(This might end up as a long post, you can read my single request at the bottom).
I’ve been using Cubase for 30+ years and also used it on stage until the launch of MaxForLive which made it possible for me to develop a set of custom plugins that made up the most flexible and most solid setup for my performances. The only drawback of this system is that the preparation phase of a new set is very time consuming. Now I’m working on a project which requires much less freedom and interactivity, so I’m not forced to use Ableton Live (which I hated from the bottom of my heart since the day I had to install it). I thought of giving VST Live a try.
I’ve read many topics here, so I know I’m not the only one who feels like a beta-tester of an app which is in a very early stage of its evolution. The missing features don’t hurt that much (although many of them would be really important), but the unpredictibility of the existing ones really do. Just a few examples:
The main part parameters (Trigger point/Duration) change their values randomly (sometimes even when I work on a different song). Sometimes they revert to their original values (also randomly) after reopening the project, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes changing the view (such as opening/closing another song) helps, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I can fix the incorrect Trigger point values by navigating the playback cursor to the correct position and clicking on the trigger point button on the right side of the part, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes entering the correct duration value fixes the erroneous trigger point values for all successive parts, sometimes it doesn’t, in some cases the correct value can’t be entered at all.
Entries on the lyrics page randomly change their position
Lyrics events (which I use for displaying cueing messages) get highlighted at the wrong time (not when they reach the playback cursor).
The audio randomly gets muted for a short time (200-500 ms) at the beginning of the part (both when looping and when triggering new parts). Sometimes it works fine within the same session, but other times it gets stuck in this state and the project must be reopened. This is definitely not an audio driver/buffering issue. I have both Cubase and Wavelab on the same machine and they both work fine.
… and the list could go on…
This is a mission critical app that’s supposed to be rock solid on stage and I have some serious doubts from what I’ve seen so far.
I’m asking you to share your experiences on how reliably this thing behaves on stage.
NOTE: In order to reduce the risk of failure, I made the project as lightweight as possible: I’m only playing back audio files (30>) and lyrics for cueing messages (no plugins, no instruments, no DMX, no layers etc.) and the only realtime input the project gets are the MIDI messages that trigger the song parts. I’m on windows (for historical reasons) and no, I’ve never had any glitches on stage.
I haven’t witnessed any of the things you describe on Mac (VST Live 3). Audio randomly muting seems like a dealbreaker if you’re on stage. I use it live and I have similarly light projects (fewer than 10 audio tracks, only a maximizer on the master, no lights or layers) and it’s pretty solid.
In terms of cues being off, I would wonder how much info or prompting you need. I just put lyrics or general notes in there and I know the songs well enough that I wouldn’t get confused if a single memo or lyric fired off early. If the songs are that complex that you need detailed (accurate to the second) notes to fire in sequence, I’d address it more on a root cause basis rather than hang the entire performance on my ability to follow a cursor. Just my two cents on that.
Thanks, although I think it does make a difference that you’re on Mac. It’s not the song complexity that makes the detailed cueing necessary, it’s more about interactivity. The other band members don’t see the screen and they play freeform solos at certain parts of the songs, so I must act as an interface between them and the machine by reading and sending signals in both directions. The length of the solo loops always must remain intact (i.e. a 48 bar loop can’t end prematurely), which requires a precise visual feedback about the playback position.
I assume you’re using a real interface and not just running out of the headphone-out of your laptop? Because that could be a major issue.
We do something similar to you: i’m the band leader and I direct the other two members. It’s their job to know how long the solo is, but we also physically signal to each other. I’d argue about how much “precision” is required because if you’re doing a 48 bar solo, then as long as they know a bar or two in advance you can wrap it up. but you also mention loops and we only do a track on rails.
Many of those bugs you mentioned were in previous versions and are fixed now. You didn’t mention which version you use. Did you install from SDA? There is 3.0.30, but the best for now is 3.0.38. Install latest from VST Live site.
Silent start could be a delay to play due to a different sample rates. Maybe. I would recommend you to try from even simplier position. Make all audio 44.1 kHz, select the same rate for your audio device. Only then, when you are happy with that, reorganize everything for higher sample rate (for dolphins, dogs, bats or Waves Soundgrid).
When you drag clips to tracks, make sure you have snap to grid active. There were some problems if you release mouse so the clip drop somewhere before bar 1 even if it seems dropped right on snap line.
But keep asking. Otherwise I can write too long and boring poems here
I’m sure the VL3 will give you necessary functionality. Due to the complexity, you just need time to get used to it.
If those busgs are considered fixed, then I have bad news, they’re still there. I installed the app from SDA last week and I got v3.0.30.157. I’ve just downloaded and installed 3.0.38.184 and it made no difference.
There are no different sample rates, all files are 48kHz. If the playback of ~20 24/48 tracks pushes VST Live to the limit then something must be very wrong with it, in Cubase I can play/loop 3-4 times as many without any glitches (on the same hardware of course and those projects use a ton of VSTi&FX, too).
I never move the clips, all files are left intact (a single clip per track, starting at the top of the song), but I keep snap to grid on 99% of the time anyway.
I feel quite comfortable with the UI, everything I’ve seen so far looks pretty straightforward, my main problem is unpredictability and instability.
Strange is that some users don’t get on the way of success while others do gigs. That fact means that all users don’t have the same setup - computer architecture, CPU, memory, drives etc. You didn’t mention the specs of your hardware so it’s hard to understand from which era is your computer.
Secondly, you had problems with video driver while running Cubase. Did you fix that for last few years?
So far I was testing on one of the backup desktop machines in the studio (Gigabyte Aorus Z370, latest W11 and VST Live, Audient evo16 audio interface -ASIO buffer set to 1024(!), NVMe SSD system and data drives). Today I tried it on an Asus Expertbook (11th gen i7, latest W11 and VST Live, ESI Maya44 USB+ with ASIO buffers as high as 512 samples, NVMe SSD system+data drive) and it made no difference. So, there are two different setups from different manufacturers, both run Cubase (15), Wavelab (12) and Ableton Live (with much higher track-count) without any problem and VST Live produces the same issues on both of them. This makes it difficult to assume that VST Live has nothing to do with this (especially the randomly changing parts parameters, which is clearly not hardware-related). I wonder how many windows users use it for interactive multitrack playback on stage.
Why do you want to switch from Ableton Live with MAX and the SetList plugin for a total of €639 to VST Live 3 that costs quarter of that price? There is no crossgrade for Ableton users as far as I know.
You compared one song DAWs with multisong Live Performance System. Cubase and Ableton has one single timeline where you can load multiple backing tracks and manage setlist by dividing in regions. That’s all. All plugins, libraries are loaded for all songs.
VST Live is from another dimension and cannot be compared with Cubase and Ableton in terms of resource consumption and performance.
So if you are in our boat, our vector is one - use and report bugs so we can all succeed. Otherwise use the tool that makes you happy!
Does this meet your request for recommendations?
Keep making music!
Hello, here are 20 tracks of 24-bit 48 kHz, the installed buffer is 64. What limit of VST Live are you talking about? I think another 20 can easily be added. My hardware configuration is in the signature. The test version is VST_Live_2.2.120
And Cubase has ASIO Guard, but VST Live doesn’t, so in any case, comparing it with a DAW is not correct.
Sorry to ask, but what does this demonstrate? The number of loops I see is: 0, the number of song parts launched is: 0. All I see is a single multitrack part playing back from the top. I can do that, too without any problem. Let’s read again my original post:
I’m trying to use VST Live the way it was designed to be used (according to the manual and all tutorials): I have multiple parts within a song (intro, verse, chorus etc.). Some of them are looped (typically the solos), others are not. One-shot parts automatically proceed to the next part, loops are playing in a cycle until a MIDI or key command tells them to proceed. Easy.
So, if you’re interested in how VST Live handles this task on your setup, then make multiple parts and loops within a multitrack song, hit play and navigate between the parts. It needs patience, sometimes it works fine for half an hour or even longer. But once a dropout occurs at the beginning of a loop, it doesn’t go until the app gets relaunched.
Your description also doesn’t make any sense. If you want the developers to check what’s wrong with your project, then… File a proper bug report with detailed steps, describe what’s happening, and when they respond, grant them access to your project. I’m sure they’ll help you.
Otherwise, these are just empty words, not supported by facts.
I’d recommend making this bug report a separate thread with the bugs mentioned in the title. They might simply not look at a thread with the title “I’m evaluating VST Live.” Or you could send them a private message.
I thought my opening post answered this question, sorry if I was not clear enough:
The only drawback of this system is that the preparation phase of a new set is very time consuming. Now I’m working on a project which requires much less freedom and interactivity, so I’m not forced to use Ableton Live (…). I thought of giving VST Live a try.
I don’t know how to explain it better, but I was hoping to be able to simplify my workflow for a simpler task, where Ableton Live would have been an overkill.
From what I’ve seen so far, VST Live (at least on paper) offers much more than what I’m looking for right now. All I want is to take some multitrack audio files, split them up into song parts -some of which are loops-, set the flexloop to ‘Part End’ and then play them back sequentially and -while playing the looping parts- send out MIDI commands to control when the playback should proceed to the next part. I tried it on two different hardware setups and got audio dropouts on both of them.
I also mentioned another bug -with screenshots and description- and a third one -with description only- and you responded that these have already been fixed. Okay. (As we clarified, I’m on the latest version).
The onboarding experience is part of deal when it comes to moving to a new platform. It would have been more reassuring to get some feedback from at least one happy Windows user who controls the playback interactively.
I could ask which step of my description doesn’t make any sense to you:
creating a multitrack song?
splitting the files up into song parts?
set some song parts to loop?
sending MIDI (or key-) commands to end the loops and proceed to the next part?
… but I’m not asking this because if any of these is not perfectly clear to you then you shouldn’t waste your time on this topic.
On the other hand, you’re perfectly right about suggesting that I submit a proper bug report, but before doing that I wanted to gather some experiences from others who trigger the various song parts interactively. Unfortunately no such user commented.
Others’ experiences may differ, perhaps because their hardware is more powerful and newer. There are many different factors involved, and to rule them out, I’d recommend filing a bug report first.
And submit the project to the developers when they respond.
Once they review it, they’ll give you an objective answer.
I believe this is a bug now when flexloops is enabled. I was just testing flexloops and seen the same behavior. But I need to do some more tests before opening a bug report. Without flexloops it should not be a problem at least in my case it wasn’t.
