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  4. Help: Single Maschine Setup with VEP6 and Cubase 9 on OSX

  • Help: Single Maschine Setup with VEP6 and Cubase 9 on OSX

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    Hi there, I am still struggling to get my new setup properly up and running. I have spent ages searching the web and reading as many posts here on the forum as possible. Unfortunately, I am still kind of lost... Let's start with some specs first: Single PC running macOS 10.11 with Cubase Pro 9 and VEP 6 in parallel. It's an I7-6700K clocked at stock 4GHz with 64GB DDR4 and 5x500 GB SSDs. Except for the OS everything is running the latest software version available. My template is structured as follows: VEP 6 server has multiple instances (See below). Threads are set to 2x each, 30 MIDI out, 8 Audio out. I am only using the VST-8 channel version of Kontakt inside any of the VEP instances. Multiprocessor support in Kontakt is turned off. Buffer setting inside Cubase for VEP instruments in the rack is 2 buffers. Kontakt pre-load buffer is at the lowest setting. Inside the VEP instances I have the following setup: 1) Strings, 13x Kontakt 2) Woodwinds, 13x Kontakt 3) Brass, 25x Kontakt 4) Percussion, 5x Kontakt 5) Keys&Toys, 5x Kontakt My audio interface is a RME Babyface set at buffer 256, 48 khz. AISO guard is on (medium) but turned off for the VEP plugin. For testing purposes I currently have only the VSL plugins and corresponding MIDI and audio setup in Cubase. No reverb EQ or other plugins. My issue is that most of the time now my setup shows excessive system load inside the OSX activity monitor making the system pretty much unusable.... After a fresh reboot when I have loaded up VEP and the server Template and afterwards Cubase as soon as I connect the instances VEP is immediately consuming tremendous CPU close to 600%. In the OSX activity monitor in the summary section the system part (red) is unusually high while the user part (blue) is only at maybe 10-20%. At this point Cubase will consume maybe 100%. When I forcefully close one of the VEP instances (does not matter which) VEP CPU consumption drops to 150% and the system related load is almost gone.... At this point I can reload the kicked instance with a moderate increase in CPU usage and everything is back to normal.!?!?!?!?? Inside the VEP instances CPU is moving around 20-30% if everything is fine and close to 90% after a fresh initial load :/ As soon as I reboot the trouble is back again. What could be causing this strange behavior? I was thinking about the number of threads maybe. Could there be some fight for resources going on in the background? I have tested all sorts of different settings with an empty Cubase project concerning multi-processor settings in the DAW, Kontakt and VEP. They all end up with different CPU consumption patterns... But the considerable decrease in resource consumption after a forced closure of one of the VEP instances is identical across all. How can this be? Any ideas?
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    Update: My resource consumption is jumping all over the place regardless of the chosen settings in either component of the entire software chain... I am about to throw OSX out the window and give Windows 10 a try to see if it helps... But so far I was hoping someone else might have a great last idea. I have also contacted the VSL guys to see what they might come up with. Worst thing is it did not do this before. But I can't identify what might have made it go crazy... Maybe it is related to the last security update I installed... But that's pure speculation right now. Yesterday evening again I had the situation that after turning on everything was fine until I closed Cubase and opened it up again. What used to be a total (Cubase + VEP) CPU consumption of around 230% turned into close to 650%. I then kicked my biggest instances with Berlin Brass+Expansion, ~25 Kontakt instances due to all the different patches per instrument. That dropped total CPU down to something like 200%. From there I reinitialized that particular instance with only minor additional CPU cost. Next thing I will try is to load up my template with only one VEP instance at a time initialized to see if I can track down an offending one... I want to finally make music, not being stuck in the maschine room all the time :/
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    PARTIAL SUCCESS! I have an update... After lots and lots of trial and error I have now found a way to properly initialize my setup again. It is a bit more work but at least it is perfectly running that way. I am no longer able to load my Cubase project AFTER loading the VEP server. I have to launch my Cubase project FIRST so that all VEP plugins are unconnected. Following that I load my VEP server template and manually reconnect the VEP plugins (as rack instruments, now 4 in total after some optimization...) back to the original instances and voila everything runs super smooth from there onwards. Low CPU, no crackles, full setup as previously described ready to go and I can play a tremendous amount of parallel voices in Kontakt. ;) COOL! If I go the other way, my traditional way I was used to, 1) VEP 2) load VEP template 3) load Cubase and 4) load project and wait until all plugins are automatically reconnected: BOOOOOM. NOTHING WORKS. I have opened a ticket with VSL with a detailed report... Let's see what they say...