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  4. VM1 and VE Pro 7 - unstable and buggy

  • VM1 and VE Pro 7 - unstable and buggy

    J
    J

    Yesterday, after watching a couple of videos on YT I took the plunge and paid $29 for the "VM1 helper" app to enable the VM1 iPad app to talk to my PC and communicate with VE PRo 7.  

    Specs: Latest VEPro 7 available, iOS 12.4 on the iPad Air, Win 7 x64 with 24Gb RAM on the PC (i7 @ 3Ghz)

    Have to say the app looks great but it's operation is buggy and unstable and doesn't seem to have progressed from the screencasts on YT back in the summer (where it crashed all the time for the presenter too!)

    I get "Server not found" multiple times, normally after trying to do something simple like add a channel in VM1 or in VE Pro 7. It's so flaky it's almost unusable. BTW, I have had TouchOSC (and it's PC 'helper' app) working flawlessly for the past three years, it never crashes. 

    I've enabled the debugging in the app so hopefully it's sending lots of helpful data to the devs at Montreal Labs. VM Helper normally just stops responding, so I have to force quit and restart it. Multiple things can cause this from switching screens in VM1 to adding a plugin inside VEPro 7 which then doesn't sync with VM1. The non-sync is normally the clue that VM Helper has died yet again. Sometimes refreshing the VM1 app brings it back but 9/10 times it needs a force quit/restart of VM Helper. 

    I have an old but very stable system. I wanted to use VM1 to mainly be able to enable and disable Instances on the fly as I worked but apart from it failing to recognise the servers or VM Helper crashing there's a huge problem. It just doesn't sync with the instance status properly at startup. i.e. 

    I have a server project with three instances all disabled. I save the server project and close VE Pro 7. I start VE Pro 7, I then start VM1. 9/10 times VM1 can't find a Server so I have to force quit the VM Helper that started up at boot and restart it. Then with luck, VM1 finds my PC but the server instances all show on VM1 as "live" whereas in VE Pro 7 they are all showing correctly as disabled. This then negates the advantage and purpose of the app in controlling the status of multiple behind-the-scenes instances remotely!

    By the time I've opened VE Pro 7 to see where we're really at I may as well just enable the Instance from there. 

    Hardly anyone is mentioning the VM1 app here (or on VI Control) so I guess there's not a lot of take up. Perhaps it's different in the Mac world but on PC it's incredibly flaky. The idea of stacking/auditioning is great and I'd love for it to be stable enough to do this reliably each time but that's just not happening. 

    J
  • M
    M

    Hi Jaybee,

    Thanks very much for the feedback. Sorry to hear about your frustrations, however we have actually made some major improvements in stability recently and we'd like to investigate your specific issues a bit further.  We'll have our dev team reach out to you directly in hopes of clearing up the connection issues.  You are right, we have concentrated on Mac dev quite a bit but now that we are cross-platform we can assure that our PC users are also getting the attention they deserve! Our dev team will be in touch ASAP.

    Best regards,

    Montreal Music Labs Support Team
  • J
    J

    Thanks, I'll look forward to that.

    I've only had VM1 a couple of days but I can see some patterns of repeatable behaviour. I've enabled logging from the app.

    I'm in the UK and a hobbyist (VIs are not my day job) so email response may not be instantaneous!

    Best, 

     

    J
  • M
    M
    last edited
    last edited

    VM1 version 2 now available on Mac and iOS !

    This is a major update that adds many new features and greatly improves stability overall.

    More info here:
    https://www.montrealmusiclabs.com/vm1

    VM1 can be useful for VEPro Users in many ways, including:

    - An Overview of all VE Pro 7 servers, instances, channels on the network (multiple machines, etc)

    - Quick access to view, re-order and instantiate plugins and VI's - Staying in one environment, avoid using screen sharing/KVM

    - Customizing and organizing all VEPro instances for quick access to any part of a large template

    - A new custom 'Stack' mode. allowing you to layer sounds & textures w ease. Mute & Reassign MIDI channels, enable/disable, etc

    - Instantly making changes to channel fader value, panning and IO routing

    - Managing DSP resources across the VEPro network