Hi Stephane!

I've experienced the same thing, however, if I leave that section of music for a while, when I return to it I again experience drops. For me, this fix is quite unreliable because sometimes it will play OK but then begin to drop again on the 3rd, 4th, or 5th play. Furthermore, what if the whole piece struggles to play because of the density? It's too easy to get voice counts above 2500 with DS. Having to play through a piece multiple times is an incredibly frustraing experience, because "quick fixes" now turn into 10 minute slogs while I put my DAW in loop playback and leave the room for 10 minutes while it attempts to load everything. 

It's curious that doing anything in Cubase or MIR has any effect, because isn't the issue hitting the voice limit and not CPU spikes? I think the high latency values that you are describing are quite unwieldy for doing any sort of composing since there is just too much lag in order to play naturally. Maybe it's OK for mixing. 

My template could load in less than 2 minutes if it wasn't for Dimension Strings, but because I have to increase the DS preload buffer to >8192, loading is quite a painful experience. 

Since no one yet has chimed in to say that they can run full DS without any problems, again I'll reiterate my stance that DS absolutely needs some lighter patches-- please: no reduced velocity layers, just save the enembles as single patches. The solo players are already well balanced with each other, and each ensemble size (div2, div 3, etc.) already has its own slot in MIR. Not to mention that it would make customizing the patches in VIPro much easier, since instead of making changes to 8 slots we'd only have to make changes to one slot. Not to mention that VSL could benefit from being able to drop the system requirements on this great library. I can't see the drawback to doing this, except for the poor guys at VSL who actually have to do it :-P 

Thanks for the input.

MOH

i have a 2014-macpro 8core 32gig and can easily run my 10/8/6/6/4-template along with other orchestral instruments.

before the new macpro i had a slave macmini 2.3 i7 4core with 16 gig ram and could run the same template. i had some dropouts at fast runs on all sections (crackilng as the voice counter showed about 1250 voices). on both macs dimension strings are streamed from ssd.

Well that's a good news at least! :-)

But you did have drop outs on runs.

When I get a chance I will see exactly how much polyphony my system can handle. On the last project I did (orchestrated a musical) the score got very dense at times, and Dimension Strings was always the choke point.

Thanks for your input!

@mohurwitzmusic said:

If I'm doing the math correctly:

8 x violins x 4 velocity layers = 32 voices for one note x 2 sections = 64 voices for violins

6 violas x 6 celli x 4 basses x 4 velocity layers = 576 voices for violas/celli/basses

Total for 5 notes: 640 voices

So if two voices overlap for even a second (which happens all the time) that will double that number to 1280 voices.

Not exactly 😉 it is (6 violas + 6 celli + 4 basses) x 4 velocity layers =  64 voices for violas+celli+basses, which together with violins amounts to 128 voices for complete string orchestra. 

Perhaps you can try to experiment with increased values in the Audio Engine section of VI PRO's General Settings (I believe Stephane already suggested this). These are also described in the VI PRO manual. 

@goran_tsch said:

I've just opened my old Wagner Lohengrin project to see what CPU usage values I get when I play the whole project - it almost never goes over 50 %, and it never goes over 60 % (and it's 52 VI instances in MIR's Berlin Teldex venue + over 30 audio plug-in instances).
I have 12 DS violins + 4 solo violins + 2 orchestral violins instances for violins 1+2.
I now remembered I did have voice dropouts in this project, but only when I played it through for the first time after opening it. After that first playback, no further voice dropping whatsoever.
My latency setting for MIR is 16384.
You guys have multi-threading enabled in VE's preferences?

Yes, VEP is very memory and CPU efficient (apart from all the other advantages it has).

I have both vel xfade (on all) and slot xfade (on some players) on DS patches in this project (with slot xfade you can double the voice count for an instance if the two patches have the same number of velocity layers).  

Oops! My bad. Back to high school math for me, eh?

Thanks. I will persevere and hopefully I can fix the problem.

As long as I know that someone else out there is running it without any voice limits that gives me hope, though it does seem that at some point almost everyone experiences a voice limit ceiling making certains types of writing precarious. 

FWIW I have indeed experimented with this setting.

Thanks again!

MOH

@goran_tsch said:

I've just opened my old Wagner Lohengrin project to see what CPU usage values I get when I play the whole project - it almost never goes over 50 %, and it never goes over 60 % (and it's 52 VI instances in MIR's Berlin Teldex venue + over 30 audio plug-in instances).
I have 12 DS violins + 4 solo violins + 2 orchestral violins instances for violins 1+2.
I now remembered I did have voice dropouts in this project, but only when I played it through for the first time after opening it. After that first playback, no further voice dropping whatsoever.
My latency setting for MIR is 16384.
You guys have multi-threading enabled in VE's preferences?

Yes, VEP is very memory and CPU efficient (apart from all the other advantages it has).

I have both vel xfade (on all) and slot xfade (on some players) on DS patches in this project (with slot xfade you can double the voice count for an instance if the two patches have the same number of velocity layers).  

if I use Vienna Ensemble instead of the Pro version, will VE produce the same efficiency on both CPU and RAM as the Pro version? I'm running it on the single machine, no plan for building a slave.

@mohurwitzmusic said:

Thanks. I will persevere and hopefully I can fix the problem.

As long as I know that someone else out there is running it without any voice limits that gives me hope, though it does seem that at some point almost everyone experiences a voice limit ceiling making certains types of writing precarious. 

Best of luck with this. DS is a great and pretty unique tool, it would be a shame not to make the best of it when one has it. Perhaps you just need to find the best combination of preload and voicing settings in VI PRO, as the overall voice count for the setup you mentioned really isn't that high.

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double post - deleted

@holywilly said:

if I use Vienna Ensemble instead of the Pro version, will VE produce the same efficiency on both CPU and RAM as the Pro version? I'm running it on the single machine, no plan for building a slave.

I can't say yes for certain, but probably so, as I assume these have identical architecture under the hood. Note that VE can't host third-party instruments and (if I remember correctly) doesn't integrate with MIR. Provided you don't use either of these, you should be fine with VE.

@holywilly said:

if I use Vienna Ensemble instead of the Pro version, will VE produce the same efficiency on both CPU and RAM as the Pro version? I'm running it on the single machine, no plan for building a slave.

I can't say yes for certain, but probably so, as I assume these have identical architecture under the hood. Note that VE can't host third-party instruments and (if I remember correctly) doesn't integrate with MIR. Provided you don't use either of these, you should be fine with VE.

Gerat! Thanks, I'll give it a try

I would like to add a lot of dimension strings users face similar issues about drop outs when using them and it seems that a lot of DAW systems are affected no matter if it is the fastest newest computer or a legacy system as I am still using. What I assume right now is that it may does not only has to do with disc streaming and voice stealing issues but with midi transmitting overloads as well. one user here on the forum recommended to assign individual dimension strings voices to different midi ports. So to say you have 8 ports with 16 midi channels each. put (for example) 4 violins on port 1 channel 1-4 , the 4 violas on port 2  channel 1-4 and so on. another thing that could help is to disable direct remote and midi remote under vienna instruments pro preferences. I use SSD for streaming and ...as many users already reported... the very first time I play a piece of dimension strings music I got a red line inside vienna instruments pro reporting voice overload and I can hear drop outs and cut offs inside the music. strangely if I just repeatedly play the piece up to 2 or 3 times they disappear as the red line does as well and everything sounds wonderful. maybe we have to wait for MIDI HD. it would be a good idea if  a VSL staff member could clear things up. some users run newest mac pro systems with 12core and incredible fast SSD connections and are reporting the same things. Are there any dimension strings users out there who do not face any streaming issues with them, where everything runs just fine? cheers Matt 

pro tools 10.3.8 hd, mac pro 2,1 8core 2,66ghz, 32gb ram, mac os 10.6.8, vepro 5 and vipro latest versions, SSD 255mb/s reading speed

Voice drop out issue seems to be solved when uisng Vienna Ensemble as the host (running on a single machine, and it's not the Pro version), with velocity x-fade disabled.

The performance is more stable running DS within VE under Cubase 8.0.5.

I will test the 8+8+6+6+4 DS ensemble with velocity x-fade enabled tomorrow to see how it goes.

I have to add my midi theory was wrong. midi does not seem to be the reason for the streaming drop outs. I assigned the different groups to different midi ports using individual midi channels on each port for each strings group and disabled all midi remote functions with no positive result. the behavior is still the same. drop outs and cut offs and and after several "play thru's" everythings runs. 

@holywilly: I would not mind using VE instead of VEpro for using Dimension Strings but disabling veloctiy x-fade takes away one of the core features to be used together with Dimension Strings. I would rather live with the issue of playing a piece several times in order to hear it as programmed instead of disabling velocity x-fade.  cheers! matt

@holywilly said:

The single note patch are running fine, but with quite high of cpu load; the legato patches are just disasters!

I once had such issues because the "envelope release scaler" in the performance settings tab was set to zero. If so, each sample is cut off sharply what will be most noticable on legatos. Unfortunately it was controlled by a default CC which I use to control another PlugIn. Best is to assign no CC to this parameter. The default value should be 63.

Another issue I have here is:

When solely using DS in VE, everything runs fine. However, if I create another instance of VI Pro (instance created under cubase) for other string library, say Appationata Strings, my Cubase performance meter hits the ceiling quite frequently to create click and pop while both recording and playback.

I put DS on its own SSD apart from other VSL libraries.

Anyone had ever experienced this kind of problem?

The only solution I can see to this is to allow better distribution of samples over multiple discs. You can put all DS violins on the same disc and violas on another and so on, but it would be more useful if one were able to put Player 1 on a different disc from Player 2. At today's prices, it would not be too expensive to have several small SSD for streaming, instead of one or two large ones.

I think the other problems are related to system configuration, as I'm using an i5 laptop, with 6 gigs of RAM, and my only problem is dropouts using VelXF on faster passages. I use MIR Pro24 in VE or VE Pro (both versions now support MIR), and MIRx when I need more voices.

Cubase VST performance is very much dependent on ASIO drivers, but I find that when I host the instruments in VE the VST load remains low, and performance is good until the Windows CPU perfomance meter shows a heavy load. I know the situation is different for Mac users, but the configuration issues tend to be similar e.g. ASIOGuard.