Looks very interesting........
www.apogeedigital.com/products/symphony.php
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Apogee Vbus - the answer to all our needs ?
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I have an apogee Symphony system and I've gone thru a ton of stuff to try to get audio from standalone
virtual instruments into Logic to take advantage of the complete RAM space in my Mac Pro - not just the
4 GB limit within Logic. No luck no how no way. VBus is simply not realized with most third party apps.
I talked with Apogee support again yesterday and they say VBus now works with VSL. Big Whoops.
VE2 & VE3 do that already. I've solved my VSL RAM issues completely by adding a second Mac Pro
runing VE3 in Vista64 with a ton of RAM. That is a slam dunk. There is no reason to refine it. It works
perfectly. (Thanks Herb et al!) It's too bad the other major manufacturers don't have such an elegant solution.
Niether Kontakt nor Play work with VBus. That is straight from the mouths of Apogee, East West
and Native Instruments. Apogee support did say that perhaps another DAW app open simultaneously
with Logic (like Live, etc.) might be able to host Play/Kontakt's outputs indirectly from the outputs of the other open
app. I haven't tried this yet though. (Hmm...I wonder if Garage Band would work? How many outputs are possible
with GB?)
SBus does look somewhat interesting. It's supposed to send audio over their SBus from a second Mac Pro
back to the original Mac Pro that hosts Logic. You would need some software like MIDI-over-LAN to get the
MIDI info to the second Mac Pro. But there again you would need to buy yet another computer and two pieces
of software to make it work - maybe work. Oh yeah, you would need to get two Symphony cards too.
Apogee support did say that they have lent a Symphony system to Native Instruments tech support in LA, but
they've never gotten back to Apogee about it. It could well be sitting on a shelf gathering dust.
In short, I would take that Apogee marketing video with a grain of salt.
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Hi Dave,
What I was trying to get across is that I was not able to get VBus to work as they originally claimed.
I'm not sure how you're going about this. VE3 (usually placed on a slave cpu) returns audio via ethernet to aux tracks directly within Logic on a master cpu. (I'm assuming you're using Logic since you have Symphony.)
Apogee support says that VE2 (the non-networked version that goes on your main cpu with the Logic software) is supposed to work with VBus. I did not try that since I went with VE3 on a slave Mac Pro running Vista 64 within Bootcamp.
You might want to call Apogee support in LA. Much to their credit they do answer the phone and are helpful. I'm not real sure that Apogee marketing & support are on the same page though.
Best regards,
Jack
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Not that my response here is of any use but I must say I am very happy I didn't buy into the apogee symphony system. I almost did and at the last moment I went with RME because of the amazing support and stability I've always had with them. What I am reading about the Apogee products here is absolutely disappointing but the same as what I went through. They are definitely a ranking world leader in what they do, and for them to fall on their face like this is an embarrassment.
To then also read that they dropped Windows driver support is crazy. Especially since my friends just bought Rosetta setups to run on their Windows recording platforms. This company is making big mistakes as far as I am concerned. They have always been good support on the phone but fact remains, they need to get their **** together and wake up to reality. They are falling behind and losing credibility in the last year or two. I even tried to demo a rosetta setup and a symphony setup. Neither one could compete with my current setup. Half the time it wouldn't even work. I remember how disappointed I was when I was on the phone with support, a Rosetta 200 w/symphony sitting in front of me and him telling me that what I wanted to do wasn't even possible (long story but it is not a difficult thing. Was a bus routing setup).
Hope you two get this crap figured out because you have amazing hardware, that has some crap ass software support at the moment. I hope they haven't lost key programmers in the midst and just not letting that information out because I just can't understand how a company as powerful as them would design such a high level product (symphony) and then FAIL for so long to get it to work. I ended up returning mine for a full refund before my 30 days ran out. Got the RME and never looked back and never had ONE application not work on either windows or MAC.
Maestro2be
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Jack,
I'm looking at doing the same thing you did and purchase a second machine. I was wondering, If I use my current Mac Pro as the slave and use bootcamp/Vista64, will I need to reload my harddrives with the VSL Library or will Vista recognize it when using Bootcamp?
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Chuck,
How were your sample drives originally formatted? If it's a format that a PC would recognize then you're OK. If not, then you'll probably have to reformat the drives and start over. If memory serves me a Mac will read HFS & NTFS and a PC will only read NTFS. (Please somebody correct me if this isn't correct!)
In my case I purchased the Mac Pro to be a Vista slave for the time being - at least until the VSL/64bit/MacOS thing got settled out. It's been over a year. I might just leave the machine as a Vista solution. It's been so incredibly, incredibly stable.
Jack
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I had the same problem. The task that faced me I thought was relatively simple. How to use PLAY as a standalone with Logic using IAC Buses in the Mac's audio/midi setup, external midi tracks and multi instruments and their respective channels in order to be able use virtually limitless numbers of instruments from several of the East West libraries I have. However, with everything pointing to Logic's Output 1-2 (i.e. PLAYS output set to Out 1-2) and my monitor speakers in the Ensembles main Out 1-2... no dice. Can hear music, can see signal in the external midi tracks, but nothing is being routed to Logic's out 1-2, i.e. no signal rising and falling in it's meter channels so hence, I cannot bounce anything, as when one does, either in Realtime or Offline, there is nothing in the MP3 or AIFF in playback. The only solution I have been able to find is that one needs to create a stereo audio track in Logic with Input Monitoring on, it's I/Os set to Input 1-2, output 1-2 and set all my PLAY instruments in the engine to output 3-4. One can also use an AUX track which seems to do the same thing. Then from the back of the Ensemble's out 3-4 I have two patch cables that are looping back over the Ensemble and plugging into the two HI Z inputs on the front. After doing that, signal now flows into the stereo audio track which then pumps it to Logic's out 1-2. I then saw signal pumping through logic's output 1-2 and I was able to successfully bounce my composition BUT, it has to be bounced in REALTIME. Bouncing offline will still give you nada when playing back the resulting MP3 or AIFF. After dropping nearly $1,800 on this Ensemble I have to belive there has to be a simpler way, or maybe this is just what one has to do. Before I got this Ensemble, I was just using an Edirol FA 66 which cost $270 which was the one I used in order to crack this PLAY into Logic as standalone. I am set to speak to Apogee's tech people tomorrow to see what they suggest. I Shall post with what I glean, if they are stumped, then this is the only way so far I have been able to figure out how to do this in order to be able to loop signal back into logics out 1-2 from the PLAY engine and the Ensemble without having to resort to creating Aggregate devices with crappy virtual routers like Soundflower and Jack Pilot.
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I just bought an RME Multiface, it seems people are generally not unhappy with everything about RME. I am looking at ways of course to maximize resources, to run Play engine instruments if not Kontakt 3, etc. With Cubase, there was always Virtual System Link, you can connect two machines via S/PDIF if the audio interfaces support this protocol. I'm considering Logic, you'll see mhth's solution (and an excellent tutorial at youtube thoroughly teaching it) of looping to get a standalone Play to send audio back to Logic, and I am right now only seeing Logic to accomplish this, since it may be problematic per se to break the MIDI loop elsewhere. Won't anything do a MIDI-over-Lan, if you've set the Lan network up? Why do we need the Apogee Symphony system to accomplish this? I'm not 100% averse to getting a second MacPro, I hate to, but it's always going to be tough to have enough resources to run these instruments... not seeing a particular advantage to Symphony over something else. If someone knows better, do tell. IE: I am looking for a solution, but I too am seeing the Apogee SBus as marketing, and not a lot else.
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It appears, now I'm in the Vienna game, that the answer is right here with Vienna Ensemble, it uses 'local host' to 'network' the standalone with the host, and the Ensemble 3 uses LAN very simply (simple enough for even me) to slave any computer, not requiring any sound card on the slave.
