Vienna Symphonic Library Forum
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  • What to do if there is a crash / no midi

    I often experience a loss of midi using VEPro:
    I have my main Mac with DP7.01 running. My external Mac has 64bit and 32 bit servers running about 3 instances each of VEPro (Vienna Instruments on the 64bit, and Kontakt / LASS strings on the 32 bit).
    Sometimes, and I don't know why, I lose midi connection and cannot play the instruments. At this point I don't know what to do, disconnect, re-connect, turn audio engine off and on restart etc etc.
    I am not sure if I restart both machines what order to start this all up in. Any suggestions on procedure? Right now in fact I ahve a huge deadline and can't play anything. I am trying different sequences of start up / re-start up etc and need some guidance. One time this happened before I recall the only way to get the non responsive instruments running again was to re-create the entire set-up in both DP and VEPro (both the master and slave machine) to get it working again.
    Any help would be appreciated.


  • When you say you lose MIDI connection do you mean the keyboard MIDI connection?  If you play the notes on the virtual Vienna keyboard in the GUI with your mouse do you hear anything? 


  • Well, it's different some of the time. At the moment, this latest crash just now, the midi does seem connected but there's no audio sounding. (If played from the real or virtual keyboard). I don't recall the exact details of last night, just the new crash this morning. Last night I seemed to get it working by simply playing some other tracks, one track worked and it seemed to activate all the others. To be specific I had a flute track that wouldn't play. In DP I selected a brass track, it played, then the flute and all other tracks started playing.

    This morning, a new crash, restarted everything. It's all connected, midi seems to work but no sound. Turning the audio engine on and off, and disconnecting, reconnecting, makes no difference.


  • With this current crash, the solution was to go into the INPUTS column in DP and CREATE A NEW INPUT. The old one was still there, but it was in italics. If I click on the input column for (say) the woodwinds (that aren't sounding since the crash) and choose "select new input" and find the woodwind VEPro input there, select it, then it works. My list of inputs is growing and growing with every crash as the old inputs seem to "die off" and become italicized in DP's input column in the arrange window.

    I wish there was a system or order of things to deal with crashes as it happens a lot. Perhaps this is it I'll keep my eye out next time.


  • OK so that solution works for SOME of the instances in my severs and not for the others. The above worked on my woodwinds, then I tried some strings, it didn't work but all I had to do to add to that procedure is disconnect and reconnect. Then tried some bass strings (different instance), and that doesn't work no matter what I try.

    I can't seem to come up with a repeatable step by step system for what to do when everything crashes. I wish I could restart and know what to do step by step to bring it all back online. What I try for one instance doesn't work for another.


  • Let me guess that this happens only with Kontakt and on the 32bit VPs? The VP channel strips show that they receive midi, but it does not trigger sounds in Kontakt; but when you play the sounds with the Kontakt keyboard, they work? If so, this is a bug that others, me amongst them, have experienced before. What worked for me as a temporary workaround is to delete the affected VP channel and re-create it. Reloading the samples is pretty fast with the Kontakt Memory Server activated and set to manual as the samples stay in RAM.

    I was not able to reliably recreate this bug and I am guessing that the VSL team could not either - it seems random, a classic Gremlin. If you have steps to recreate the behavior, please let us know.

    restarting the Macs: the order does not seem to matter here, as long as I start+load the VPs before I try to connect to them from my DAW (Logic)


  • ACtually, at the moment it's occuring with Vienna Instruments. I lose the connection midi-wise and audio wise. Triggering from within the virtual keyboard in the VI interface does not trigger a sound. It seems that sometimes (not sure how to exactly replicate this, but it happens very often) re-opening a DP file with the same template, the connection is lost. Re-connecting doesn't work. Usually I have to re-setup the channel routing in DP (input channel assignment etc), but at the moment THAT doesn't work either. (Sometimes it does, right now it doesn't). 

    The list of inputs gets longer and longer in DP as with several files I keep having to add new inputs, even though technincally it's the same one I jsut have to keep re-creating. As mentioned though, it doesn't always work, like at the moment. (It worked OK this morning, but not tonight).


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    @Wolfsterik said:

    Let me guess that this happens only with Kontakt and on the 32bit VPs? The VP channel strips show that they receive midi, but it does not trigger sounds in Kontakt; but when you play the sounds with the Kontakt keyboard, they work? If so, this is a bug that others, me amongst them, have experienced before. What worked for me as a temporary workaround is to delete the affected VP channel and re-create it. Reloading the samples is pretty fast with the Kontakt Memory Server activated and set to manual as the samples stay in RAM.

    I was not able to reliably recreate this bug and I am guessing that the VSL team could not either - it seems random, a classic Gremlin. If you have steps to recreate the behavior, please let us know.

    restarting the Macs: the order does not seem to matter here, as long as I start+load the VPs before I try to connect to them from my DAW (Logic)

    Are you sure the Kontakt patch has its MIDI channel setup correctly? Kontakt is somewhat picky about this (setting VE Pro to Omni will only work with the Kontakt patch set to omni or 1 for instance).

  • Karel,

    to the best of my understanding, yes, I am sure. My default way of setting midi channels is: VP = 1 Plugin Midi In 1 + Channel e.g. 8 and set the same channel (here: 8) in the Kontakt instrument (or instrument bank). Currently I always only use 1 instrument (or .nkb) per Kontakt instance.

              Good point about the Omni particularity, but I never use Kontakt in VP this way.

    This might be a different issue, but I am still getting random VP 32bit crashes with 

    Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)

    Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x000000001e9e8008 (this number varies)

    in the latest one this thread crashed:

    Thread 5 Crashed:

    0   com.vsl.viennaensemblepro     0x002a10f3 SocketAudioEngine::addEvent(AudioEngineBase::MidiEvent) + 195

    1   com.vsl.viennaensemblepro     0x002a325a MidiServer::handleIncomingMidiMessage(juce::MidiInput*, juce::MidiMessage const&) + 394

    2   com.vsl.viennaensemblepro     0x0051d04e juce::MidiFile::readFrom(juce::InputStream&) + 1312

    3   com.apple.audio.midi.CoreMIDI 0x00d9e977 MIDIProcess::RunMIDIInThread() + 271

    4   com.apple.audio.midi.CoreMIDI 0x00d81149 XThread::RunHelper(void*) + 17

    5   com.apple.audio.midi.CoreMIDI 0x00d80b16 CAPThread::Entry(CAPThread*) + 96

    6   libSystem.B.dylib             0x931c8f39 _pthread_start + 345

    7   libSystem.B.dylib             0x931c8dbe thread_start + 34

     I tested the RAM extensively and found no errors. This might be material for a new thread - it just happened 1 minute ago, which is why I report it here.


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    Dear Rob Kral,

    please send me a detailed setup description, your latest crash reports and if possible a simplified DP project where the problem occurred to support.

    /Regards,


  • Please note I am having erratic problems with DP (version 7.0 an 7.01). Just now I inserted a measure change and pressed play. This resulted in suddenly losing the movie audio in the quicktime window. I did nothing else. The reason I post this detail is that I believe there is a problem with my actual DP at the moment on my system that is contributing to my studio hassles recently.

    My original question is when the computer crashes or needs re-starting (my main sequencing computer, for whatever reason at all), what is the best procedure for handling the re-start in terms of what I should do, if anything, on the external VEPro machine? 

    Thanks, I will send details on the next crash. Sometimes there isn't a crash, I just can't access the VEPro instruments on re-opening a previous file and have to set up the audio channels / instances again.


  • (In the meantime, another problem with DP requiring restart of the DP machine. I did not restart the VEPro machine. Restarted the main DP machine, started DP. Midi not transmissable to VEPro. Disconnected in the server on the main machine, reconnected, VEPro indicates plugin info needs to be reloaded, reloaded it, still no midi. Playing the virtual keys produces sound).


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    Dear Rob Kral,

    I encountered problems with DP 7 when opening an existing project (crashes) but cannot reproduce the problems with VE Pro you´re describing here. I´d need a detailed setup description and a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) to be able to narrow down this problem. Please send it to support (for Maya).

    /Regards,