Vienna Ensemble Pro!
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 12:25 pm
For those of us doing orchestral music with potentially large templates set up they typically span at least one computer besides our DAW machine, Vienna Ensemble Pro is a Godsend!!
In a nutshell, the software hosts virtual instruments in VST, AU (Mac) and RTAS formats. That's pretty basic stuff, the beauty of it is that it sends and receives MIDI and audio over the composer's local Ethernet network!! There is no need for sound cards and the protocol is fast enough to stream literally dozens of audio channels from one computer to the other with incredibly low latency!!
Basically "audio hardware" now consists of a couple of Ethernet cables, a router or switch, a couple of computers and one sound card on the DAW machine and that's it! It will also run on the same computer as one's main DAW and stream audio back in and move MIDI as well, just like it does on an external computer. This allows one to bypass the limitations of a 32 bit DAW, for instance.
It comes in 32 and 64 bit flavors. I'm running 32 bit on my DAW and 64 bit on my Windows slaves and VEPro doesn't care, it automatically handles all of that "under the hood" stuff.
If a composer has a very large template set up, she can "preserve" the slave instances of VEPro such that it won't re-load the exact same samples into memory when the composer switches projects on their DAW machine. This saves a lot of time because large orchestral templates can take several minutes to load depending on the size of the template!!
The reality is that now we can fully conceptualize a computer as nothing more than a very powerful sample player and using VEP we can have it seamlessly integrate into a session as if it were on the desktop of the main DAW! All of this happens with a relatively shallow learning curve, it's cross platform and as neutral as it can be on it's end. Every DAW has it's quirks and some need a bit more work on the front end to get things up and running, but over all it's not as painful as it seems like it has the potential to be. They did a great job designing this!!
I can't say enough good things about this software. Not only does it save money and space on sound cards and cabling, it has the potential to save a ton of time, and when working on large scale orchestra projects with large amounts of samples (not to mention stiff deadlines!) every second counts!
I've barely scratched the surface of it at this point, needless to say incorporating things like LASS into it, but it can run Kontakt, Play and Vienna instruments all at the same time in the same interface! Any VI like Omnisphere can also run inside of it. Now it has the ability to sync to clock from the master so running libraries like Damage that have tempo sync'd loops works as expected. It has the ability to do surround sound panning in it's mixer and they have developed a virtual space software package called MIR that can be upgraded to run inside which opens a ton of possibilities when mixing and might be great for virtual orchestra. I haven't upgraded or dug into that quite yet.
The only slight downside is that it uses the Steingberg eLicenser (formerly Syncrosoft) dongle for copy protection. You get 3 licenses with it and need one dongle per computer licensed. A small price to pay, IMO, for such power and freedom. If there weren't people out there who try to steal intellectual property such as this, there would be no need for these dongles, but that's another discussion!
Woo Hoo!!
http://www.viennaensemblepro.com/
Mazz
In a nutshell, the software hosts virtual instruments in VST, AU (Mac) and RTAS formats. That's pretty basic stuff, the beauty of it is that it sends and receives MIDI and audio over the composer's local Ethernet network!! There is no need for sound cards and the protocol is fast enough to stream literally dozens of audio channels from one computer to the other with incredibly low latency!!
Basically "audio hardware" now consists of a couple of Ethernet cables, a router or switch, a couple of computers and one sound card on the DAW machine and that's it! It will also run on the same computer as one's main DAW and stream audio back in and move MIDI as well, just like it does on an external computer. This allows one to bypass the limitations of a 32 bit DAW, for instance.
It comes in 32 and 64 bit flavors. I'm running 32 bit on my DAW and 64 bit on my Windows slaves and VEPro doesn't care, it automatically handles all of that "under the hood" stuff.
If a composer has a very large template set up, she can "preserve" the slave instances of VEPro such that it won't re-load the exact same samples into memory when the composer switches projects on their DAW machine. This saves a lot of time because large orchestral templates can take several minutes to load depending on the size of the template!!
The reality is that now we can fully conceptualize a computer as nothing more than a very powerful sample player and using VEP we can have it seamlessly integrate into a session as if it were on the desktop of the main DAW! All of this happens with a relatively shallow learning curve, it's cross platform and as neutral as it can be on it's end. Every DAW has it's quirks and some need a bit more work on the front end to get things up and running, but over all it's not as painful as it seems like it has the potential to be. They did a great job designing this!!
I can't say enough good things about this software. Not only does it save money and space on sound cards and cabling, it has the potential to save a ton of time, and when working on large scale orchestra projects with large amounts of samples (not to mention stiff deadlines!) every second counts!
I've barely scratched the surface of it at this point, needless to say incorporating things like LASS into it, but it can run Kontakt, Play and Vienna instruments all at the same time in the same interface! Any VI like Omnisphere can also run inside of it. Now it has the ability to sync to clock from the master so running libraries like Damage that have tempo sync'd loops works as expected. It has the ability to do surround sound panning in it's mixer and they have developed a virtual space software package called MIR that can be upgraded to run inside which opens a ton of possibilities when mixing and might be great for virtual orchestra. I haven't upgraded or dug into that quite yet.
The only slight downside is that it uses the Steingberg eLicenser (formerly Syncrosoft) dongle for copy protection. You get 3 licenses with it and need one dongle per computer licensed. A small price to pay, IMO, for such power and freedom. If there weren't people out there who try to steal intellectual property such as this, there would be no need for these dongles, but that's another discussion!
Woo Hoo!!
http://www.viennaensemblepro.com/
Mazz
