Just installed VEP7 to try it out. First, congradulation on getting it released.
Questions
- How can I obtain the AU3 beta to try it out? the installer has this box greyed out.
- The manual states that articulation names will be displayed for ViPro instruments, but i can't seem to get that to work. Synchron player is showing the articulation names, but VIPro channels are not. Is this a documentation error, bug or user-error?
Observations FWIW
- Loading old projects in LPX based on VEP6 worked fine and loaded the instance data into VEP7
- I think load time was approx about the same as VEP6. I don't have hard measurements.
- CPU usage seems a little lighter compared to VEP6, but not by a lot and I might be imaginging it.
- Love the Plugin management improvements. That might be the biggest VEP7 improvement for me. A few plugins did not validate, which used to validate and work under VEP6. But at least VEP7 did not crash while scanning plugins like VEP6 used to do. Ability to disable plugins and have favorites is gold, thank you!
- I like how the VEP plugin and FX plugins have a menu item to change their scale, which help a lot on my Retina monitor. PLEASE add that to ViPro.
- New FX are nice, looking forward to exploreing some of the presets as they apply to my ViPro instruments. In case anyone is wondering, they do not work directly in your DAW, they can only be used inside VEP, which is to be expected IMHO.
- Multiport environment macros still work! Yay! I was getting more dropped NoteOff problems compared to VEP6 though, especially if I mouse around in other apps while its playing. I am still testing that, but I could go for hours with VEP6 and never lose a NoteOff with Multiport macros, but now there are more dropped NoteOff's. :-(
- Would be nice if frame files using VIenna Suite plugins would load into VEP7 using the built in plugins. For example some of the example projects provided on VSL website include use of VIenne suite EQ. For example, the E.T. Score. If I load those frame files into VEP7, the vienna suite EQ still does not load, I get an error about plugins not available.
- In addition to more dropped NoteOff's (using multiport enviornment trick), I have experience some cases where the audio buffer seemed to jump forward in time, like a broken record skipping a short section of music. This happened while I was mousing around in another app and LPX/VEP7 were playing back. More testing needed to see if I can replicate it again, but it happend twice already so far. its possible I had the VEP preferences window open too, which would be somewhat understandable.
My overall impression is that its an improvement over VEP6. Some of the new features are not of much interest to me, so I do have to say for me its a fairly expensive upgrade, especially in light of the multi-license policy changes. The Plugin management is a very welcome improvement that I think everyone will appreciate. I may find some use for the FX presets. Eventually, AU3 will be useful, but as of now, its not useful for most people and I can't seem to find it to try it anyway, but based on Paul's video about it, I think most people will not want to monkey with it. The improvements to automation are also very welcome improvements that I have yet to try out. The ability to enable and disable instances, folders and channels, etc.. I don't really need that feature, but I think some people will find that useful. Overall I would consider most of these refinements to be very good and welcome refinements, its not a major change to the software by any means. I still have to work through why I'm getting more dropped NoteOff's and strangeness somehow at times...overall the playback feels smoother and lighter on the CPU, but then that is happening more often now for some reason, but that's also involving the Logic enviornment multiport trick...I think most people are not messing with that so it may not matter.
