Getting VI Standalone audio into ProTools ...? (WinXP)

[Trailerman]

I wondered if I could beg some advice ...

I've been battling with the Vienna Instrument plugin in ProTools HD (Windows XP) over the last couple of weeks, and struggling to get it to behave or remain stable. So far I've focussed on using the FXPansion VST-RTAS wrapper, but am seeing a number of stability problems, GUI issues, and also host issues when I have more than about 900MB-1GB of samples loaded. In short it's not working reliably enough to use at a serious level.

So I figured it might be better to approach the challenge from a different angle. In an ideal world I would use the Standalone VI Player, but this seemingly does not offer any REWIRE capabilities. So, does anyone know of:

1. ... any way of routing audio from the standalone player into ProTools, or

2. a standalone VST host/shell, which can output audio in REWIRE format, which ProTools could then access?

The benefits of either of the approaches above are a) they avoid ProTools having to directly host a plugin it is clearly ynot happy with, and b) I get a fresh chunk of application memory for Vienna Instrument use, which might enable greater sample loads.

If anybody had any ideas or suggestions, I'd be hugely grateful. Obviously the ideal solution would be an RTAS version of the VI Plugin, but my impression is that this is not imminent.

Many thanks

Jules

[joybeanstudios]

Jules,

Hey, I was wondering the same thing and then came across your post. Although I'm a bit discouraged to see no one has replied to you.

Have you found anything out or had any luck since you posted this? I'm running Pro Tools on a Mac and am interested in APPASSIONATA STRINGS, but if there's no reliable way to use it in PT then I can't see purchasing. I'm using QLSO Platinum as an RTAS and want to supplement the strings, but need to have them all running in the same program.

Anyone have any idea why VSL does not make an RTAS or if they plan on it? Thanks!

-Ruckus

[Vagn Luv]

Search the forum for Pro Tools or RTAS in the topic and u will see why. Performance of RTAS is not good enough, and Digidesign say they are aware of it's shortcommings and are working to resolve them. No timeschedule, though(of course).

Cheers.

[Trailerman]

Hey Ruckus

I spent much of the back end of last week testing different VST hosts which can also run as a Rewire slave, and trying to get them to work with VSL and ProTools.

In short (and none of this is entirely conclusive yet).

1. Reaper looked good, but had an issue whereby as soon as I routed individual tracks to different Rewire Outputs, it would stop outputting audio. Apparently this has just been fixed in an update, seemingly as a result of my reports, which is very impressive, but which I'm yet to try out.

2. ACID also looked good and I got further with it - hosted multiple instances of the Vienna Instrument and could route them to individual Rewire outputs no problem, but when I tested it in earnest, it started dropping notes on some isntruments, and I don't really have the time to try and nail that kind of fiddly and potentially time-consuming issue and then try and get Sony to fix it.

3. Fruity Loops may work, but I could not get my head around it's GUI or basic architecture.

4. Orion doesn't like the Vienna plugin at all, and refuses to see or load it.

5. LIVE it turns out does not host VST instruments when in Rewire slave mode. Shame, becuase it's clearly a top class application.

6. Bidule is a pretty funky application, but for what you and I want to do, it may well be perfect. Initial tests showed excellent performance and reliability, low overhead etc. You just have to get into the whole 'bidules' concept, and not mind wiring things up on screen. Great little application, with the benefit that it's not trying to do anything other than route things around, so no surplus fat in the coding.

In short, it's now looking like Bidule and Reaper are strong contenders and will allow this to work reliably. I'll be testing further over the next week or so, and will report further if the situation changes. I'm confident though - not as easy as an RTAS version, but then again, running VI in a separate app, might buy you a bit more memory.

Hope this helps.

Jules

[golem]

hey - this sounds like a pro thread i could chime in ...

1 digi has a very very pristine hardware, but they struggle on keeping up with SW. it is not the engineering they lack (hey guys you are great) , rather the decision of what compiler platform they will use. and this is also a third party issue.
2 complex systems like we face today, heavily rely of what is called threads.
and here is where the nightmare starts. theory is quite settled, well, reality tells a different story.
3 now networking issues rise into the mind of the average computer assisted musician. i am not going to frighten you, but networks are not designed for real time - they are content to manage the connection itself.
4 but it is quite natural - you can do what you want, but there is just no way in talking your neighbor into the very same thing (not even your wife or girlfriend)
5 so - i feel for you, because i am a user like you, and try to get it work seamlessly. well, industry - to tell the truth - is not interested in us poor users ( especially those making music, which is a figure that even does not show up in their spreadsheets )
6 and - we (vsl) are working towards a rather complete solution, which will address most of the shortcomings of present (patchwork) approaches. at least for what is of concern for our products.

stay tuned.

thanks

chrisT
development

[Trailerman]

Hi Chris

Many thanks for chiming in on this thread - your input is greatly appreicated, and I'm interested in what you say, especially 6. above [[;)]]

At the end of the day, users can only find the 'solution' that works best for them. Although I was a ProTools sceptic for a long time, I personally think PTHD is a superb platform, especially for mixing, has superb latency compensation, the best plugins available and from my experience is exceptionally stable. I fully acknowledge that RTAS has some issues though. I'm just trying to find a way to run part of our new VI Cube on this machine, because it gives us more flexibility than trying to run everything on our Mac Pro/G5.

An integrated and simplified approach would clearly be the best solution (please let me know if user input would help at any stage!), but in the absence of that, it looks like there are some more clunky alternatives which might just keep us going in the meantime.

Also, I don't think this is a ProTools specific issue. Mac users are now trying to find ways to use more RAM on a single system by running standalone instances as well as hosted instances of VI. It seems that the whole VI library is starting to test the boundaries of current OS limitations, so it may well be that whatever 'complete solution' you guys are working on, may make life a lot easier for a lot of different users.

I'll report back if I make more progress on the VST/REWIRE host approach.

Jules

[Vagn Luv]

Well it's ALSO a ProTools specific issue. I made Digidesign acknowledge that the RTAS format is showing some rather obvious shortcomings in the performance department, and VSL is not the only developer reporting trouble getting it to run optimally. One thing clearly showing this is a new feature put in the PT 7.3cs3 (or is it cs4?) version where you can now adjust buffers and memory usage for plugins that are streaming audio. It has improved the performance of running a wrapped VI inside PT some, while still being very far off from what should be possible when compared to Logic. This is all on Mac G5 btw.

I'm think that the next 6 months will be very interesting in regards to getting rid of some of these annoying problems, and not less due to your rather perplexing answer in nr. 6, Dr. Teuscher. [[;)]]