I'm not completely new to VSL. About 10 years ago a friend of mine had a small recording studio where he had VSL sounds in GigaStudio and Cubase as the sequencer. GigaStudio and Cubase seemed somewhat glitchy to me then (I believe he had 2 machines: Cubase on the master and Gigastudio on the slave). After a couple years he had to fold up shop, unfortunately.
Fast forward a bit and I'm now in a position to put together a modest home studio and am just trying to understand how all the pieces fit together. I'm a visual person and would love to see a diagram of this, but alas, I've searched the forums and haven't yet seen such a thing.
I know the following 4 software products are available (not to mention the actual sound libraries):
- Vienna Instruments PRO - sample player
- Vienna Suite PRO - audio processing
- Vienna Ensemble PRO - MIDI and audio hosting
- Vienna MIR PRO - mixing and reverberation engine
I've read all the descriptions of each of these but I'm trying to wrap my brain around how they fit together. I've considered getting Cubase (I really liked it despite some glitchiness as mentioned above). According to the descriptions I assume the Vienna products all work with Cubase, but would I even need it? Could it be done without it? How do they all tie in together (with or without Cubase)? I imagine Instruments PRO being set up as an instrument within Cubase for the playback of the MIDI and the Suite PRO as a plugin within Cubase for audio processing, but not sure if that's right. And anyway, wouldn't the Ensemble PRO perform the same function as Cubase? If so, why use both, or could you even use both together? Then, what about the MIR PRO?
I'm just trying to make sense of it all.
Thanks for any feedback.