Nick:

Thanks very much for your comments and documentation However can you tell me precisely how you get MIDI input from Logic to the Standalone and how you route the standalone's audio back into Logic (via an aux track I'd guess) so that it can make use of plugins within Logic? Does one need to use SoundFlower or Jack OSX for the audio? How does one get Logic to see the standalone as a MIDI device? No doubt I'm just missing something due to brain cell depletion - - but if you could describe this precisely it would be extremely helpful to me and, I suspect, to many other users.

Thanks,
Stephen

MIDI is a little tricky, and I haven't quite thought it through entirely since I'm rusty on how the Click and Ports layer in the Environment works. It's going to take some poking around that I haven't done yet, although it's not a big deal.

But I can tell you how to get it working. The first part is easy: go into Audio MIDI Setup and double-click the IAC Driver to make sure you have a bus set up. I believe you do by default, but if not you'll need to create one. You can give it a name if you want.

Then go into the Logic environment and (on an appropriate layer) create a new Instrument (it doesn't have to be a multi-instrument since the Vienna Instruments player only uses one MIDI channel). Set its Port to IAC bus 1 (or whatever). Go to the Vienna Instruments player's prefs and tell it to receive on IAC bus 1.

Assign the active Logic track to that instrument. If you play the keyboard now, you'll hear a god-awful racket that sounds suspiciously like a MIDI loop. In fact that's exactly what it is.

So go into the Click and Ports layer of the Logic Environment and disconnect the Physical Input Sum [of all your MIDI inputs] cable from the Recording & Thru object (usually it's connected to a MIDI monitor object first). That disconnects the IAC bus and stops it causing a loop. Then I think you have to connect every physical MIDI input you want to use back to the Recording & Thru object (or the MIDI monitor object).

You can do the same thing for additional Vienna Instruments players if you can get them running on the same machine.

What I'm unclear about is whether there's an easier way to disconnect the IAC bus from the sum. Not a big deal.

Audio is another long story. I'll come later and explain that, but first, what audio hardware are you using? Soundflower is the easiest way I can think of, but if you have an RME interface you can use its Totalmix software to do that.

Hey Stephen,

You should be able to route midi to the standalone over Apple's own "IAC bus". If it's not available double-check that it's "online" in Audio MIDI Setup (double-click on the IAC Bus icon). Then you can choose IAC Bus as the midi instrument in your Logic track (yes, you'll be using a midi track in logic, not an instrument). In the VI standalone, go to preferences and choose the IAC Bus as your midi device.

As far as audio goes, it's a bit tickier. One approach: Soundflower.
I've used it before and it seems pretty good. However, afaik Soundflower has no capacity to connect its output with your hardware -- it's strictly a "virtual" audio device. To get around this, you make an Aggregate Device in Audio MIDI Setup. Create an aggregate device combining your hardware with Soundflower. You'll see in the Aggregate Device Editor that each device will be assigned to a range of channels. You'll use the hardware channels for Logic's output, and the Soundflower channels for the input from your VI Standalone.
Once you've got an aggregate device, select the aggregate device as your audio device in Logic's "driver" section. Then, you'll just make a Stereo Input track in Logic, and select the channels that were assigned to Soundflower in the Aggregate Device editor. The output of Logic will use the channels that were assigned to your hardware in the aggregate device editor. That should do it!

The advantage of Jack OS X (and why it's used in Linux-land all the time) is that you can patch virtual ports directly to hardware, saving you the trouble of making an Aggregate Device. The idea is the same though, you're going to select Jack as the device in the VI standalone, and in the Jack router you'll patch the VI standalone's output to Logic. It sounds confusing, but it will make sense when you get Jack going.

Hope this helps.

J.

hehe... you've got more than you bargained for...!

J.

Confirmed with Orren Merton (who wrote the book): you need to reconnect every MIDI port individually.

Edit: you need to disconnect the Sum and then reconnect everything except the IAC ports manually. End of story - you can ignore what I said about needing to poke around.

Man, I love technology. As soon as you think you pretty much know everything there is to know about something, boom, you find out that you were wrong. Very humbling, I must say [:)]

Anyway, I had to try this thing, so I did a couple of tests here, on a Dual 2Ghz G5 with 8GB of Ram.

Here are my findings...

First, I tried maxing out a single stand alone instance of VI. I went up to 3.25GB of used memory (VI indicated "3004 MB" of used memory). I couldn't load more samples than that - after that, the app simply crashes (I tried it twice!).

With two Vienna Instrument instances loaded, I was able to load 2.71GB on one, and 1.10 on the other. At 1.11 GB, the second instance crashed. Total = 3.81GB.

http://vsl.co.at/upload/users/22294/VI_Duo.png">

Conclusion: it seems more stable to have two, smaller instances of VI loaded, than a single, fat one.

So... I decided to try something even crazier.

I launched Plogue Bidule, and loaded a huge preset in VI, with about 3GB of samples.

Then I launched one stand alone instance of VI, with 1.5GB of samples.
Then I launched *another* stand alone instance of VI, with 1.5GB of samples.
And then, I launched *a third* stand alone instance of VI, with 1.5GB of samples.

Everything worked quite ok for a few minutes, but the third instance then crashed.

So, I launched another third instance, and, this time loaded only 1 GB of samples. Everything worked fine, and is still working fine right now.



Total : 3 + 1.5 + 1.5 + 1 = 7 GB of samples.

That's quite nice. And a *huge* find.

I gotta say thanks to you all for challenging us with that idea. That's a huge discovery for me. In theory, and if the CPU is powerful enough, you could have one Mac Pro instead of four or five Mac Minis!

WOW!!!

Jerome

jerome, thanks for posting this numbers - although i had to take the liberty and crop your images to ~600 px because for users reading the forum within the website they had exceeded the max.available width
christian

Hey Christian,

no problem. I'll make sure they're not more than 600px next time.

Jerome

Nick, JBM, Jerome - - many, many thanks to all of you. Following your collective advice I've managed to get the thing working - using Soundflower - in cooperation with Logic. Jack OSX looks interesting and I'll try and figure it out later.

Previously, I'd gotten as far as the horrendous feedback loop (didn't blow my speakers luckily!), but Nick's solution works perfectly. The one thing I'm not absolutely clear about is running more than one instance of the standalone. Nonetheless, in my primitive way, I seem to have accomplished it by simply making a copy of the application and running the copy along with the original. Certainly glad I asked for help on this. Pretty nifty to be able to run a lot more samples on one computer.

Again I'm extremely grateful.
Stephen

Hey Steve -

yes, to run more than one Stand-Alone app, you just need to copy it. If you want to keep both in the same folder, they just need a different name.

If you tried it with more than one stant-alone app, can you let us know how things are going ? Any problem regarding MIDI ? Is everything going to the right stand-alone app? There's nothing like the MIDI signal mixing-up or the like?

Jerome

Jerome, using different IAC busses ensures there are no mix-ups - you just select a different "MIDI interface."

What I haven't experiemented with is how to separate the audio outputs from each instance. The Vienna Instruments player allows you to select one device, e.g. RME Fireface or MOTU PCI-424 or built-in; there doesn't seem to be any way to be any more specific than that. I assume Soundflower is just another device, and it'll have the same problem.

So the first instance is no problem, because it's going to go to the default output pair for the audio driver. And you can of course route the outputs inside any host to a separate pair; so far so good. But when you add the second insetance outside the host, that's when I think you might have to do some thinking.

Yes, I did realize this problem. In VI Stand Alone, you can only choose the audio interface - you can't choose a specific channel. So, let's say you have an interface with ADAT, you can't tell "Stand Alone 1" to go out ADAT 1-2, and then "Stand Alone 2" to go out ADAT 3-4.

The solution could be:
- For the VI Stand Alone 1, to go out the default outputs of your audio interface (let's say, ADAT 1-2)
- For the VI Stand Alone 2, to go out SoundFlower, back into Plogue, and then to route the signal to ADAT 3-4.
- For the VI Stand Alone 3, to go out Jack, back into Plogue, and then to route the signal to ADAT 5-6.

What do you think?

Just brainstorming here...

Jerome

My first reaction was that it sounds a little kludgey. But then OS X has no problem with multiple audio drivers, which is what those are, so why not.

Another thought - which I haven't investigated - is to create two aggregate devices, one Soundflower-audio interface and the other one audio interface-Soundflower.

I don't know if that would work...

It works!

That eliminates one audio driver.

The silly thing is that I actually get excited about stuff like this. [:)] [:O]ops: [:D]

I don't follow you here... what do you mean it elimitaes one audio driver?

Jerome

I mean you don't need to use both Jack OS X and Sunflower - you can just use one of the two and your regular audio driver. That gives you four output choices: Sunflower; audio driver; Sunflower/audio driver aggregate device; audio driver/Sunflower aggregate device (or substitute Jack for Sunflower).

If Jack OS X and Sunflower - two software drivers - will work in tandem, my idea gets you nothing. My fear is that using two audio drivers is risky.

But as I said, I could be wrong.

Ok, I see your point now... but where would the signal go if you use the aggregate device? Let's say you use "Soundflower+Audio Driver", where does the audio go?

Jerome

To an input pair inside Plogue, most likely, via Soundflower (since the first two Soundflower inputs are likely to be where the Vienna Instruments player sends its output).

Except that I'm stuck in RME Fireface 400 land, having been working with it for a review. Audio Driver + Sunflower is only going to go to an audio interface output, not into Plogue, so that doesn't work. The RME box has internal mixing, so software outputs can be routed to any DAW input.

Maybe I'm not as clever as I thought I was. You still have Soundflower and Soundflower + Audio Driver; I think that would give you two different routing options with Soundflower. But that may be another hole in my thinking.

To me, it would seem that the same issue would happen with "SoundFlower+AudioDriver", because it would simply go out SoundFlower 1-2... which is already being used by "SoundFlower"...

J.

Probably, which is wny I don't think I'm as clever as I think I am.

But it might go to another pair if Soundflower decides that pair is already being used - in which case I'd be clever all over again.