VEPro won't work for me!! I've been trying for days to get VEP to work without pops, crackles and dropouts without success. I've read the manual over and over again, I've scoured the forums for information (BTW is there a way to search these VSL forums, the search bar at the top right doesn't seem to do anything and the tags aren't super useful.) Here is my setup and what I have tried, any help or links are greatly appreciated.
Sequencer: Cubase 5.5, VEP 5814, Mac Pro 3,1 Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2.8ghz, 8 cores, 16gb RAM. OSX 10.6.4 Interface: M-Audio Lightbridge
Slave: VEP 5814, Kontakt 4.1, Mac Pro 1,1 Dual-Core Intel Xeon 2.66ghz, 4 cores, 19gb RAM. OSX 10.6.4
It's a pretty straightforward setup, I run Cubase on the sequencer and have the second Mac Pro running as a slave with my orchestra in Kontakt 4.1. It sends midi fine, I am hearing my audio back just fine but without fail if I just hold a small chord for more than a few seconds the audio will drop out for a second and then come back again where it left off. I've watched what is happening on the other computer and there are no CPU spikes or Disk read spikes, all the meters are fine, in fact the audio meters never drop out which leads me to believe the drop out is happening on the network somewhere. Here is what I have tried with no success:
Changed CAT6 cables...didn't help.
Changed Gigabit ports on both computers....didn't help.
Changed the Gigabit switch I was using....didn't help.
Tried using Kontakt 3 instead of Kontakt 4....didn't help.
Tried using Kontakt 4 64 bit instead of 32 bit....didn't help.
Tried different "Thread" settings for the processor....didn't help.
Updated VEP from 5436 to beta 5814... didn't help.
Put samples entirely in ram, eliminating the hard drive...didn't help.
I loaded my template in VEP standalone using Midi and ADAT, and that played back just fine so it's got to be something to do with the network/server/plugin.
Is there any compatibility issue between the versions of VEP, OSX and Kontakt that I am running? (VEP 5814, OSX 10.6.4, Kontakt 4.1)
Do I need to assign fixed IPs to the computers?
Also another weird thing that I've noticed....if I go away from the computer leaving everything connected for a few hours and then come back I get no sound out of VEP and when I look at the VEP slave it says the cpu is maxed out 99%, I disconnect the plug in, restart Cubase, no luck, I have to restart the slave computer, load my template again and then it runs fine at 40% is there some sort of MAC runtime error bug with leaving samples loaded up for a few hours? My template on the Slave uses about 6GB of RAM.
I have tried everything I know how and probably spent at least 30 hours testing and loading and tweaking with no luck, please help!!