@george_11239 said:

If this is indeed by design I am very suprised by what I think is a glaring oversight of an elegant way to compose in the score (selecting articulations with MIDI channels).

The Vienna Instrument player appears to be bountiful in ways of selecting articulations, especially suited for real time performances, but composing with the proverbial quill and paper it doesn't seem to offer an elegant method of selecting articulations (without cluttering the score with keyswitches).

By design/an oversight is a contradiction.

You don't like keyswitches is all this says to me. The VI Pro interface offers vastly more than another interface in terms of what can be done in one 'instrument' instance.

The analogy of one Kontakt .nki within a multi/VI within VEP is fairly apt, except that VEP can give you 48 MIDI ports instead of one.

Anyway there is something for Logic now in terms of articulation mapping

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=417124

@Another User said:

Anyway there is something for Logic now in terms of articulation mapping

I appreciate that, but this is exactly what I don't want - to be distracted from the score and nudging program changes or keyswitches.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I certainly hope the brilliant folks at Vienna consider the multitimbral implementation.

I just tried this with Play and it crashed my machine. True story.

@BachRules said:

I just tried this with Play and it crashed my machine.

That is irrelevant to the topic of this thread. The point was to find out how I could access articulations within Vienna Instruments with unique MIDI channels. And it's not possible in the current version.

My Preferred Workflow

The attached image is a screenshot showing a few articulations in the score which were quickly and easily assigned with the highlighted MIDI channel selection box shown on the left. If Vienna Instruments was multitimbral I would happily be able to do this.

Once a portion or the entire piece is written, it is then I leave the score and focus on editing the dynamic curves. But while in the score, I just want to write and not be distracted with clumsy program change or keyswitch nudging -- for me, that's not very conducive to creative writing.

@Another User said:

The attached image is a screenshot showing a few articulations in the score which were quickly and easily assigned with the highlighted MIDI channel selection box shown on the left... in the score....

@Another User said:

there are solutions

I wasn't looking for an alternative solution, I was inquiring how I go about changing articulations within Vienna Instruments by MIDI channels.

@Another User said:

I wasn't looking for an alternative solution

and so I'm prepared for you to remain unsatisfied.

@BachRules said:

But Play is really zero-timbral, because it crashed.

This is pointless and again irrelevant to my inquiry. Vienna Instruments is not multitimbral, whereas other samplers are.

I am not requesting Vienna to remove any of the articulation accessing features that others enjoy and have become reliant on, but merely asking for the implementation of what I consider to be basic functionality.

@Another User said:

I am not requesting Vienna to remove any of the articulation accessing features that others enjoy and have become reliant on, but merely asking for the implementation of what I consider to be basic functionality.

You are asking them to divert their limited resources into adding a feature for solving a problem which already has other solutions (the alternative solutions requiring no more eye-movement or "clumsy fiddling and nudging" than your own preferred solution). Diverting reources into a redundant solution would mean diverting resources away from different issues, hence my reservations.

If the functionality you want is truly "basic", VSL will hear requests from numerous customers for this functionality. If that doesn't happen, maybe the functionality wasn't so basic after all.

@Another User said:

You are asking them to divert their limited resources into adding a feature for solving a problem which already has other solutions

I am requesting a feature that would be beneficial to working within a score editor.

I did not read the 3 pages of this discussion, if you use Logic it is easy to do, you just need a few Transformers in the Environnement

@Cyril said:

...if you use Logic it is easy to do, you just need a few Transformers in the Environnement

Thanks a lot Cyril, I super appreciate the suggestion and will check it out.  I thought there might be a way within the Environment.

@civilization 3 said:

By design/an oversight is a contradiction.

You don't like keyswitches is all this says to me. The VI Pro interface offers vastly more than another interface in terms of what can be done in one 'instrument' instance.

It is not a contradiction, in that Vienna Instruments was designed without multitimbral capabilties

I don't use it or need to, but the thing I showed you claims to "allow the user to select and display articulations directly from the Main window without the need for Key Switches, Program and Control Changes embedded within Logic’s editors." so my assumption was the point is a clean score, ie., a Logic version of Expression Maps.

@Another User said:

the thing I showed you claims to "allow the user to select and display articulations directly from the Main window without the need for Key Switches, Program and Control Changes embedded within Logic’s editors." so my assumption was the point is a clean score, ie., a Logic version of Expression Maps.

I do appreciate the heads-up regarding the articulation switcher at the link you posted. I just wish I could do it by simply assigning unique MIDI channels to the articulations within Vienna Instruments.

I surely don't mean to discredit the functionality that Vienna Instruments has to offer (in which I realize is quite extensive), I simply enjoy my workflow and wish I was able to do so with Vienna Instruments.

@civilization 3 said:

the designers were aware of virtual instruments that used more than one MIDI channel and that is was a conscious choice

Yes of course, I understand what you are saying. I just thought that perhaps the decision to exclude mutitimbral functionality was overlooking composers like myself that prefer the articulation selecting method I've described.

I used to work for Dave Smith making (multitimbral) synths, and we would often omit certain features while looking straight at composers who wanted those features, because to succeed in business we had to aim for the center of the bell curve instead of the sides.

@Cyril said:

...if you use Logic it is easy to do, you just need a few Transformers in the Environnement

Thanks a lot Cyril, I super appreciate the suggestion and will check it out.  I thought there might be a way within the Environment.

the way to do it :

if midi = 2 send before the note the keyswitch let say C0

if midi = 3 send C#0 before the note

and so on

If you are an Environment guru you can use the Map in the transformer so you have one transformer, otherwise you put your transformers in cascade

 Do not forget to duplicate the item (note, cotroler....)

YES

You need to write to the Logic team, more we ask more there is chance they do it.

I have been asking it for 10 years.

When it was the German team, they told me to use a Notation Program !

I have post on the Apple audio develloper forum, the US team does not answer

You can enroll for the audio develloper forum and ask 

I think the pragmatic answer is that tool which transforms midi channel into controller or note message.

VSL goes back to the beginning of time in terms of control of sample instruments (cf. Performance Tool, Gigasampler) and there is I think an expectation of an end user that grew tired of a new track every time you want the next articulation.

Hi George,

I understand you desired workflow, I used to work like that during a short period where I was new to orchestral samples and had hands onto the EastWest Orchestra. As those were my first steps into virtual orchestration, most of the times 4-5 articulations seemed sufficient to me. When I moved to Vienna Instruments, I tried to implement this workflow and - just as you - had to learn, that this is not possible within VI.

But, I also learned, that the note-by note midi-channel is a unique Logic-feature. It is not possible to assign an individual channel per event in ProTools, and I do not know, if it is possible in Cubase or DP.

However, when I started out to really use the abundance of articulations of the larger libraries, I soon realized, that the limitation to 16 slots would not be acceptable for me either, so I changed my approach to using keyswiches, and I advise you to do so as well.

Anyway, your repeated insisting on noting that VI is not multitimbral is not helping. You are ignoring all the hints, that you are comparing the wrong products. You have to compare Play/Kontakt with Vienna Ensemble (and not with VI). You can load 16 VIs into one VE instance, and you load the desired articulation into each VI. Tho whole setup can be stored from the VE host (as viframe), so that all VIs including the loaded patches can be restored with one mouseclick - exactly as you would do using contact.

MassMover, I really appreciate you sharing your experience and the suggestion to consider adapting to a new workflow using keyswitches.

I have been using my current workflow within Logic for a long time and really enjoy the fact that I can assign a unique MIDI channel to individual notes in order to change articulations. I'm all for embracing the future and adapting, but this workflow is so fast and clean it's difficult to consider another. I do use the entire catalog of EastWest orchestral samples but would enjoy incorporating the Vienna sounds too, I was rather surprised though to find out that I couldn't use my existing workflow.

I do realize that a more appropriate comparison would be of VE Pro to PLAY, which allows generally the same articulation selecting method and more. At this stage I am trying out the various methods available within Vienna Instruments and VE Pro for articulation selection.

Thanks everybody for all the suggestions and tips.