an instrument track with surround outputs (namely, Absynth, routed on a 5.1 bus), so the instrument track is set to 5.1
• I inserted the MIR Pro plugin, and set it to 5.1 mics, it works.
• on an instrument track stereo-only (Kontakt) routed on a 5.1 bus, I inserted MIR Pro plugin, but I got this message from MIR : PLUGIN DISABLED / Reason : Channel configuration mixmatch / Plugin : Stereo / Engine : 5.1 / MIR Pro's channel configuration is defined by the first instantiated plugin. Use MIR Preferences to force channel configurations
• so in MIR Preferences, I ticked "Force output channels"  and set to 6
• I retried to insert MIR Pro on the stereo instrument track (after deleting the previous one), and I have the same message (the only difference is that for the field Plugin it says "empty"

I'm using the latest version of MIR Pro plugin, and Cubase 10.5

Matthieu

Hello,

In Cubase (10.5), I'm studying the possibility to use Instrument tracks instead of racks + MIDI tracks. My goal is to have instrument tracks hosting Kontakt instruments or whatever (Massive, Zebra, UVI, etc), and insert on them MIR pro plugin in order to spatialize them and have a 5.1 output.
But I can't manage to use instrument tracks in a surround context, they are desperately stereo only. If I route the output to a 5.1 bus for example, the track is still in stereo (the two circles icon), and when I want to insert a surround plugin (like MIR, Vienna Matrix Pro...), its inputs and outputs are in stereo. Only the Vumeter is in 5.1 (but only the L and R channels have activity).
As far as I understand, Cubase sets the number of outputs of the track according to the number of outputs of the instrument plugin. I can do a dumb workaround for Kontakt (setting output with 6 channels as default, close then reload, then add a matrix filter before MIR), but Im' screwed with stereo-only instruments (like Massive, Zebra...).
Can some people help me ?

Matthieu

It would be great.

Thanks for the answer.

This is a known bug I pointed out to VSL 1 year ago : Kontakt is not seen as a 5.1 plugin in VE PRO in Windows.

15/06/2018 :
Hi Matthieu,

You are of course correct - thanks for reporting and please accept my apologies for the confusion.
I was in fact checking this on my Mac with the AU version of Kontakt, which can indeed be loaded as a true 5.1 plug-in in VE Pro, and just realised that this is not possible with the VST version of Kontakt on my PC.

I will notify our developers of this inconsistency and they will hopefully be able to implement a fix during the next VE Pro update spin - thanks for your patience!

Best regards from Vienna, Marnix Veenenbos

But VSL DOESN'T CARE AT ALL, we can die ! No reply to my 2 support cases (1 month ago, then 10 days ago)... I'm so upset !

Hello,

In a 5.1 instance of VE PRO 6, I only have the choice of stereo Kontakt instances (Kontakt > Stereo to Stereo). While for example for Play I have the choice of Stereo or 5.1
Is this normal ?

So I tried anyway a stereo Kontakt instance : in the outputs I added 1 stereo output, and tried to route mics of Spitfire instruments on my 2 outputs (Tree on 1+2 and Ambient on 5+6), but only the first stereo pair works ("plugin out #1" and "plugin out #2"), which doesn't surprise me...

How to deal with surround in Kontakt and VE PRO ?

Thanks,

Matthieu

 

I already asked this to support. The answer was no.

You should say : "thanks again, dear silly cash providers, to be treated with disrespect since six months"

Releasing 2 new products with Synchron player (CFX and SFX Strings) before releasing the Synchron Player for the Strings I or Percussion I is just insulting.

Personally my trust in VSL is totally broken : I will even not try the Synchron Player if it releases finally one day, and I'm selling all my Synchron products.

Ok, thanks.

I think I still have a lot to learn about mics... It's not at all intuitive for me that we can mix for example a Tree mic where the piano is at right and Close and Mid mics panned at left.

Why it is placed at right ??

I could be wrong, but I believed that it was usually always at left :

• in an orchestral context, beside the celesta, in order to allow 1 player switching instruments.
• in a solist context, before the strings at the left of the conductor

 

Side note : I would have prefered you complete the previous Synchron instruments with the Synchron Player before releasing a new one... I think you underestimate our frustration.

If you are used to a workflow without VE, have no lacks and are happy like that, stay away from it : indeed it's a layer of complexity slowing the workflow, and there are bugs not fixed (developpers are on Synchron Player...), lags, crashes for some people...

It happens to me regularly too, with Cubase too (7.5 or 9.5). I noticed at least one time that the CPU increased suddenly. When the CPU meter of VE PRO 5/6 was still working, it showed me 100%.

It's true that's not important, but several annoyances (VE PRO, Cubase, Windows...) make a big one...

Hello,

I have a very annoying problem killing my workflow.

In an instance of VE PRO, the first time I want to display a VI PRO (in the Instrument view), it takes a very long time to appear (between 5 and 10 seconds, totally unacceptable nowadays with so powerful and expensive workstations !), with VE PRO telling it isn't responding, with the famous blue circle.

It wouldn't be a problem if I had only one instance, but I have 8. So, when I switch from an instance A to an instance B, if B was in Instrument view with a VI PRO, it takes long time to switch. And if not, when I click on an instrument to view it, it takes long time too. It occurs only with VI PRO, no problem with Kontakt, Play, Ivory... As if, each time we come in an instance, VI PRO had to be completely reloaded, with a lot of pain it seems.

You may say it's not a problem since I shouldn't need to access the instruments very often, but yes : I need to do regular tweaks (I don't have a well balanced orchestra yet) or to select an articulation to play/test.

My server project is not so big, it has a typical orchestra (essentially VSL instruments), and some other instruments (Kontakt). 265 channels, but only 83 enabled by default, which represents less than the half of my RAM (30 Go / 64). My VE PRO is set up to 30 MIDI ports.

My only solution is to give up the cool feature of tabbed instances I adopted few weeks ago, and come back to a single big messy instance, which doesn't please me at all.

Does somebody else see this problem ? If yes, did you find a solution, a workaround, a lead, a cause ? I already asked to VSL support, but they have no solution, and it looks like they find this normal for big projects (which is weird, since VE PRO is meant to have orchestral templates...). I don't accept it's normal !

Thanks for your help,

Matthieu

(Windows 10, latest versions of VE PRO and VI PRO, 6 cores @3,4GHz and 64 Go RAM)

Yes, same here, this long saving time is very painful !

Thank you Paul and Dietz.

Hello,

I’m currently redoing my orchestral template in VEPRO 6 (and MIR), and I wanted to have almost all my virtual instruments present, mostly disabled, so I just have to enable the instruments I want for each project.

But I realized that a disabled channel still has a high RAM footprint. It’s difficult to measure, I tried to disable my whole VSL orchestra and it saved me only the half of the RAM, for some Kontakt instruments it seems to work well (samples almost entirely purged), for other it seems it doesn’t work at all.

In short, after testing it, my solution is unusable as it overloads my available RAM.

 My questions :

• What does exactly the disabling feature ? Are the MIR samples unloaded too ?

•           Is there a different behaviour between VSL instruments and other instruments (specially Kontakt) ?

•           Is there a way to do what I wanted to achieve ? (other than the Channel set which looses the setting of the Output…)

Thanks for your help,

 Matthieu

 (Windows 10, Cubase 7.5, VE Pro 6, MIR Pro, 32Go RAM)

If the samples are recorded at fixed gain, why the volume levels in the mixer are all different ? For example, in the "01 Synchron Strings I Standard VE Projects" and "01 Synchron Percussion Standard VE Projects", close mics are at -20 for 1st VI, -23 for 2nd VI, -21 for Violas, -19 for Cellos, and -13.2 for DB, -22 for Celesta, -16 for Glockenspiel... (other mics are "inconsistent" too).

Shouldn't they have the same level for each mic ???? Either I don't understand something (and I'm very open to learn !), either I consider that the fixed gain - which is a major reason why I purchased Synchron Strings - is a joke and I would be very disappointed... Maybe I will be told that these things are mixes of multiples mics, and that each instrument mix is consistent with the others, but if that's the case, it's very painful to see/feel what is the "right" volume of the instrument. I didn't expect a so high level of complexity....

And why volumes are not consistent between VE Projects and VI presets ? For example, for the Stereo mixes of the Celesta, we have the mic volumes at -22, -19, -10, -19 in the VE Project, and -25, -22, -10, -22 in the VI preset... Disturbing.

One other disturbing thing, why in the stereo mixes the Main-C is muted for 1st VI and Cellos ??

Ah sorry. Strangely I don't receive newsletters from VSL anymore since months, while my account is configured to receive it....

Only Violins I and Cellos seem to have legato (in the Sample content tab of the Synchron Strings page).

I can't imagine it's really the case...

???

Indeed the audio demo "Enter the dream" is beautiful, but at 0'35 for example :

- If it's legato, then it's totally failed : either samples are bad, either programming is bad. The result is a doubt : is the new legato THIS ?

- If it's not legato, it's a little bit strange musically (personnally here I expect legato, but it's a matter of taste) and above all it's a lost opportunity to demonstrate the new legato so much advertised.

 

So I understand V_ad_im on this point.

And even if the video on cellos is very welcome (thanks Paul !!), the limited musical context doesn't do a bulletproof demo.

I don't understand why we can't take advantage of SSD with Synchron Strings ?

Many thanks for your help, Guy ! We would really appreciate simple melodies too.

This is always the game with the monthly offers, Synchron Strings or not. You never know if the next offer will be more interesting than the actual one. It's a game to accept if we want offers. Just continue to complain and we will not have offers anymore since it's the only way that everyone has the same treatment. And sorry, but you paid 70% of the price, it's indecent to complain and to want even less...

You should rather complain about the lack of communication from VSL since more than 1 month. IMO it's the only thing which is irritating (and still, it's not a severe problem), not the delay or the offers.