Hey Tim,

To answer your second question about the iLok transition VSL are making. Yes they are moving away from Steinbergs eLicenser (aka Vienna Key). These keys will still continue to function so long as Steinberg keep up their servers, and after that point they should continue to work so long as you can continue to run the eLicenser manager (or at least that is my understanding). The Vienna Key is actually just a rebranded eLicenser from Steinberg and with their transition to a new online licensing system and the deprecation of the eLicenser system VSL needed to make a choice about how to protect their IP and they decided to switch to iLok about a year ago now (at least that is when the public announcement came). Of course with PACE hard at work rewriting (from the ground up I imagine) their iLok system and ensuring it is secure it has taken them quite some time to do that. PACE recently told the folks over at ProTools Experts that they finally have a version for developers to start working with but it isn‘t quite ready yet and so we are still waiting (as are quite a few other vendors AVID comes to mind) for PACE to officially release their Apple Silicone native application so they can start their final re-write of their code that relies on PACE. 

This thread was started 15 months ago. Is there any estimate yet on when VI / VE Pro will be able to run natively on Apple Silicon?

Native Instruments and others have already made the transition, so right now VSL is the only thing in my setup that's still Intel-only. 

+1.  Really hope we getting closer to this as it is so crucial to my and many others' workflows.

I know ilok is the thing that's been holding everyone up to an extent....

Though, I'm seeing some chatter that ilok FINALLY has this stuff together and a bunch of ilok dependant developers now finally have public beta builds which I'm HOPING means VSL is nearing their big ilok switch.

Continuing to keep my fingers crossed.

Evan

Time to switch back to using Plogue Bidule? 

+1. I am waiting for this to transition to M1, especially urgent because my DAW is DP11 and there is a MIDI timing bug with DP11 on older Intel machines, so until I switch I'm using annoying workarounds :(

Working under Rosetta 2 sounds too dicey, though if any of you have had good experiences, please post.

No ETA yet??

@evang42 said:

I also use DP11 and am a beta tester and can report issues directly to the MOTU devs. What are the steps/circumstances that cause the midi timing bug w DP11/VEP you’ve found on intel???? This needs to be fixed asap regardless of AS transition.

With higher buffer settings (e.g. 1048), if you are routing a MIDI track to a VI (any VI, even a MoTU VI), MIDI records about 60 ms late. Also "Fine-tune Audio I/O Timing" does not work on these machines. The only workaround is nudging MIDI back into place after recording. I've been working extensively with Matt Batson in tech support, and the engineering team has been made aware of the bug. They have reproduced it on 2 different Intel machines, and confirmed that it does not happen on their AMD PC or their M1 Mac Mini. I don't know that it is a priority for them though.

There is an extensive thread about this on MoTUNation, "MIDI recording late", where I document what's going on in detail (though you may have to wade through some off-topic or uninformed posts to see it). If you have access to the engineering team and can help nudge them toward supporting the older Intel machines, that would be great!

@dmansfield said:

+1. I am waiting for this to transition to M1, especially urgent because my DAW is DP11 and there is a MIDI timing bug with DP11 on older Intel machines, so until I switch I'm using annoying workarounds 😞

Working under Rosetta 2 sounds too dicey, though if any of you have had good experiences, please post.

No ETA yet??

WOW.  mind absolutely BLOWN.  Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention.  This has long plagued me too!!  But I had no idea until 20mins ago that this was an actual bug effecting only DP users.  I incorrectly thought this was just the very nature of latency and buffer settings etc and all DAWs experienced this.  Just confirmed with Logic and Cubase using friends that those DAWs will compensate for higher buffers when live recording MIDI.  DP needs to fix this RIGHT AWAY.  I'm going to ping the hell out of this to the dev team.  Thanks again for bringing to my attention!

@evang42 said:

WOW.  mind absolutely BLOWN.  Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention.  This has long plagued me too!!  But I had no idea until 20mins ago that this was an actual bug effecting only DP users.  I incorrectly thought this was just the very nature of latency and buffer settings etc and all DAWs experienced this.  Just confirmed with Logic and Cubase using friends that those DAWs will compensate for higher buffers when live recording MIDI.  DP needs to fix this RIGHT AWAY.  I'm going to ping the hell out of this to the dev team.  Thanks again for bringing to my attention!

@evang42 said:

WOW.  mind absolutely BLOWN.  Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention.  This has long plagued me too!!  But I had no idea until 20mins ago that this was an actual bug effecting only DP users.  I incorrectly thought this was just the very nature of latency and buffer settings etc and all DAWs experienced this.  Just confirmed with Logic and Cubase using friends that those DAWs will compensate for higher buffers when live recording MIDI.  DP needs to fix this RIGHT AWAY.  I'm going to ping the hell out of this to the dev team.  Thanks again for bringing to my attention!

No no, theres a very clear distinction that needs to be made here.  I'm not saying other daws found a way to eliminate the buffer latency of - the interval between the time a key/pad is pressed to the time you hear the sound - that would basically be impossible.  What Im saying is other DAWs have a way to place the actual MIDI notes that you play in real time down in the midi track at the EXACT time you physically touch the keyboard, regardless of buffer.  Pretend your speakers are muted for a sec, this whole thing has nothing to do with actual sound.  Set up a metronome on your iphone or something.  Now, If you record arm a track in Logic or Cubase, play a midi passage to the click at a buffer of 64, the resulting recorded midi will be in time to the same extent that if you then change your buffer to 2048, record arm the track and play to the same click.  That is currently NOT the case w DP.  DP's buffer settings are having a negative delay/impact on where the actual midi notes get put while recording and it gets worse the higher the buffer goes.

Got it. What you describe is what I always assumed. Yeah, I guess other DAWs would need to have implemented time-travel to eliminate live buffer latency!  

So higher buffers causing "negative-delay" in DP is the operative here. That is new info for me. By keeping my buffers at 512 I guess I've never noticed the discrepancy - mainly, probably because I'm not much of a player. At 512 that negative-lag is the least of my problems.  

But is this a VEP issue, evang42? Or do all VI exhibit this in DP? 

This problem exists in DP with any VI. For example, we tested it with a basic MoTU VI, in the actual sequence on the host computer (no VEPro, Bidule, etc.), and it is still a problem. Take the VI out, and record into a MIDI track that's not connected to anything, and MIDI is recorded correctly, regardless of buffer setting. By the way, I can set Pro Tools up with the same parameters and it does not exhibit this problem. All modern DAWs compute where to record the MIDI note regardless of buffer size, latency, etc..

Finally, this problem does not exist with AMD PCs or M1 Macs. You can record MIDI with a VI and a 1048 buffer on a M1 MacBook Pro and the MIDI notes will be recorded exactly as you played them. Matt Batson and I did a lot of testing on this, and the engineers confirmed it.

@dmansfield said:

This problem exists in DP with any VI. For example, we tested it with a basic MoTU VI, in the actual sequence on the host computer (no VEPro, Bidule, etc.), and it is still a problem. Take the VI out, and record into a MIDI track that's not connected to anything, and MIDI is recorded correctly, regardless of buffer setting. By the way, I can set Pro Tools up with the same parameters and it does not exhibit this problem. All modern DAWs compute where to record the MIDI note regardless of buffer size, latency, etc..

Finally, this problem does not exist with AMD PCs or M1 Macs. You can record MIDI with a VI and a 1048 buffer on a M1 MacBook Pro and the MIDI notes will be recorded exactly as you played them. Matt Batson and I did a lot of testing on this, and the engineers confirmed it.

...and now iLok is done... hopefully beside debugging it (just last little inconsistencies, the overall job was quite brilliant, well done VSL) a VEP7 universal macOS will be released... 

From your mouth to God's ear 😉

@fatis12_24918 said:

...and now iLok is done... hopefully beside debugging it (just last little inconsistencies, the overall job was quite brilliant, well done VSL) a VEP7 universal macOS will be released...

I'm assuming VEP7 would stay on Rosetta and VEP8 would be the software to make native. Seems like a heck of a lot of work to have to do it fro VEP7 when VEP8 is probably on the horizon. It would also be a little nudge to encourage an upgrade :-)

@santamorphic said:

I'm assuming VEP7 would stay on Rosetta and VEP8 would be the software to make native. Seems like a heck of a lot of work to have to do it fro VEP7 when VEP8 is probably on the horizon. It would also be a little nudge to encourage an upgrade :-)

...along these lines, I'm reading that MacOS 12.3 seems to have fixed a lot of plugins that weren't working in Monterey. I'm holding back updating for a couple of reasons, but I'm curious if, by some miracle, the update makes the MAS plugin usable on M1 Macs.