Venue Presets

Dear MIR Pro user,

thanks for your interest in this collection of Venue Presets for Vienna MIR Pro. For now, we provide over 150 of these hand-crafted settings, for each and every Venue available. This number will increase constantly in the future.

You can download the collection of MIR Pro Venue Presets for free from your User Area on the VSL website.

Venue Presets are very small files, so we decided to pack all the Presets for all RoomPacks into one ZIP archive. If you don't own licenses for one or more of the additional RoomPacks for MIR Pro, feel free to delete the Presets you don't need at the moment. You can download the whole package again whenever you decide to add new RoomPacks to your arsenal.

Venue Presets are meant to be used as starting points for your own arrangements and mixes in Vienna MIR Pro. Think of them as empty stages which are set up readily by a team of professionals for recording an orchestra or ensemble of your choice. Ideally they will also inspire you to use MIR Pro in ways you didn't think of previously. Each Venue Preset is built around one Main Microphone position in one of MIR Pro's Venues (… please refer to the Vienna MIR Pro user manual for a detailed discussion of the technical terms used in this ReadMe). They are roughly divided in "typical" setups and setups that were created with more specific sounds in mind, or for certain instruments.

In general, all Presets contain

• dedicated Output Formats, in many cases created specifically for the task
• fine-tuned Main Microphone / Secondary Microphone positions and settings
• optimized Room EQ settings, mostly to get rid of room-inherent resonances or similar peculiarities
• suggested RoomTone Levels.

Much care has been taken to achieve perfect stereo balance and all-embracing stereo width. Some Venue Presets are set up as 5.0 and 5.1 surround configurations from the very beginning, though – all marked clearly so that they won't be confused with stereo Presets. Quite a few Venue Presets make use of the brand-new Secondary Microphone feature of MIR Pro. In these cases, both microphone positions are specified in the Preset's name. In case of a surround setup the chosen configuration is mentioned, too. – Venue Presets that don't make use of the Secondary Microphone will contain meaningful settings for the switched-off secondary array nonetheless, just in case you want to give it a try. Several Venue Presets make use of MIR Pro's unique MIRacle Algorithmic Reverb Add-on, partly in a "hybrid" approach, partly as a synthetic enhancement of MIR's natural spatial enveloping. The settings used for MIRacle in these Presets were hand-crafted in every single case.

You will also find some additional built-in effects like MIR Pro EQs or VE Pro's Matrix Mixer in some more demanding setups, or for reasons of sound design. Speaking of sound design: Some Presets rely on shortened overall reverb times (which can be achieved easily with the help of MIR Pro's Reverberation Time feature). This option multiplies the possible uses of one and the same Venue – which is what those Presets are meant to demonstrate. Some few Presets also make use of MIR Pro's option to present a Venue from another acoustic perspective than the usual 0° main axis. These files are marked accordingly.

Usually, a Venue Preset will contain just one or two "empty" Vienna Instruments to give you an idea where to start with your own setups. There are several examples built around specific instruments, though, e.g., the Vienna Imperial Piano and the Vienna Konzerthaus Organ. While you will have to own the licenses for these instruments to make full use of the provided settings, you can of course employ these Venue Presets for other signal sources, too. For lack of other equally obvious means of adding written notes to a Venue, some MIR Icons' title bars serve as memos aimed at the prospective user – just make sure that the blue "Titles" option is switched on below MIR's Venue Maps to see them.

Technically, MIR Pro's Venue Presets are just VI-Frames with fine-tuned parameters. (VI-Frames contain all the settings of one VE Pro 5 instance, including MIR Pro-specific settings). Once you have unpacked the downloaded archive, just copy it to any location on your system's hard drive that's convenient for your workflow. Load any Preset from VE Pro's "File ..." menu. Don't get confused by the fact that the files are actually labeled as 64-bit VI-Frame (*.viframe64). They will open quite happily in a Vienna Ensemble Pro 5 instance in 32-bit mode, too. As mentioned before, you can download the whole package again whenever you feel the need to do so.

First of all: please keep in mind that these Presets are meant to be used as starting points. That said, not a single setting must be seen as the one and only solution for a specific purpose. No matter if you need just slight adaptations or radical changes to achieve the sound you have in mind – just go for it. You may have noticed already that the Venue Presets are sorted by RoomPack. We've also tried to supply meaningful names for each of them, but if you're unsure what to expect there's nothing wrong with simply loading a Preset to actually hear what it does. Don't worry if you inadvertently overwrite the original file – you can download the whole collection of Venue Presets again (or keep the .zip file handy on your computer). Plus there's always a chance that new Presets were added in the meantime. :)

Still, it might be a good idea to create a new version of a loaded VI-Frame using the "Save as..." command from VE Pro's File menu.

Once you've loaded a Preset, just start adding as many instances of Vienna Instruments (VI), VI Pro, virtual instruments from 3rd-party manufacturers, audio inputs and/or buses you need for your arrangement. If you want to make use of an existing template you've created before, just save a single channel as a Channel Preset, or a group of channels as a Channel Set (the respective commands are available from the right-click context menu). You can import them into the new Venue Preset-based project then. Don't forget that you can convert a whole VI-Frame using the basic Vienna Instruments player to a new project that uses VI Pro 2 ("File" > "Convert Project to Vienna Instruments Pro"). The same is true for cases where you want to work in different channel configurations – just load the Venue Preset using the "File" > "Convert Project Channel Configuration" command and select the desired format. – You will be reminded to select an appropriate MIR Pro Output Format then. If you find certain settings within a Venue Preset that you would like to use in another context (e.g., Output Format, MIRacle settings, etc.), just save them as a User Preset and reload the patch in the other project.

We hope that these Presets will serve you as a convenient source of inspiration. Thanks for using Vienna MIR Pro!

- Dietz Tinhof - MIR Project Leader