I am preparing a large setlist with Native Instruments orchestral sounds. Since these plugins are memory monsters, I looked at using “shared instruments”. For now, it does not work as smoothly as I would like. Therefore, I tried to use tracks with virtual midi buses instead.
The idea was to instantiate a sound only once as a track and then use a different VM bus per track to control these instruments from different parts of the song:
While this perfectly works for one instrument per part at a time, trying to play two instruments at the same time results in sound mayhem + the CPU maxes out. This is what the layers of the part look like:
Since there are only 2 virtual midi busses, I will probably not use this solution and investigate shared instruments more in-depth and report issues I have with that approach. Nevertheless, I think this bug is worth reporting for other use-cases.
VST live version: 1.1.53.676
Project:
ControlTracksThroughVM.zip (345.5 KB)
It looks quite complicated…
What are you missing?
Create one Layer with a plug you want to share. Fora all new Layers to share the Instrument, select it in the Instrument dropdown/shared list.
If you need it with tracks, go to the Layers view where your Layer to be shared resides, and click the “R” button, it will ask you to create a track. Then you can see how the Track addresses the Layer (and thus, the shared Instrument). You can address this Layer from other tracks as well, and you can create multiple shared Instruments that way.
The virtual MIDI approach is probably maxing out because you create a MIDI loop. VM1 and 2 are not just ports, they are cables. If you send to VM1 in, you can receive on VM1 out. But using shared Instruments should work for you, right?
Thanks for your feedback. I think I might have created a midi loop indeed. In my attempts to find my WoW in VST live and debugging another hardware issue at the same time, I probably created a mess out of it 
Initially, the shared instruments looked like a perfect solution to me. But there are several small things that make it frustrating for me to work with it:
- If an instrument is shared between two songs, I often need to set a different volume depending on the context. So I would like to be able to change the volume per part. This is not possible as far as I can see?
- Currently, my largest setlist contains 30 songs with each up to 10 parts with up to 5 layers. That gives a huge “Shared instruments” list to choose from in a very narrow dropdown.
- The “S” next to the layer name is easily overlooked. When tweaking parts for a song, I often overlook that a layer was shared. Tweaking the layer in one part affects the parts as well.
- If the “Shared instruments” is a Halion Sonic SE, I often lose the settings (eg instruments loaded in the 16 slots) when I restart VST live. But I could not consistently reproduce this yet.
Sure. What is shared is the Instrument, but not the Layer. Usually this is how you use it with multi-timbral Instruments, by addressing the Instrument via MIDI Channel. This is also why a Layer switches to MIDI controls (orange) instead of audio when you assign a shared Instrument to it; the audio controls control the audio channel of the shared Instrument, while MIDI controls only affect the slot of the shared Instrument listening to the Layer’s MIDI Out channel. Understand that the audio channel of the shared Instrument belongs to the Instrument, not to the Layer (that’s not possible).
I don’t quite get this. if you use shared Instruments, you only need one, or a few…?
Note the velocity lo/hi controls get an orange circle. Also as said before, Layer controls swith to MIDI and you should leave it that way, otherwise you cahnge the shared layer and thus all other Layers.
Let us know if you find a pattern to reproduce this, looks ok here.
