Please Welcome Our Brand New Plug-In: Blue Cat's Connector!

[barza]

I don't think that is the issue - the receive Connector reports it is "Not Connected" so there is no audio to stream!

[Blue Cat Audio]

The message can indeed be a bit misleading, but if the sender says it's connected, that's what is happening.

[barza]

The sender also reports it is not connected, despite being set to local host and the same port number as the receiver.

Actually, scratch that - I have got the "send" instance of connector reporting it is connected to the VEPro "receive" instance. But the recive instance still reports it is not connected, and its leds do not show any audio being received.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Ah ok, sorry for the misunderstanding. In this case you may want to try another port number: maybe this port is already in use by another application.

[barza]

Already tried changing port numbers, no change.

[barza]

Here is what I see.....

live.png

VEPro.png

[barza]

And this is with a different port number, and the LED's on the send instance show audio is being sent..

live.png

VEPro.png

[Blue Cat Audio]

So the sender is connected, so that's indeed an issue with VEP not streaming audio thru the receiver. The receiver will actually connect only when the host calls it to process audio or MIDI. There is probably a way to force VEP to call the plug-in even if it is not a virtual instrument (it is declared as an audio generator, but some hosts may not recognize this). Is anyone an expert of VEP here?

[barza]

Okay, I have got audio coming from the receive instance of connector (I sent audio from a different source down the same channel in VE Pro and it seemed to wake the receiver instance up!). But with the buffer set to auto or to its maximum the audio from the send is intermittent - the drop outs windows is ticking up each second.

[barza]

To see if it would help, I have installed the preview BC ASIO driver and set Live to use it. Although this has meant the audio is flowing between Live and VE Pro better the audio is not continuous even if I set buffers and packet size to maximum.

[Blue Cat Audio]

You may want to double check your buffer sizes and read our tips to achieve low latency streaming.

For the ASIO driver, you want to make sure that the buffer size is exactly the same as the master application sending audio to it. Using the driver may indeed help lower the latency compared to using different audio interfaces.

[barza]

If I am understanding it’s usage correctly, the BC ASIO driver acts like an instance of the Connector plug in in the application using it. So, for example, if I set Ableton Live to use the BC ASIO driver, and set the BC ASIO driver to send audio, I would just need an instance of the Connector VST plug in set to receive mode in the ‘receive’ app (in this case VE Pro). And of course both need to be using the same port number and set to local host if on the same PC.

Can I check that is correct, as I am currently finding I cannot connect if I just use the ASIO driver, I have to also load another instance of the VST in send mode in Live. This works better than when I have the ASIO driver for my interface selected, but I don’t think the additional VST instance should be needed.

[barza]

So I have done some more testing this morning and here is what I have found.

Sending audio over the network:
(a) I cannot get audio directly from the BC Asio driver using either Live or Bitwig as the "send" application over the network to an instance of Cubase on another PC. The PCs are connected using gigabit ethernet and both go directly into the same switch.
(b) Using an instance of the BC connector plugin in either Live or Bitwig I can send intermittent audio to Cubase over the network, but I cannot achieve an uninterrupted audio signal even with the buffer setting at maximum. Raising the buffer size from auto to maximum lowers the frequency of the audio dropouts but they still occur every 1-2 seconds, with dropouts being recorded in the plugin, even with buffer at max.

Sending audio to VEPro on the same PC as Bitwig/Live behaves identically to what I have reported above.

I typically have three different VEPro servers feeding into Cubase over the network without issue. I had hoped I could use Connector to send audio from Live and/or Bitwig on a remote PC into VEpro to send on to Cubase. Or alternatively to send directly from Live/Bitwig to Cubase skipping the use of VEPro. Even with no VE Pro servers running I cannot get the direct Live/Bitwig to Cubase link working.

For what its worth, this is basically the same behaviour as I found using the (free) reastream plugin.

[Blue Cat Audio]

If I am understanding it’s usage correctly, the BC ASIO driver acts like an instance of the Connector plug in in the application using it. So, for example, if I set Ableton Live to use the BC ASIO driver, and set the BC ASIO driver to send audio, I would just need an instance of the Connector VST plug in set to receive mode in the ‘receive’ app (in this case VE Pro). And of course both need to be using the same port number and set to local host if on the same PC.

Can I check that is correct, as I am currently finding I cannot connect if I just use the ASIO driver, I have to also load another instance of the VST in send mode in Live. This works better than when I have the ASIO driver for my interface selected, but I don’t think the additional VST instance should be needed.

The ASIO driver is actually a slave driver for the application using it. It requires another app ("master") to send data to this driver (even if empty) for the slave app to be able to do anything.

[Blue Cat Audio]

To achieve optimal performance with a "slaved" app using the ADIO driver, it is recommended to use the same buffer size as in the master app.