I am looking to build a slave PC. Are people using Vienna Ensemble Pro, or System link these days? Are they both reliable? What are the pros’ and cons please?
I am building a very large template, and the design of this template will be different, depending on the technology is used.
The more I drill down into the ‘what Vienna Ensemble Pro can and can’t do’s’, the more I begin to realise that Cubase can perform most of its functions on its own often better - by using folders. hiding tracks and folders, disabling tracks, freeze, exporting and importing track archives with routing. This gets complicated of course…
Does anyone use System LInk? If this works well then I can see no need for VePro.
VST system link has worked great for me over the years. To lock You need audio cards with ADAT light pipe though I believe on both computers I had the motu 2408 on both and with ADAT in and out looped it locked the transport in perfect sync with no drift on stop or start.
As noted above my purpose was mainly to run film video on the slave ( therefore I need the locked transport sync) and as a secondary benefit I run my VST brass library on the slave to off load the master PC…however you need audio cards with plenty of I/O. I don’t think system link runs Audio but I could be wrong. It does handle midi.
I moved to motu AVB audio cards and the VST link no longer worked. So I went to midi clock, machine lock which locks with a slight drift. But had to ditch motu midi all together if you see my other thread.
Back to your main purpose, if your audio cards have enough I/0 as mine did, then I would prefer to load the slave with VST and not use Vienna, I tried and found the interface visibilty gets in the way of my productivity, it’s hard to read, small text. And I tend to set up templates with folders and even though track visibilty is broken it still helps ( you have to set up a macro to remove unwanted tracks ) by the project anyhow so I don’t need to fiddle with VST loading. Also I moved away from all VST to more external hardware and real instruments over the last three years which if you know how to play is so much more rewarding.