MIR SE and 3rd Party VST's: Confused

[noldar12]

 I am confused about MIR SE and 3rd party VST's.  According to the MIR SE page, SE should work with third party VST instruments.

My computer is currently in the process of being upgraded for use with either MIR or MIR SE (by ADK Pro Audio).  They have indicated that in their testing (I would assume via a demo license) that MIR SE does NOT support 3rd party VST instruments.

As I need to make a decision within a day or so and purchase either one or the other, it would be of great help to get clarification on this.  Is it intended that MIR SE will support third party VST instruments?  Does the demo perhaps restrict this?  Note that since ADK has my computer for the needed hardware upgrades, I cannot presonally test it.

Thanks.

Jim

[Dietz]

Thanks for your interest in Vienna MIR, Jim.

There seems to be a misunderstanding on ADK's side. Since the release of Version 1.1 Vienna MIR (and Vienna MIR SE) will happily host 3rd-party VST and VSTi plugins, as long as they offer 64bit versions. Most 32bit plugins will also work once they are wrapped with jBridge.

Handling of 3rd-party VSTis is covered in detail in MIR's User Manual on page 35 ff:

-> [URL]http://vsl.co.at/en/68/428/709/239.htm[/URL]

Vienna Instruments are deeply integrated into MIR/MIR SE with all the unique input-conscious features like individual Directivity Profiles, Natural Volume or the taylor-made Character Presets. All other VSTis will have to rely on General Purpose settings that MIR offers for this task.

The only real technical restriction reagrding 3rd-party instruments is that you can't use multiple outputs from one VSTi-instance, due to the internal design of the MIR engine.

BTW: The MIR-demo offers the full feature set of the retail-version for 30 days and an unlimited number of starts, so I can't imagine the purpose for the reported problems on ADK's side. Maybe they were testing with Version 1.0 ...?

HTH,

[noldar12]

Dietz, thanks for the reply.  I will forward that response to them.  BTW, they were working with an actual copy they had purchased.

Long term I can certainly see numerous reasons for going with the full MIR.  It happens that for most of my compositions, MIR SE would be enough, and I can think of work-arounds for the few cases where it would not be.

It is good to at last be nearing the point of moving forward with the purchase of one of the versions of MIR.

Jim

[Dietz]

You're welcome, Jim.

(For the sake of completeness: The MIR 30-days trial license encompasses one MIR Venue with one Main Microphone Position only, not the whole Standard RoomPack. This was done to keep the downloads at a reasonable size 8-) ...)

[noldar12]

Dietz, thanks again.  I heard back from them after forwarding your post, and it turned out they had already realised their mistake.  It turned out to be a classid "Duh oh... oops".  The person doing the testing accidently missed something (I've done that numerous times myself).  Things are now going exactly as they are supposed to.

[Animus]

That's cool that MIR can host 3rd party vsti's but that's too bad by not having multple discrete outputs to bring the instruments into your host for further mixing.  Perhaps for MIR Pro?

Can you also turn off just the tail part of the reverb and just have the ER so you can add your own tail in the host?

[Dietz]

Animus,

I guess you're still mistaking MIR as "just another reverb" ;-). Although you _could_ trim the overall length of  MIR's reverb tails to something like 0.1 or 0.2 seconds (thus leaving more or less just the early reflections of a room), you would lose much of the beauty and the actual strength of MIR's concept.

Your way of thinking derives from the usual way of thinking that we have just one or maybe two or three individual impulse responses for  whole mix. Within MIR, _each and every instrument_ will have its _individual_ set of IR's, depending of the type of instrument (or ensemble), on its positition, its direction, its stereo width, and so on. Much of the depth and realism you will perceive comes from exactly this underlying principle.

Coming back to your thought about adding "your own tail in the host", I would rather opt for one of the dryer sound stages as Venue, and add some algorithmic reverb to the dry signals :-)

Kind regards,

[Animus]

hey Dietz,

I was actually thinking that most the localization/ of  space comes from the ER information, at least from my experience.  Tails in convolution reverb usually don't excite me and sound static.  I was looking at some vids on Youtube yesterday of a guy demoing MIR where he was ABing a trumpet in the real hall and then MIR.  Although it was pretty close something about the tails were way smoother in the real hall and there was a bit of disconnect in the MIR version. 

thanks

[Dietz]

That was most likely me :-) ... as far as I remember this video was shot with a hand camera and its built-in microphone, so soundwise this is maybe not a reference 8-)  Apart from that, the demo was created by hand (without the actual real-time capable MIR engine) in the year 2005, AFAIR, so you could get more refined results today.

In any case, personally I would prefer the multi sampled reverb tail to most (if not all) synthetic reverbs, especially when it come to realism, but also regarding resonances and chorusing artifacts. But everyone to his taste! In principle, MIR is able to do what you seem to be after, that' s the most important part.