Page 2 of 2

Re: Vienna Ensemble Pro

Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2019 2:43 am
by [jur]
ShelLuser is right, your probably misunderstanding something Nonchai.

Re: Vienna Ensemble Pro

Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2019 2:45 am
by [jur]
Or maybe it's us (after reading Machinesworking answer)?

[edit] Or is External Instrument the answer here?

Re: Vienna Ensemble Pro

Posted: Wed Dec 11, 2019 10:51 pm
by nonchai
Firstly [shelluser] why on earth would I post a dishonest comment?
Secondly someone else wrote " I think he's referring to virtual MIDI ports, not physical ones. "
Yes thats correct. Cubase and Logic allow a single multitimbral type client plugin like VEP to send MIDI to more than 16 instrument channels by means of these virtual ports.

but regardless of any temptation of mine to respond to your hint at an accusation of dishonesty I will explain more - since you clearly don't understand what is being discussed here.
Do you own VEP or actually understand anything about how one operates it?.

< if you could only use one MIDI port you'd never be able to use multiple devices.
I also suspect that you meant to say channels >

NO. I meant what I wrote. See here is the thing Vienna Ensemble Pro is used to host very large collections of instruments in plugin instances - which present themselves as instrument channels. Because of the current limit in many plugins to 16 channels it means that typically a SINGLE VEP instance ( one can actually have more than one VEP "instance" operating on the same VEP server app. But I'll just stick with a scenario of where there is just one big instance being present in VEP.

This instance - in order to host and present more than 16 instruments - each accessible via MIDI - will use more than one MIDI port - EACH with 16 MIDI Channels. So for example MIDI port 1 might have 16 channels of string instruments, port 2 16 channels of winds, port 3 brass x 16 and so on.
All of this gets controlled from a SINGLE instance of the VEP client plugin inside the DAW.

Now it IS possible to run several instances of the VEP client plugin inside a DAW. And in this situation each VEP client plugin instance connects to a SEPERATE VEP "instance" on the VEP server app. This is in fact one possible solution to the 16 MIDI channel and 1 port limit.

So each VEP client plugin would only allow MIDI to be sent to port 1 and each VEP instance on the server would just use MIDI port 1 for each collection of instruments. But the trouble is - as the Vienna Ensemble Support engineers themselves will often point out - running more than one VEP "instance" on the server - and more than one CLIENT VEP plugin in a DAW presents much more load on the computers AND the network - for reasons that can't be gone into here.

So the preferred solution recommended by Vienna themselves is to run ALL the instruments in 1 single instance PER SERVER COMPUTER. And in this scenario - given that huge numbers of instruments are being hosted - this needs MIDI control via MANY. MIDI ports. For example my current setup - when using Cubase - has a single VEP instance on the server. which uses 8 MIDI ports. Giving a maximum instrument count - all accessed via a single VEP client plugin - of 8 x 16 = 128 total instruments.

This maybe confusing - but given this thread is specifically directed at Ableton users who actually own, use VEP - they will understand what I'm talking about.

VEP is used when one typically has enormous track counts of orchestral type sample library instruments and is usually operated in conjunction with huge DAW templates. The pros often have templates with over a 1000 plain MIDI tracks. With the majority of virtual instruments and sample libraries stored on one or more VEP server machine.

Re: Vienna Ensemble Pro

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2020 4:40 pm
by daxxus
nonchai - I also posted a thread about Ableton Live and VEP as over the holiday break I built a Slave computer for my large Orchestral Libraries (like Spitfire Audio's products) - viewtopic.php?f=1&t=237329

Have you figured out a way to use Live with VEP's multiple MIDI port, MIDI Channel thing? Or are you also seeing that we may be stuck for now with Port 1 Channel 1-16 and that's it (per VEP server instance).

I saw you were actually asking the same questions I just recently did.