Seems like enough time has passed. It would be great to get some sort of comment back from Vienna when we will see this fix implemented.

Martin or Paul....any word on this yet?

Hi, 

I talked to Martin, here is his answer: Prefetchable support disabling will be available in the upcoming new version of VE Pro. 

So Asio Guard will be disabled programmatically in the VST3 plug-in, every other change would introduce a dramatic raise in latency. 

Best, 
Paul

Thanks for the post Paul.

However, I'm not entirely clear on what this means and would be very grateful if you or Martin could clarify.  This is my current understanding:

Selective disabling of ASIO Guard on a per-plugin basis (e.g. just for VE Pro) is already available in Cubase 8 and Nuendo 7.  I have tested this (and tried to work with it) in Nuendo 7, and sure enough it does stop the issue whereby audio drops out every time a different track is selected.  HOWEVER, it means that CPU usage jumps dramatically, to the point where templates which run comfortable under previous versions of Cubase and Nuendo no longer run at all in Cubase 8 and Nuendo 7. 

In short, the efficiencies which ASIO Guard brings to Cubase 8 and Nuendo 7 are basically essential in order to keep large templates running at all.   If ASIO Guard is disabled for VE Pro, the loss of CPU efficiency renders many large templates unusable, and massively handicaps the usefulness of VE Pro.

My understanding of the situtation was that VSL needed to implement a VST-3 interface which supports ASIO Guard.  Your statement below appears to suggest that a new version of VE Pro will simply disable ASIO Guard support within the plugin, which leaves us in the same situation we're currently in.

Hopefully I have misunderstood.

Jules

It would be great if you can clarify what this means.

Hopefully.....does this mean we can change tracks in Cubase without the 2 second hang/pause in the audio?

@Paul said:

Hi, 

I talked to Martin, here is his answer: Prefetchable support disabling will be available in the upcoming new version of VE Pro. 

 

So Asio Guard will be disabled programmatically in the VST3 plug-in, every other change would introduce a dramatic raise in latency. 

Best, 
Paul

@dlpmusic said:

It would be great if you can clarify what this means.

 

Hopefully.....does this mean we can change tracks in Cubase without the 2 second hang/pause in the audio?

You can already do this in Cubase - you just need to disable ASIO Guard for VE Pro.

The problem is, the loss of ASIO Guard means VE Pro uses signficantly more CPU resources than it would otherwise, leading to CPU overloads etc.   Which is why we've been waiting for VSL to implement a VST3 interface which correctly supports ASIO Guard 2, so that we can re-enable ASIO Guard for VE Pro, not suffer the CPU issues of having it disabled, and also not suffer the audio dropout problems.

Whether this is what VSL are looking to achive remains somewhat unclear (in fact rather unlikely) from my interpretation of Paul's post.

You misunderstood me.  Currently you can use ASIO GUARD 2 with VE PRO 5 but with the annoying audio muting.  If the prefech means we can still use it as is but the audio muting goes away I would assume it would still give us the CPU gain benefits that you can clearly see right now if you put up with the 2 second audio pause.  For me there is also additional problems that occur with VE PRO 5 in regards to having ASIO GUARD 2 on.  I have a very large template that takes Cubase about 10 seconds or so to start an export.  If I enable ASIO GUARD 2 with VE PRO 5 my exports take more then 1 1/2 minutes to begin exporting and a 1 1/2 minute delay for Cubase to become responsive after the export.

Disabling the plugin VE PRO 5 from using ASIO GUARD 2 within Cubase is a waste of time for me as there are almost no benefits acroos my system.  Turning it all on produces incredibly low CPU on the VE PRO machines.....that is what we all want.

So......if we still can get the benefit of the low CPU and no audio muting that might be good enough.

@dlpmusic said:

So......if we still can get the benefit of the low CPU and no audio muting that might be good enough.

I didn't really get that out of it, seems like there's no other way except to disable ASIO Guard for VE Pro.

 I really dislike that idea, because with Cubase 8 the performance with all VSTis including VE Pro hosted ones has gone down, and only with ASIO Guard enabled does the whole thing make any sense. So there needs to still be a way to manually enable it for heavy sessions, even if VE Pro will default to disabled.

I am being optimistic hopefully....not sure what they mean.  We need it explained.

Currently there is no other way to mitigate the audio muting, than to disable ASIO Guard (2) for the VEPro plugin. With the help of the new interface introduced in the VST3 SDK, I have set VEPro to automatically disallow going into ASIO Guard mode in the upcoming version.

As I have described earlier, the cause for the mutes is the Cubendo audio engine reconfiguring itself as soon as the buffer size (and with it, the latency) of the plugin changes. Other hosts (such as Logic) get around this problem by queuing an engine/PDC reconfiguration until the next stop/start cycle.

The only possibility I see to handle AG2 from our side right now, would be to make the plugin operate completely asynchronously, but this would also mean we would have to adapt the overall latency to be higher than currently, which we are reluctant to do.

I am also wondering if it really is the case that plugins running without AG2 are performing worse in C8 than they were without AG in C7? Did any of you guys do any tests on this?

Thanks,

Yes....I have done significant testing.  For instance I have a machine that runs nothing but EW PLAY running Hollywood Strings and Brass.  Play is very demanding and without playing a single note my very powerful I7 QUAD core sits at 78%....before I play a single note.  My Cubase buffer runs at 128 samples.  With ASIO GUARD 2 on its high setting that 78% drops to just 16%.  At medium setting it drops to about 23%.  These results are similar across all 5 of my slave machines.  This an absolute ground breaking difference.  

There must be some sort of solutiion to resolve this.  Is it possible to have a preference to run in asynchronous mode?

We desparately need this feature to work.

-Danny

@MS said:

Currently there is no other way to mitigate the audio muting, than to disable ASIO Guard (2) for the VEPro plugin. With the help of the new interface introduced in the VST3 SDK, I have set VEPro to automatically disallow going into ASIO Guard mode in the upcoming version.

 

As I have described earlier, the cause for the mutes is the Cubendo audio engine reconfiguring itself as soon as the buffer size (and with it, the latency) of the plugin changes. Other hosts (such as Logic) get around this problem by queuing an engine/PDC reconfiguration until the next stop/start cycle.

 

The only possibility I see to handle AG2 from our side right now, would be to make the plugin operate completely asynchronously, but this would also mean we would have to adapt the overall latency to be higher than currently, which we are reluctant to do.

 

I am also wondering if it really is the case that plugins running without AG2 are performing worse in C8 than they were without AG in C7? Did any of you guys do any tests on this?

 

Thanks,

@MS said:

I am also wondering if it really is the case that plugins running without AG2 are performing worse in C8 than they were without AG in C7? Did any of you guys do any tests on this?

Unless I've misunderstood you, this isn't really the comparison that we should be making: in Nuendo 6.5 and Cubase 7 we don't have the audio dropout issues when changing tracks, which means ASIO Guard can be left ON.   The audio muting issue is totally new to Cubase 8 / Nuendo 7 (AFAIK) and as a result, we now have to turn ASIO Guard 2 OFF.

There's no question that CPU performance under N6.5/C7 with ASIO Guard on is significantly better than in N7/C8 with it turned off for VE Pro.

Having tried (and struggled) to work with Nuendo 7 for a few weeks, I have now reverted back to Nuendo 6.5, because my template (which is largely hosted in VE Pro)  is just not stable with AG2 turned off.

Jules

Sorry I misread your post....I did not use ASIO GUARD in C7 because Steinberg said it did not support instruments with multi outputs in C7.  My previous post is just showing the obvious need for you to support ASIO GUARD 2 in C8.

-Danny

@MS said:

I am also wondering if it really is the case that plugins running without AG2 are performing worse in C8 than they were without AG in C7? Did any of you guys do any tests on this?

Post deleted and a new thread started. I decided it was most likely a different issue to the one being discussed in this thread

@paaltio said:

Yes this performance regression has been a constant in my tests, and a similar difference was already present in C6 -> C7.

Would it be possible to have a "set the number of buffers for all VE Pro plugins" button like we have for decouple all? Would make it a little easier to at least manage our own extra buffers in large sessions if we can't use AG.

Thanks,
Panu Aaltio

Hi Martin

I would also be interested to know what the latency implications are for having the VE Pro plugin run asynchronously.  As things stand it seems that the new VST SDK and proposed VE Pro implimentation does not resolve the situation in any way - we are still left with either audio dropouts (if AG2 is enabled) or increased CPU load (if it's not). 

I would really like to kow how bad the additional latency would need to be, in order to run VE Pro with AG2 enabled but also accomodating Cubendo's need to rebuffer.  One way or another we're going to need to find a workaround, if not a solution, because remaining on legacy versions of Steinberg software is only going to be possible for so long.

Would some kind of external MIDI workaround resolve the situation, such that instead of selecting the VE Pro plugin when you select a track in Cubendo, you're actually selecting a virtual MIDI port, which is then in turn routed to a VE Pro server instance?  Would this mean that Cubendo does not need to reset it's audio engine every time a track is selected?   Just trying to come up with ideas ...

Thanks for any more info.

Jules

We definitely need a solution.  It seems the midi idea is not going to work as the VE PRO 5  plug would be working in a very large buffer ....that is the benefit of ASIO GUARD 2.  The medium setting in Cubase is 1024.  Multiply that by the number of VE PRO buffers and you can see that will not work.

-Danny

@paaltio said:

Yes this performance regression has been a constant in my tests, and a similar difference was already present in C6 -> C7.

Would it be possible to have a "set the number of buffers for all VE Pro plugins" button like we have for decouple all? Would make it a little easier to at least manage our own extra buffers in large sessions if we can't use AG.

Thanks,
Panu Aaltio

Hi Martin

I would also be interested to know what the latency implications are for having the VE Pro plugin run asynchronously.  As things stand it seems that the new VST SDK and proposed VE Pro implimentation does not resolve the situation in any way - we are still left with either audio dropouts (if AG2 is enabled) or increased CPU load (if it's not). 

I would really like to kow how bad the additional latency would need to be, in order to run VE Pro with AG2 enabled but also accomodating Cubendo's need to rebuffer.  One way or another we're going to need to find a workaround, if not a solution, because remaining on legacy versions of Steinberg software is only going to be possible for so long.

Would some kind of external MIDI workaround resolve the situation, such that instead of selecting the VE Pro plugin when you select a track in Cubendo, you're actually selecting a virtual MIDI port, which is then in turn routed to a VE Pro server instance?  Would this mean that Cubendo does not need to reset it's audio engine every time a track is selected?   Just trying to come up with ideas ...

Thanks for any more info.

Jules

So would it be possible to have a preference that could switch the plugin to asynchronous mode?  If it is a bit higher in latency then so be it but please give us the option as the benefits of ASIO GUARD 2 are HUGE especially on the slave machines.

-Danny

@10us said:

I don't have the dropout during lane switching anymore. AG2 enabled, not sure if I have done this also in the plugin manager. Only other thing I changed was using rack instruments instead of instrument tracks. I do experience increasing latency during the build of a project. I do not mind, I also use high latency (1024) on my asio drivers to max out vst performance. Is the increasing latency an effect of disabeling AG in the plugin manager?

ASIO GUARD 2 set to MEDIUM is the same thing as 1024 buffer.  From my understanding of how it works .....if you are at 1024 buffer and ASIO GUARD 2 is set to MEDIUM then ASIO GAURD 2 is doing nothing additional for you and that is why there is no delay in switching tracks as it has no effect in your situation.  The same would be true if someone used a 512 buffer and  the "SMALL"setting in ASIO GUARD 2 as that defaults to 512.

If you dropped your buffer to say 512 and tried it with ASIO GUARD 2 on MEDIUM you would indeed have the delay in switching tracks.

-Danny