Please explain to this 5 year old why he needs VSL Ensemble when he's already got a good DAW

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Hi all,

Having started working through Paul Gilreath's textbook on midi orchestration, I want to supplement my existing sample libraries with one really good one, and all signs point to VSL's Special Edition I Plus. Nothing else within my price range has dry, indivdual instruments which sounds as good, and (reportedly) works well with my DAW (Sonar X3), as my Cakewalk forum mates have advised. (Please don't suggest other libraries here,if you don't mind.)

I would love to go with something like Dimension libraries, MIR Pro, Suite Platinumissimo Super Double Plus,etc. but for me, now, that's like buying a 747 before I can balance on a bike.

I need to not only stay within my PC spec and budget -- which can handle the SE 1 Plus library and the two free programs, Vienna Instruments and Ensemble -- but also really must limit the complexity and number of learning curves -- not to mention hours of tutorial videos, help forums, wondering why there's no sound, hey this worked fine yesterday, wtf etc -- because I'm discovering belatedly that orchestration alone is, well, canyon-deep and canyon-wide as it is; it gives me enough to think about for quite a while.

Since I need to streamline, I'd like to know why if at all I should worry with the Ensemble software.

Here's how I typically work: say, I have 16 individual instrument midi tracks, each going to a channel in either a single-library instance of Kontakt, or the occasional Kontakt multi, but ultimately exporting audio to 16 channels in my Sonar console.

From there I can route, mix, automate and master in an environment with which I'm getting increasingly comfortable (it's the first largely solid DAW for me in years; I'd forgotten what hours of uninterrupted work was like). I can organize things into track folders, color-code, create project templates. I have all the fx plugs I could ever need.

So again ... why should I even fire up Ensemble?

Maybe it would help if I better understood where Ensemble fits in the Vienna project "data flow". In my setup, it's midi --> Kontakt instances --> Sonar console. I get that Vienna Instruments is like Kontakt; but there is no NI equivalent (or need for) and Ensemble-like thingie when VST Kontakt instances are used within a DAW.

I could well be missing some important things. Can anyone enlighten?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDj_Van ... uNbgY-4qFK

I'm not the Messiah. I'm not the Messiah!

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I'm hoping jan-civil stops by to share his knowledge and expertise on the VSL subject, lingyai. He's been a user for years an can shed some light for you. His writing is deep and covers a lot of territory.

IMHO the main reason to use VEP5 is to move your instruments off your DAW computer and slave a system for greater power and flexibility.

I needed more RAM and decided a slave computer was the best option - for me. Never been happier as this seemed to have fixed some problems I was having with Live (running out of memeory crashes), gave me greater control over instruments and many more options for flexible routing solutions.

If you plan to do all on one machine, I do not think VEP5 is for you. If you plan a slave system though, it's the only way to go IMHO.

Do yourself a favor and request the demo. I am confident you will truly enjoy working in a new way.

You will need an eLicenser dongle to test the waters, but if you have Cubase or Nexus, or any other the other software that uses eLicenser, then you are covered.

BTW - Kontakt runs well in VEP5. And as flexible and powerful as Kontakt is, VEP5 made it even more so for me.

Happy Musiking!
dsan
My DAW System:
W7, i5, x64, 8Gb Ram, Edirol FA-101

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dsan@mail.com wrote:I'm hoping jan-civil stops by to share his knowledge and expertise on the VSL subject, lingyai. He's been a user for years an can shed some light for you. His writing is deep and covers a lot of territory
his sister, jancivil, might be a better authority :tu:

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You don't "need" VEPro, but it does vastly speed up workflow in certain circumstances, and as has already been highlighted allows you to add additional processing power easily if/when you need it.

I use vepro on the same computer as my DAW, Its very handy because it allows me to load up the libraries I need once, and then not have to continuously load them again, every time I load a new project.

MIR and all the rest of the super features are great to have, but not an absolute necessity - try a demo is the best advice

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Thanks everyone.

It was actually a post of jancivil's (one in which I did not get maimed) which led me to investigate the VSL stuff to begin with.

I won't be getting a second PC, so slaving becomes irrelevant. It is interesting to hear that it's being run on the same machine though.

I guess then that Ensemble is not a VST but rather is a DAW, is that it?

So for me the main question is, if I pull the trigger on the library, then it sounds like Ensemble is something I can leave for later, and that meanwhile, I can concentrate on what Mr Gilreath is teaching, without a massive learning curve, by, within Sonar, using Vienna Instrument (Free) VST instances, the same way I use Kontakt VST instances, for the kind of 16 midi --> [sample players] --> 16 audio outs setup I've described, yes? That's really key for me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDj_Van ... uNbgY-4qFK

I'm not the Messiah. I'm not the Messiah!

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lingyai wrote:I guess then that Ensemble is not a VST but rather is a DAW, is that it?

So for me the main question is, if I pull the trigger on the library, then it sounds like Ensemble is something I can leave for later
VE is not a DAW, but a plugin that can host other plugins. As others have said, you probably don't need it. It can come in handy for the reasons they mentioned, as well as the fact that it can host VST2.4, VST3, and AU plugins in 32-bit or 64-bit format. If your host doesn't support one of those formats, but you have a plugin that only comes in that format, VE can be a bacon-saver. Doesn't sound like you're in that situation at the moment, though.

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el-bo (formerly ebow) wrote:
dsan@mail.com wrote:I'm hoping jan-civil stops by to share his knowledge and expertise on the VSL subject, lingyai. He's been a user for years an can shed some light for you. His writing is deep and covers a lot of territory
his sister, jancivil, might be a better authority :tu:

Ooops :oops: , I once again stand corrected by the knowledgeable el-bo. You have a knack for that senor(ita just in case :hihi:)

My apologies to jancivil for assuming; something I rarely do.

Back on topic - I think the sound libraries are likely your target at this time lingyai, given the way you plan to work and your goal of expanding your arsenal of orchestral sounds.

They are on sale now until the end of May so I would probably go after them first and add VEP5 later.

I believe there is a cut down version of VEP that comes with the libraries....just enough for you to get a taste of the power of VE and hopefully pull the trigger on Pro. ;)

I also suggest creating yourself an account at VSL so you can be ready whenever you decide to pull that trigger :tu:

A little off topic - what did you decide about UVI Orchestral?

Happy Musiking!
dsan
My DAW System:
W7, i5, x64, 8Gb Ram, Edirol FA-101

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VE Pro is not that hard to learn, I don't think.
The difference for me, I have a fairly demanding load most of the time albeit not quite philharmonic scale, is honestly incalculable.
But I'm using more FX by far in all probability than a typical VSL aficianado.

The free Vienna Ensemble 5 is what comes with any library, not 'Pro'. VE non-pro will load any 3rd party FX, but no 3rd party instruments. It used to not load anything third-party except for these AUs which come with the AU development installation.

BTW, it doesn't host VST3. It connects as VST3 if you want it, and here it affords up to 48 MIDI ports. That's 48 x 16 channels if unclear. So compared with every other multitimbral plugin, you could have one instance rather than 48 potentially. That's a huge savings.
Taking plugins out of the DAW host's processes is huge in terms of what one can load before running out of resources. For multicore distribution, you can assign 'per instance', the lingo is 'threads per instance' but it's about cores. So you have something you know is a hog, isolate these things in an instance ['vi frame'] and give that more cores. My FX templates for lead guitar don't use RAM like samples-based instruments do and I have a few things that I'm sticking with 32-bit versions of so I usually have a 32-bit metaframe up with the 64-bit. Nothing to it, this is completely stable.

But even at the beginning when I translated what I was loading in Kontakt as a plugin in Cubase, the project had grown impossible and now I had all of this room to grow.
if I assessed it as 'I'm loading ten times what I was' it wouldn't really cut it. Because on top of that [having plugins not standing in line for priority with the other DAW processes], as a mixer with its automation mapping (not available with non-pro) I have very few mixer channels going on in Cubase. Typical for me is 4 vi frame, "instances". I need to make a few stems from the e.guitar frame (owing to my ways with reverb etc), but for the other three I'm just outputting one stereo out.

It's a multitimbral plugin to the DAW host since it connects as a plugin. Another cute thing is Audio Input where you instantiate that plugin as an FX send and create the approp. input in an instance. Now, that is an external device requiring Realtime export.
But multiple input and output is where you run into overhead. Before the automation mapping, the only parameters were the mixer levels, volume, balance, and send. So I started out with a lot of outputs but grew with the automation; every parameter a plugin exposes to a host is handled in one window. So that's how I mix today, with very little in Cubase, that I do very little with. I still commit to audio and Cubase is an audio workstation on top of being a MIDI station, but I'm giving it a huge break on the mixer load.

If you're NOT as heavy on plugins, it could be overkill. For what it provides the more heavy user, I don't consider it very expensive.
Another factor here is that VSL's engine, Vienna Instruments is a hell of a lot more efficient than most things (BUT, when you get heavy with that there is an efficiency, purge regimen for all your VSL). So, if a high percentage of instruments are going to be VSL, ironically the need for VE Pro can be very different than using a lot of NI, BFD3, Spectrasonics, besides talking about the CPU guzzling FX. But the upshot is, I have a gigantic mix 'template' happening live. I'll commit long envelopes and long reverbs to audio early because that gets to be such a PITA on playback, but the whole thing of 'freezing' is a thing of the past.
Last edited by jancivil on Wed May 06, 2015 12:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

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I used to run it on this machine as a slave. I ended up selling the other machine, I'm using it as 'local host'. The difference for me with that machine is almost negligible.
My projects are pretty much approaching the limits of my machine, though. The original Vienna Ensemble made a difference just as a VSL Instruments host for me in local host. They were about to come out with Pro so I was somewhat used to the workflow when I bought it. The two things start differently: Pro you need to launch first so its 'servers' are available as a plugin to connect to; non-Pro is launched by instantiating the plugin automatically. So, for example Kore 2 or Logic scanning for plugins launches plain VE, and rebuilding Cubase preferences does.

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jancivil wrote:I used to run it on this machine as a slave. I ended up selling the other machine, I'm using it as 'local host'. The difference for me with that machine is almost negligible.
My projects are pretty much approaching the limits of my machine, though.
Very interesting. I hadn't thought about VEP from the performance/efficiency angle. Am eager to test that out, though.

What is your config (machine, DAW)? Have you done concrete measurements of its limits as far as size/complexity of project, using VEP? Real-world cases are worth a thousand benchmarks...

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I'm on Cubase 5.5.3 on a MacPro 4.1 Nehalem, 8-core w. 24GB RAM. Three samples drives, internal.
I haven't used anything else to host plugins since late 2009, I think it was. Except for I do Reaktor Skanner in Cubase, in order to interact with its GUI directly. And Vienna Suite Mastering EQ for the same reason. Concrete measurements, no. The first project I transferred everything to VE Pro was 10, 12? Kontakt instances. a couple of them small multis and this was def. no mixing scenario. And I was fried in Cubase and I was about maxed out in RAM, that's 32-bit. I will have had to do BFD2 in its own project with everything else rendered.
YMMV because Cubase is sluggish on a Mac.

Actually the very point of it is to replace 'server farms' for composers, like the way people used Gigastudio, you'd dedicate a machine to this part of your orchestra and another to the next, and port the audio through Lightpipe back to the sequencer machine. IE: you couldn't so much run Giga and the DAW on one computer, even. So the first principle is to get the plugins out of the DAW process and priorities.

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jancivil wrote:I'm on Cubase 5.5.3 on a MacPro 4.1 Nehalem, 8-core w. 24GB RAM. Three samples drives, internal.
Same here, approximately - 2010 Mac Pro 5.1, 8-core, 16GB. It's starting to poop out, especially if I throw Diva or Diversion in the mix, which is why I'm especially interested in performance. Am probably going to do a DIY upgrade of CPU and memory, since OWC is so expensive ($1700 vs. ~$700 DIY). A 3.33GhZ CPU w/ 32GB ram 1333MhZ should hold me quite a while.

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Thanks jancivil and again everyone else for posting. It seems that Ensemble justifies the time and cash outlay if one is doing much more involved and resource-intensive projects than I plan, so I'll save that bit for a rainy day. Otherwise, between what I hear here and on the Cakewalk forum, it sounds like my 8 core i7 2.3 ghz, 16 GB Win 7 64 machine can cope, and I can use my basic approach. Bloody well hope so, I feel I've been researching this to death. If anyone disagrees, speak soon!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDj_Van ... uNbgY-4qFK

I'm not the Messiah. I'm not the Messiah!

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dsan@mail.com wrote:
A little off topic - what did you decide about UVI Orchestral?
After repeatedly listening to the demos for it and for the VSL Special Editions, it was just no contest. UVI has a lot of stuff which I would not want playing an exposed line. I just knew that as soon I started working with UVI, I'd be daydreaming about VSL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDj_Van ... uNbgY-4qFK

I'm not the Messiah. I'm not the Messiah!

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gnosis123 wrote:
jancivil wrote:I'm on Cubase 5.5.3 on a MacPro 4.1 Nehalem, 8-core w. 24GB RAM. Three samples drives, internal.
Same here, approximately - 2010 Mac Pro 5.1, 8-core, 16GB. It's starting to poop out, especially if I throw Diva or Diversion in the mix, which is why I'm especially interested in performance. Am probably going to do a DIY upgrade of CPU and memory, since OWC is so expensive ($1700 vs. ~$700 DIY). A 3.33GhZ CPU w/ 32GB ram 1333MhZ should hold me quite a while.
I had Apple put in 32GB when I bought it, but this Mobo is 3-channel so - this from consulting one the tech-savvy VSL guys - 24 is actually more useful RAM. That was a huge waste of money at Apple's prices, and then during a move I lost the RAM I had taken out.
I'm running into actually loading 16 gigs pretty often. I'm using 'purge' from Terminal frequently.

I ran into an issue due to particular synths and FX - and automation - but I had forgotten I had relegated only 1 'thread per instance' to that instance, which had evolved from a very lite one to something with a lot going on. I reassigned the cores and the issue was gone.

I think that i7 with VSL SE is going to be ok, more or less, as I said VSL's engine is efficient. One consideration you don't have is Cubase on a Mac, which I had to find a solution to. I didn't expect my performance after spending 9 thousand dollars to suck like it did. VE Pro saved me.

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