Hi all!
I'm new to the forum, so first of all it's great to meet you all, and please don't crucify me for the potentially n00b questions! I'm currently in the process of building a new orchestral template, after having recently decided to move from Logic Pro X (running instruments natively), to a Cubase 11 Pro + VEPro7 setup. I'm currently running a single Mac setup (MP Pro 15-inch 2019 , 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 , 32GB 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM), and also considering adding a slave PC if necessary. With all that in mind, a few questions:
1. For the time being, I'm going for separate MIDI tracks in Cubase for each articulation (rather than keyswitches). Now, within VEP, I'm trying to figure out whether it would be better to have all articulations for a given instrument hosted in one Kontakt-multi on one VEP channel, or alternatively to have one VEP channel for each articulation (each with its own instance of Kontakt). Which of these approaches would make better use of CPU and RAM resources? Intuitively, the first approach (Kontakt Multi) seems more logical, as it would require less VEP ports & channels per instance. However, I came across this video that seems to suggest the opposite. I also tried doing my own mini test for this by loading all articulation patches of Berlin WW Piccolo in both the Kontakt multi approach, and the multi VEP channel approach, and the VEP instance CPU meter was showing that the multi VEP channel approach was using up more CPU on average than the Kontakt multi.
So at the moment I'm leaning towards using the multi-kontakt approach. However, this might limit the possibility of another feature I want to implement in my template (see next question)
2. As I currently have limited processing/RAM resources, I'm going to want to make use of VEP's disable channel function - controlled by MIDI messages from an iPad running Open Stage Control. Something along the lines of this setup. Keeping in mind I'm using a single MIDI track per articulation - as long as I have a separate VEP channel for each articulation, I'll be able to link the disable feature in VEP with the disable feature in cubase, keeping things neat and organised. If I go the other way (Kontakt multi), I wouldn't be able to disable/enable individual articulations, but rather the entire instrument. So I'm basically trying to figure out whether the benefits of the apparent better CPU efficiency of the Kontakt multi approach outweigh the benefits of having the ability to disable each articulation individually.
(Incidentally, whichever approach I end up taking, I'll have all samples purged by default)
3. I read the VEP manual's section on multi threading, but couldn't quite understand what setting would be best for me. Taking into account my specs, and the fact I'm probably going to be running 6 VEP instances (woodwinds, brass, percussion, harps/pianos/choirs, strings, synths), how many threads do you thing I should be setting per instance?
4. VEP lets me run Kontakt as either VST or AU. Is there any difference in terms of performance?
Many thanks in advance for your time and your replies!