@Jack Weaver said:
My remark, perhaps poorly crafted, was to say that even though whatever VSL announces will be amazing that it may not be in perfect alignment with everyone's preconception of what the product should be.
That's generally true but in this case there are some extra guidelines to help VSL to make a product that will satisfy most people. I mean FX Teleport and the unfulfilled promises for the version 2. What people have been waiting for years from FX-T are cross-platform support, 64-bit memory addressing, loading the slaves simultaneously instead of one at a time and keeping the samples in memory when switching projects. The last one requires some extra work but the rest is already implemented in VE3.
Right now I can think of only one extra feature which would also solve the project switching problem. It would be perfect if the VE could be sort of disconnected from the DAW. I mean that the VE would operate just like hardware MIDI and audio connections to a hardware sampler. The DAW should see tons of MIDI ports going into and audio ports coming from the VE and happily send MIDI and be ready to receive audio even if none of the slaves was online. This would serve several purposes:
1. The users could switch projects on the DAW without having to reload anything on the slaves.
2. The DAW could crash and be up again in a minute as the slaves wouldn't need to reload. Any slave could
crash and everything else would work while the slave reloads.
3. This would allow modular templates. I would like to build and maintain a single 'super-template' which would contain absolutely everything I own and then just use parts of it when the whole thing isn't needed. I would begin working on a new project by loading the super-template to my DAW but I would then start slaves only when needed. The DAW would see all the MIDI and audio connections and have tracks ready for all instruments (sorted into folder tracks) but I wouldn't have to load every instrument. The idea could be taken further by changing the structure of the VE so that the user wouldn't load things into separate VE instances but only communicate with a single VE software which would be split into blocks internally. I could build a choir block, a brass block, drum block and so on and I would just select which blocks I'm going to need in the current project. The super-template could contain a lot more stuff than the slaves can load simultaneously. I'm not suggesting any kind of dynamic allocation of the slaves as that would require years to build. The slaves would still be used in the traditional way so that the user would only install the choir library and build the choir block on one slave and so on. It would also be a lot easier to update older projects. If the user would
for example buy a new library he or she wouldn't need to manually add
it to every project but just do it once.
Most people using FX Teleport or VE3 build and use templates anyway and there's room for thinking out of the box as the current solutions concentrate on the single DAW project while the real challenges in a professional workflow are between projects: loading, programming, handling crashes and such. Of course this kind of behaviour could be selectable so that people who prefer the old behaviour could keep working that way.