welcome jeff, your email makes me assume you're on a mac ... right ... PPC or intel?
the Vienna Instruments currently don't offer RTAS (a beta turned up to be not performant enough) but it is said the 7.3.1cs4 with the current FXpansion wrapper works, although i can't say how good. we could test this configuration (m-box + PT LE) on windows as soon as we have some time (and machine) left.

i have also heard that digidesign tries to allow streaming sampler plugins more performance, but i guess this would only affect intel, at least as far as it concerns VI ... and we will let you know when a new RTAS version of Vienna Instruments is there.
christian

Many thanks Christian!

It is good to know that VI does not have an official RTAS plugin. Guess its a good thing I also use Logic 7.2! To answer your question, I am running an intel iMac 20" with a 2 Ghz intel core duo processor and 2 GB of RAM.

I will certainly be eager to know when there is an official RTAS version! In the meantime, I will try the wrapper you mentioned. I assume you can get it from the FXpansion website?

Thanks again for your helpful and timely response!

Best,
Jeff

Hi Jeff,
I fired it up on my pt rig using DP running DAE and the wrapper and was able to get a few instances loaded and working. It does work, but you won't be too thrilled with the amount of instruments you can load. I forget what i was able to get, but if you dig around the posts, you'll probably find it.

And yes it's the FX expansion wrapper.

Dont go blow any money on buying the FX wrapper, it's not worth the money as the number instances and the performance of them is still very very low.

My thanks to Tripit and Vagn Luv!!

This info is important to me because almost all of my work is for full orchestra. If you can only load a few instances in Pro Tools, the wrapper is certainly not worth it to me. Guess I'll have to wait for VI to come out with a fully-fledged RTAS version.

Best,
Jeff

p.s. for anyone else reading this, I got this response from VI:

"Vienna Instruments are available as standalone application and as AU/VST plug in´s only (this information can be found on our website and on the box of each Vienna Instruments collection).

An RTAS version of Vienna Instruments is not yet available. In our tests, a RTAS betaversion did not meet our requirements. Even tests with FXpansion`s VST to RTAS wrapper software weren´t successful in terms of reliability (nevertheless some customers use FXpansion´s wrapper version 2 for Vienna Instruments).
Therefore Vienna Instruments are not compatible with Pro Tools Software at the moment. However an RTAS version for intel-based Macs is in development but we cannot yet estimate its release date.

Vienna Instruments will of course work as standalone application (with Core Audio).

We regret that we are unable to give you a more favourable reply.


Best regards,

M a y a
VINSON"

If I were VSL I would delete the line

@Another User said:

nevertheless some customers use FXpansion´s wrapper version 2 for Vienna Instruments

from any future corespondence with customers, as it may mislead ppl into thinking some sort of setup can be achieved using the wrapper, when in fact it can't. Performance is too low to even hint at this imo, and considering how ppl become naively hopeful at the prospect of being able use this wonderful library, it may well mislead someone into making wasted investments into the wrappers.

Just my 2 cents, anyway. [:)]

if this would be an isolated sentence i'd agree, but - as always - one had to read it in context (especially with the sentence before).
strictly speaking this would otherwise apply also to other setup questions, eg: you _can_ use firewire drives, which does not mean they work under any circumstances or for any purposes ...

of course a wrapper (as the word IMO implies) keeps to be a workaround and no solution ...
christian

As a general rule, I find that most VI don't perform to expectations with RTAS. RTAS is just not VI friendly. I've long since moved all VI off of RTAS and keep RTAS for effect plugs only. Not what most people want to hear, but that's just the reality of it. I think a lot of developers wish that RTAS worked, and many try to make it work, but it's just not very stable when it comes to VI - let alone getting instances numbers that match VST.
The wrapper does seem to help, in some cases people are getting better results with wrapped VST than with the same counterpart in RTAS.