Anyone running VE Pro on Mac with Cubase 6?

Hello,

I’m curious if this is limited to just myself or if others experience it as well:

When I load my project template, which consists of four VE Pros, it seems to take about 5 to 10 minutes to load it. Cubase just sits at the “Loading Mixer” page. Obviously, VE Pro is loading all the instruments and samples. I keep Cubase decoupled from VE Pro all the time and load my VE Pro metaframes independently of Cubase. I have 20GBs of samples that load quicker than Cubase.

Thanks for the help.

What it really sounds like is simply the load time for your Ve Pro instances. You say you have them de-cpoupled-but I assume you’re still loading them at the same time you load your initial sequence.


Try this…after loading,leave VE Pro open, quit the Cubase project and open a new project based on your template. It should be virtually instantaneous, or at the least much faster than the initial load depending on what effects or instruments you have in your template that are not part of VE Pro.

I’ve seen this same behavior on Win7 as well. VE Pro isn’t loading the instances anymore, but the output channel assignments are slow to open in Cubase’s mixer. It seems to be slowed down even more if you try to open the session while VE Pro is still loading (only considering the time after VE Pro finishes of course, otherwise that’s pretty obvious!). It seems maybe Cubase timeouts if the VST instruments seem stuck, so then it takes even longer than usual.

Vienna could improve VE Pro by having the mixer load first and then just loading the plugins in the background, sort of like Kontakt loads samples these days. But of course this is the wrong forum for that. I don’t think Cubase does anything incorrect in this, although maybe the timeout is a bit excessive if that’s what it is (and not e.g. a VE Pro bug that’s just triggered by Cubase requesting the plugin init at the “wrong time”).

NYC Composer - Actually, what you described I do on a daily basis. My VE Pro is a set template, so I usually switch between Cubase projects all the time leaving VE Pro open and loaded (which is why I work with it decoupled). Yet Cubase still takes a long time to load. Even if I don’t have VE Pro open, Cubase will take the same amount of time to load using the same template.

Panu - This is Jimmy by the way, I’m guessing this has something to do with Cubase and not so much to do with VE Pro because when I load the same exact template with Logic, Logic loads up super fast. Also, I just setup another composer’s studio with VE Pro, which he’s running DP, and it too loads super quick. Maybe it’s a VST thing? Though, since I don’t run Windows, I’m not sure if the same occurs in Windows using Cubase and VE Pro. Anyway, that’s why I’m posting here and not on the Vienna forum. I’m thinking it is a Cubase issue.

Huh. I don’t tend to do the de-coupled thing, as the vast bulk of my work is not film…however, I’m going to check it out. It really sounds to me as if your template is making VE Pro re-load everything-but I assume you don’t see that happening? Do you have a bunch of other stuff outside of VE Pro that also gets loaded in your template?

I don’t have anything besides VE Pro outside of Cubase loading. I have two Omnispheres and two Stylus inside Cubase to load, but even with alternative templates without Omnisphere/Stylus it takes a long time to load.

I have upwards of 400 MIDI tracks, so I’m wondering if that could contribute to this deal. Unfortunately, I’m in the middle of a project so I’ll need to wait until finished to actually mess around with Cubase to see what is causing what.

Thanks for the help!

Btw, decoupled or coupled, Cubase still takes the same amount of time to load for me. :cry:

Another thing, I don’t have many audio inputs per VE Pro either. I’m only using no more than four inputs per VE Pro, though I don’t know if this matters.

Oh, hey Jimmy! I actually kind of guessed this was you before. Posting about VE Pro combined with that nick & picture, gave it away!

Anyway that’s good to know that it doesn’t happen with Logic. I guess an effective way to see whether it’s Cubase-related or not would be to test the VST version somewhere else, like Reaper. But in any case this same thing seems to happen on Windows as well, so it’s just the way it is at the moment.

I’ve simply started using a single session for every project, did two features so far with this method and no issues (knocking on wood)… It’s a bit of a hassle shuffling things with Process Bars and Time Warp, but it still seems like less trouble than loading different sessions and matching tracks, routings etc. across them. Plus you get a nice full tempo map to import to Pro Tools for the scoring mixer, nice to have the grid line up still in the mix phase as well.

Have to be very careful though to back everything up as often as possible, keeping all the past versions, both in the Cubase Project and XML format. Session corruption with the single session solution and no past versions would be a pretty sure way to induce a drinking problem!

I’ve been frustrated by the slow load times as well. I use a couple dozen VE Pro inserts with a 1200+ MIDI track template connecting to VE Pro servers that run persistent on 6 computers. It always takes about 3 minutes to load a Cubase session even though everything is decoupled. Essentially all it’s doing is connecting to an already-loaded template, just making audio and MIDI connections. But it still takes a long time.

I did notice that the more audio and MIDI connections you dimension your VE Pro servers to, the longer it takes. For instance, VE Pro defaults to 8 MIDI ports per VE Pro plugin. I increased this to 16, and it increased the load time for the project quite a bit.

I’ve had a suspicion for a long time that the internal methods Cubase uses to set up audio and MIDI ports/channels in memory is rather inefficient. Especially since people report Logic and DP can load faster. But also remember Cubase utilizes VST3 which means that each VE Pro plugin loaded will instantiate 8 MIDI ports (or 16 in my case, as above). In Logic or DP with the AudioUnit spec, they can only instantiate maximum 1 MIDI port. So, added to my theory above that the more MIDI ports loaded, the longer it takes - that might help explain why it seems to load faster in Logic or DP.

It’s the same on PC really. What I found out is:
when you reduce the MIDI ports to 4 it loads very fast. Increasing the number of ports
seems to exponentially increase the loading time of Cubase.

I’m really considering using the VST2 plugin and putting each plugin in its own VE Pro instance…

Hey Stephan - weren’t we just talking about Mac Minis with Fred? :wink:

So what you’re saying is, in theory:

  1. 16 VE Pro plugins, with 4 MIDI ports each (64 ports total) would take less time to load than:
  2. 8 VE Pro plugins, with 8 MIDI ports each (64 ports total), which would take less time to load than:
  3. 4 VE Pro plugins, with 16 MIDI ports each (64 ports total), which would take less time to load than:
  4. 2 VE Pro plugins, with 32 MIDI ports each (64 ports total)

Number of ports being equal, I’m curious to know if that’s true.

Actually I just found an interesting tidbit of information.

One of the support people at VSL made this remark on their forums:

“Actually, there is a slowness in initializing the VE Pro VST3 plugin the more MIDI ports it has. This is due to a workaround required to properly support MIDI CC messages, resulting in a rather large amount of dummy automatable plugin parameters, which Cubase seems to need some time for to setup in the project. It’s advised to set the MIDI ports setting to just the amount you need and not more for that reason.”

Yes, that was me :slight_smile:
I got the same answer from Karel some time ago. I started a similar thread on VSL.com.
But anyway, VE Pro 5 fixes all these shortcomings, since you don’t need to create MIDI devices anymore.
It’s done within VE Pro :slight_smile:

What do you mean? My sessions take the same time to load with VE Pro 5 as they did with version 4.