I have set up a bunch of VST Instruments hosted in a few instances of Vienna Ensemble Pro Server. Each VEPro instance is its own endpoint setup that contains several ports, one port for each instrument. Unfortunately the instrument names are not showing up in the appropriate mixer channels. Most of them are blank and a few of them are just wrong.
I can see that you assign the “number of audio outputs to show in mixer” in the endpoint setup window. I had assumed each audio output represented one midi port and that the instrument assigned to each port would show in the mixer window, but it is not.
Anybody know how I can get the assigned instrument names to show up in their corresponding VST instrument in the mixer window?
I am attaching a Dorico file if you want to have a look.
Mixer Window test.dorico.zip (1.35 MB)
The labels that appear in the Mixer are a combination of the output names from the VST plug-in and the instrument currently routed to that output, assuming that there’s a one-to-one mapping between MIDI channels and outputs provided by the plug-in.
My VST Instruments are organized in a different way then, for example, HALion SSE. Vienna Ensemble Pro is my VST Plugin, but each Instrument within VEPro has its own midi port (as many as 20) that receives midi in OMNI mode. It appears that HSSE uses a single port and assigns each instrument its own midi channel.
Ideally, in my VEPro setup, I would have one mixer channel per midi port. The instrument assigned to that port would appear on the mixer channel. Right now this is only happening for port 1.
I guess the question then is: How do I get more than midi port 1 to show in the mixer?
I think the problem here is that the MIDI mixer channel names are out of sync with the state of the instruments in your project. If you create, delete and reorder instruments then the order of the MIDI mixer tracks will reflect the order of creation. When you apply a Playback Template then this will ‘normalise’ the instrument and mixer states, ensuring that the order is consistent with the order in Setup Mode. In your case, you have some quite extensive customisation for the routing. I would suggest creating an endpoint configuration for each of the instruments in the rack so that you can capture the instruments you have routed to each one, and then create a Playback Template with those endpoint configurations. Then apply the playback template to recreate the same list of plugins and most (if not all) of the instruments should be routed, and the MIDI mixer should reflect the current Players.
Paul, thanks for this. Vienna Ensemble Pro is meant to use minimal instances while hosting many instruments - each one via a different midi port. If I understood you correctly, I should assign each Dorico instrument its own endpoint plugin instance (all set to port 1). Unfortunately, that would mean that my full orchestra would need dozens of VEPro instances - which is rather impractical because they are hosted on another computer for which each instance must establish a network connection. That makes it rather unwieldy. Also, I can’t utilize midi channels to get the mixer channels (like you see in HSSE) because my endpoint instruments (Spitfire Symphonic Series) need to receive in OMNI mode.
I attached an image of a simple endpoint setup in my system. (I tried to upload a new simple Dorico file, but I couldn’t get it small enough for some reason…)
All I need is for Dorico to create one mixer channel for each port that is named after its assigned instrument. It doesn’t seem possible currently.
Another observation: if the “number of audio outputs in mixer” is unchecked, 24 stereo mixer channels are shown. Port 2 starts at the 17th, as it shows my instrument assignment there. Presumably this means the first sixteen are the midi channels of Port 1 waiting for instruments to be assigned to them.
Perhaps there is a way (in a future version) to specify audio outputs for both midi channels and Ports.
I think if you have a very complex VEPro setup like this and you aren’t able to use Endpoint Configs to set them up automatically then you have to produce your required list of instruments in Setup Mode first, before routing them. It’s by design that Dorico doesn’t reassign channels automatically when adding, removing and reordering instruments, because that could lead to Dorico overwriting changes to your plugins. There may be something we can do in the future to improve the order of the MIDI mixer channels in the display, but that is a limitation for now.
Re: midi ports and audio outputs: Dorico has no way of knowing which MIDI inputs are connected to the audio outputs. It assumes you have set MIDI channel 1 to audio output channel 1, but if you have a complex setup such as VEPro then this assumption may be invalid, so you won’t be able to rely on the instrument labels in the mixer. We may be able to add more control over mixer labelling in the future.
