Vienna Symphonic Library Forum
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  • when you try and start VEP through MRD do you get the error message pop up saying that the Remote Desktop needs to close and you need to log back in? Interesting to hear that you can mix and match clients/servers. In case you missed it-my setup has been working fine for a long time with VEP6. My MRD settings haven’t changed-it’s just a simple direct LAN connectionusing a direct Ethernet cable between the two computers on a 10.0.0.0 subnet. Getting on to the slave, opening other programs, etc, all works just fine through MRD. Again- I’m surprised and intrigued to hear that it’s working for you because VSL has basically told me that it’s a known issue and they won’t do anything about it. Sorry for any typos-I’m on my phone in the green room at a gig :-/

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    @Another User said:


    In case you missed it-my setup has been working fine for a long time with VEP6. My MRD settings haven’t changed-it’s just a simple direct LAN connectionusing a direct Ethernet cable between the two computers on a 10.0.0.0 subnet. Getting on to the slave, opening other programs, etc, all works just fine through MRD. Again- I’m surprised and intrigued to hear that it’s working for you because VSL has basically told me that it’s a known issue and they won’t do anything about it.

    What you are quoting from VSL I don't know the context to really comment about it, but I  know VePro is using a third party graphics library, a very popular and well established one, but still, in some ways its out of their hands if there is actually some kind of OpenGL problem, but personally I don't find that to be a reasonable explanation, maybe someone made a guess at that being the cause and they don't know what to do, but if VePro is dependent on OpenGL and if that is a problem, then it shouldn't work for me either.  But it does work for me, I haven't really had any kind of problem with it, but I haven't been pushing it to the limit either.  I only setup my older windows box to host a few odd windows plugins that aren't on the mac (Harmor, etc)..and might host some kontakt instruments that don't require a seperate dongle.

    A lot changed in VePro7, including they upgraded that third party library.  Ok.  But again, working ok for me.  So in order to figure out why its not working for you, we would need to pretty much look at every single setting we can think of between OS versions, remote desktop version and settings, etc.  and try to see what might be different.  Could be network settings too.

    I am willing to bet that if you get an OpenGL test app and run it on your windows machine it will not crash MRD.  Could be wrong.  But again, if VePro is using OpenGL...and i'm not sure it would be, its not impacting my setup.

    Another factor is that I have a GPU with metal, on Mojave.  If you're using an older mac with older OSX and no metal GPU, maybe its possible that caxuses things to use OpenGL instead of Metal or something, which might explain why it works for me but not for you. (shrug).  I'm guessing wildly now.


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    Alright, I just got UltraVNC to work on windows with the built in mac VNC viewer to work.  Free.  Not too hard.  Just install the windows UltraVNC server and steart it up.  There are a lot of settings which were easy for me but might not be for you or others, so ask if you have questions or google around.  But it seems to work fine.  Laggy.

    UltraVNC here: https://www.uvnc.com

    To connect from your mac just open safari and use

    @Another User said:

    vnc://servername


  • Regarding OpenGL.  I just ran the following utility over MRD.  Its an OpenGL feature and benchmarking tool that runs the PC through a bunch of OpenGL.  I did this through MRD.  It ran perfectly fine to completion.

    https://gfxbench.com/result.jsp

    I'm doubtful that OpenGL has anything to do with the reported crash problems.  That doesn't mean it isn't possible in some situation that the OpenGL tool isn't testing.  I'd like to know more about the windows, OSX and MRD's versions being used that are having problems.

    As I mentioned above, I installed UltraVNC on my PC and connected from mac's built in VNC viewer that that also worked perfectly fine, though one thing I did not like is that it does not seem to have a way with that setup to change the resolution of the remote desktop.  My remote PC is using a very small monitor with a very small resolution, so this is far less from ideal.  VNC is capable of using virtual desktop resolutions, so I'm now looking into that, and I found out about another free VNC package with support for both mac and windows, called TigerVNC, which might provide that.  When I have settled on the best solution I'll post here.


  • spent a lot of time on this tonight and I'm out of it, so this is what I have for now:

    1. I can run OpenGL test on my MRD session without problems.

    2. UltraVNC (windows) seems to work very well.  Use built in VNC viewer on Mac or any other VNC client such as tigerVNC, JollyVNC or many others.  

    3. TigerVNC (windows) I could not seem to get my mac to connect to it properly when running as server on windows, but looks like the service wasn't starting, so I coudl probably figure it out if I spent more time but I'm out of time.  UltraVNC works very well too, just use that for the server.

    4. TigerVNC client also works pretty well if you want a dedicated client

    5. I was unable to figure out a way to configure the PC to have a larger desktop size.  The VNC client always wants to use whatever the physical desktop size is on the actual PC.  In my case I have a tiny monitor with tiny resolution, so I could not figure out any way to get VNC to scale up to a nice large desktop on my mac that has 4k monitor.  This is basic behavior of MRD, but apparantly VNC on windows requires the desktop to be the same desktop as the actual machine, which is tied directly to the video card and monitor.  For me that's a deal breaker actually, but maybe someone knows a work around.  I don't and no more time to spend on it.

    So bottom line, I think you could use UltraVNC on your pc to get a VNC sessino happening, for free.  I think MRD is a much better solution.  Its not crashing for me.  It would be good to figure out why its crashing for you and not for me, so that maybe you can get to the bottom of it, or more information for VSL.  Nothign else to say, I'm just glad it works for me in MRD because I find VNC to be inferior in every way.  I could live with it if I had to if I could figure out how to enable a larger desktop session from a windows machine.


  • Thank you so much for spending this time. It’s late here and I’m just finishing a gig so I won’t be able to really look at this at the studio until Monday, but I will definitely try these ideas! I did try the demo earlier today of a different (paid) vnc app and it worked fine, so I’m feeling confident now knowing that we can mix and match that I’ll be back up and running soon. Thank you again for your help!

  • Regarding my setup-The master is a 5.1 Mac Pro on high Sierra with just the stock graphics card. The PC is running Windows 10 pro with the latest updates. Graphics is a 1070 and it’s one of those Asus motherboards with the 1066. I’m pretty sure I’m not using metal anywhere- certainly not intentionally. I don’t really know that much about graphics or OpenGL, etc. I don’t use that machine for anything other than as a slave.

  • what version of MRD?

    You aren't using metal.  You will need a Metal capable video card in order to upgrade to Mojave, if you decide to, which by the way I highly reccomend.  When I first got VePro7 I was on Sierra and getting worse performance then VePro6.  It was suggested to me that Mojave and metal would improve things..well I upgraded to Mojave which was one of the best decisions I have made, it improved my macPro 5,1's general benchmark scores by like 15-20% and VePro runs noticeably better then VePro6 in terms of performance on the updated OSX.  part of that may be due to the fact that Mojave requires a Metal video card and takes advantage of that.  I can highly reccomend for your machine that you consider a Metal card such as the RX-580 or closely related.  My mac really gained some performance with that and especially with VePro7.

    Now as to whether that would make any difference to your crash problems, is hard to say.  Quite possibly but not neccessarily.  How's that for an answer.

    Your PC machine is fine.

    There was a verison of MRD a while back that was broken, I can't remember when, but make sure you're running the very latest version of MRD, you're already on the the latest win10.  I'm talking about the MRD client app for OSX.  Make sure its up to date.


  • I'm starting to think that the issue must be the old video card and not using Metal.  What version of the RX-580 do you have?  I have all my other PCI slots full of SSD drives.  Are you abl to access all your other slots with your graphics card in?  I may just upgrade the card.


  • I replaced the stock video card with the RX580.  There is one out there that is specfically reccomended by Apple, SapphirePulse.  Google around for that info, I will try to find it later.  There is an RX590 that has come out since then which may have superceded it, and might be better, not sure.  Some people has also used the RX560 for less money.  My RX580 was about $130 as I recall.

    With my RX580 video card in place, I still have 3 more slots for whatever and I'm using them all for SSD and soundcard.

    I think you said you already upgraded to high Sierra, which included an important firmware update in order to support Metal cards.  For that upgrade, you could not use the RX580 for the firmware update part, because the RX580 does not have boot screen.  What that means is that the screen is blank until its almost fully booted up and then only shows stuff right before seeing your complete desktop.  So prior to High Sierra, you could not perform the firmeware update with this new GPU, you had to keep your old video card installed for that OSX upgrade.  Its not a bad idea to keep your old video card in a box on a shelf for the future just in case.  But apple did improve the Mojave updater, such that it will work with the RX580 and includes yet an additional firmware update...but Mojave actually REQUIRES a metal capable video card such as the RX580. 

    Anyway, the Mojave update should work with the new card in place, in fact Apple requires it.  

    My experience has been that Mojave is faster and that VePro has also been optimized for Metal in some ways, it has been more efficient, I did performance comparisons between VePro6 and VePro7 at some point and found this to be true.

    I do not know whether this will solve your problem with the crashes, but in general I think you will be happy upgrading your video card and upgrading to Mojave honestly.  And maybe that will solve the problem with the crashing.  If not, then we can try to figure out what is different about your system that causes VePro7 to crash under MRD.

    Like I said before, make sure you're using the very latest version of MRD available on your Mac.

    One other thing to point out, when you move to the Metal card, the mac boots up with a totally black screen until the last minute, which be a little disconcerting.  It still can respond to all the key commands for safe mode, restore more, pram reset, smc reset, etc..all that still works.  Apple made sure the Mojave installer would do its firmware update while looking at a black screen, for example.  It all works, but seems like I had to boot twice or something to get the mojave firmware update to work.  you can google around.  Apple is not supporting our macs for catalina forward.  Some people will figure out how to do it anyway though.  But I doubt there will ever be any more firmware updates for the 5,1 MacPro because of that.  So once you update to Mojave, probably you will not bother going past that ever.  Metal is an improvement for sure, I thnk it was worth the price and I plan to use my 5,1 for at least 3 more years.


  • I have discovered the issue.  It is MIR.  I First tried with a 2018 Macbook Pro via Microsoft RDC.  Same crashes, etc.  I then used an external GPU running a Pro Vega 64.  Same crash.  I noticed "hmm....the crash always seems to happen when the red Mir logo thing pops up.  
     
    I uninstalled Mir.  Now the program works even on my old system with Microsoft RDC.  
     
    I checked for updates on Mir and it looks like I was up to date.  
     
    Dewdman42, do you have MIR installed?

  • That’s very interesting. I don’t have mir installed on my slave pc. I will try later to move the license and get it there but I think you may be on to something. As an alternative you can try using the vst version of mir inside vepro rather then the built in version. Worth a try anyway.

  • Any chance you got to test this with MIR installed?


  • haven't had a chance yet sorry.