This is an two-faced issue I think. When I am making an orchestral score with lots and lots of VST instruments at some point there seems to be a disconnect in the VST instruments table causing the file to load, but the audio engine to be dead (greyed out play button, forever (i have waited)). I could have 28 instances of Kontakt/BBC Orchestra plus one Halion and everything is OK, but then somewhere after adding another halion instance the thing does not load. Moreover if I clear VST slot to ----- I cannot delete it, and cannot make adjustments in the left player sidebar. All added VST are VST3.0, and all other VST are blacklisted by me. Why You ask?
I have noticed similar behaviour when adding VST2.0 instruments to the pile. After adding f.eg. UVI Workstation or sampler like TX16WX the same happens, even with small files. Instruments are referencing wrong slot number in VST instrument table (if they say they reference 4, they actually send midi to fifth or more) and the lower, bugged slots are impossible to delete. I think I wrote about this, but now I cannot find it.
I tried to search the forum and found no solution to this. If there is one, or the problem is known, I apologise.
I have observed similar behaviour on two machines - my Apple macbook, and my beastly Hackintosh with 32gb ram and 4,2 GHz Intel Core i7.
All the best, Nikola
Hi Nikolai,
our biggest problem is always reproducing issues that customers report. It would be great, if you could at least find one recipe to make that freeze happening, so that we can also try on our side.
Also, what version of Kontakt do you use? I once dealt with a customer who also had a huge template with lots and lots of Kontakt instances, which also frequently froze on his Mac. We analyzed that further and saw, that Kontakt would freeze everything. Since I defered that customer to Native Instruments, I don’t know if the case ever got resolved. Your issue could be same or just another one. We need to find out.
Could you also please post a diagnostics report. Thanks
I sent two similar files via message to Ulf, one loads and plays, the other one is grayed out and does not play, and freezes the audio engine. (one is an earlier version of the other) Here is the diagnostic report after the bad oneDorico Diagnostics.zip (2.0 MB)
Hi ! I am the customer with the same problem Ulf mentioned above : my problem never been solved by Native Instrument. But. I have found a way to avoid to have a big template, this by using Vienna Ensemble Pro. I have now always available all my instruments without any download lag with Kontakt & Dorico. To do so, I created new playback templates (one for each section : woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, choirs, keys, etc…) using Vienna instances. And I am now starting Dorico from a blank page, adding the instruments or sections I need, and due to the playback template and Vienna Ensemble Pro, I have immediately the instruments loaded and available. So Dorico combined with Vienna Ensemble Pro is definitively for me the way to work fast with big ensemble.
I am interested in that workflow, especially how to create that template with all the instances needed in VEPro. John has talked about it quite briefly — which I understand, since he’s not working for VEPro but for Dorico. If any of you VEPro gurus would cook us a little video… it will be greatly appreciated!
Well, yes, that’s the video I was referring to when saying that John (Barron) has talked about it. It did not really help me to go through the whole process of creating my own template with my libraries. Nevermind, I’ll dive into this as soon as I have some spare time!
My experience is that it is really simple & there are very good tutorials on Youtube to setup VEPro. It took me about 2-3 hours to learn & implement it. Good luck.
But it depends of your level of mastery of Dorico Play mode. You first need to understand how to create a Playback templates of your own first. There are excellent videos on the Youtube Dorico channels.
Hi @Nikola.Kolodziejczyk, thanks for the project data. And although I don’t have most of the used plug-ins, also Orchestra4a does behave the same way here with me. The Play button never turns green and I get the spinball when trying to quit Dorico. We will dive further into it, but it’s good to have those project files; shall be much easier to get to the bottom of it. I’ll report back.
I switched recently to VEPro, and that felt imidiately the right way to use large templates with Dorico,
I simply have everything go through one instance of VEPro and I do my mix with VEPro mixer. Apart from huge difference in project load and save times, you also get more flexibility to use different libraries for one instrument via channel switches.
I route the Instruments via channels and ports, but to allow multiple ports you have to make sure to use VST3 version of the VEPro plugin.
Biggest limitiation (depends on your setup) might be that full version of VEPro needs to have their USB dongle connected to run. But you can avoid this by using their free demo version, which doesn’t require a dongle. With the demo, you cannot save your template. I’ve gotten around this by never quitting VEpro, so my template is always ready. If you have limited RAM, you can also very effortlessly disable any slot (or even instance) in VEPro. Kontakt multis can be also saved, so building again the same template would be relatively fast.
I have purchased the license to VEPro and I have the dongle - but for my workflow their demo version has been more suitable. The license serves a back up for me, should the demo stop working (I think it has been 25 days or so)
All in all, VEPro is very easy to use and I highly recommend it to anyone with multiple libraries.
Hi @Nikola.Kolodziejczyk, we had a look and the audio engine data of the Orkiestra4a projekt is corrupted, therefore Dorico chokes on it and never manages to load it.
We’ve seen such corrupted data already in the past, but only really rarely and we could never tackle this issue, because we never had a reproduction for it.
Now, with you it might be different, you seem to be able to run into this issue consistently, is that right? It would be extremely helpful, if you could say e.g. I take this project, add one VSTi X instance, save it and it won’t load anymore afterwards. Because then we could try the same here in a debugger and see what is going on exactly. Your help on this would be so much appreciated. Thanks so much in advance.
Many thanks for reformulating : far better said ! And that’s true : channel switch enables you to move from one library to another one for the same instrument (I use it a lot) !!!
I’m happy to help if I can, but do you have a specific question in mind?
For me, everything is the same as before (same expression and percussion maps), only difference is that the instruments are in VEPro instead of Dorico. Then when I open my Dorico file, it’s just one click to connect all of the sounds.
I can reliably bork the file by adding Halion SE, loading f.eg. Electric Guitar on slot 10, and change channel from 1 to 10 on the left player tab. (still plays) Then saving then loading. link to file in a message. When I will encounter a problem after only adding VSTi I will report with a new set of files, but it is tricky because it seems to happen on file save.
Excellent, I will try this here as well and see if I can also reproduce. That would be a major breakthrough towards eliminating this bug. And yes, the crucial point is the saving, that’s where the data gets corrupted.