No talkback signal from performer (anymore)

VST Cloud VST Connect
1

Had about 5 successful sessions with Connect SE and the performer. Recording midi & mudio from the VST instrument OK. Everything worked great!

Yesterday I loaded the same project we already worked on 5 times before and everything still is OK. But now when I press talkback I can’t hear the performer! He can hear me OK but i can’t hear him. I can record the audio from the mic so there is nothing wrong with it. I didn’t change anything, the performer didn’t change anything but no talkback sound from his side.

Did several repairs, created a new empty project with only the bare minimum in the control room. Just the one VST cue channel and only the main output with only there the VST connect monitor plugin. Sync is very good all green and no dropouts on vst audio and midi.
-Reinstalled the latest performer 4.0.43 on his side
-Reinstalled ASIA4ALL on his side
-Reistalled Connect SE 4.0.43 on my side

Again everything works great to and from him but I just can’t get a talkback signal from his side! Only when I turn up the recording knobs of either the mic or instrument channel I hear his mic and would be able to record it. But it’s not controlled by the talkback function and I don’t want to record the audio from the mic.

The performer is using an HP laptop with build in soundcard and Asio4all.

When connecting the last session this issue started I notice something weird. I couldn’t see any faders on my side in the monitor mixer from the performer. It was completely blank. Just when he started moving those on his side they started to appear one by one? Also most toggle buttons and rotary controls do not synchronize to his side and back. Only REV does. When I or he toggles the on/off or dials a knob on COM, EQ or INS the changes are not synced back. Maybe it’s nothing but maybe it’s some corruption in settings of the program that now keeps loading every time I start a session? Is there some ini or config file I can delete so it will rebuild it with fresh settings?

Any Ideas what I can check or maybe overlooked? Because I’m all out of options.

2

First off, the ‘ghost faders’ have nothing to do with your monitoring issue. It appears that the plugin didn’t capture the mixer state initially. Unless this happens more often, you may just ignore it.
Second, if the VST Connect Monitor plugin is present and inserted after the Monitor Channel that your speakers are connected to, you should indeed hear the Performer at any time. Obviously his signal gets thru.
Check that the VST Connect plugin ‘MONITOR - PERF’ is raised to some level, and that the VST Connect Monitor plugin is inserted after the very Monitor Bus that you are actually listening to (if you listen via Control Room/Headphones, move that plugin there).
More can be found here, if it still fails let us know.

3

Thanks for the reply Musicullum. I’m thinking about buying the pro because because in the future I probably will do more audio and would like to take advantage of the current 50% discount of course. I’m sure it must be a glitch somewhere because it worked perfectly before? Anyway, I’ll do some more testing later this afternoon and will let you know the results.

4

Did some more tests and the issue with no ‘talkback’ is still there. Luckily the performer was able to arrange another laptop to rule out any issues on his side. But unfortunately the talk back issue still exists on this one also. So it’s now obvious the problem exists on my side. But I still have no clue what’s causing it?

On both laptops the mic works when I have the recording knob open. But as soon as I turn this down and use ‘talkback’ to communicate I can’t hear him! Very frustrating!

I will go over the VST troubleshooting page once more tomorrow and see if I maybe missed something? But it looks like I’m going in circles?

So I’ve established the following:

  • The performer can hear me only when I have the ‘talkback’ switched on.
  • But when the ‘talkback’ is on I can’t hear the performer.
  • I can only and ‘always’ hear the performer when I have the ‘mic recording’ knob is turned up. Regardless if the ‘talkback’ is switched on or off.

Question: Is there any specific insert taking care of the ‘talkback’ communication from the performer besides the recording signal? If not and the ‘recording’ signal of the performer is following the same route as the ‘talkback’ I can only conclude that it’s a corruption in the application itself or it’s settings? So it means the ‘talkback’ button is not doing what’s it’s suppose to do!

I’m not saying the program itself is flawed. I’m just saying it’s flawed on my side and I would like to know what I can do to solve this? That’s why I asked earlier if there’s any ini or config file I can delete so it will start with default settings? Maybe I need to trash my Cubase preferences? If you can’t or ‘wont’ tell me I will investigate myself and trash everything from program files/data to registry and see if that helps? But I’d rather have you come up with a fix so others may benefit from this in the future?

Remark: The https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-u … 0012899079 site is outdated. The screenshots shown are old. The Control Room in 10.5 looks different now.

Suggestion: The signal flow chart in the beginning may be logical at glance but in practice is not very helpful. It doesn’t translate to what plugins need to be where and what they exactly do and why they need to be there? Maybe make screenshots of every plugin on every location (track inspector, mixer and control room) explaining where it needs to be, what settings and what it does? This would also help to quickly see if a plugin is not there or not configured correctly. Because I found out some parts where levels can be set in the control room that’s absolutely not described anywhere in the manual or this site. The way it’s described now is not transparent. Especially not for newcomers. The ‘create VST Connect’ script needs to take care of setting everything up. But when it fails users need to be able to figure out what made it fail and have tools to investigate why and what they can do to adjust/fix it. A poor flowchart and a lot of theoretical talk about how it works is not what people are looking for if they have issues. They first want to know to know if every plugin needed is there. And second what those plugins do and what controls affect what?

Especially on midi recording/playback there’s actually ‘nothing’ described anywhere! While I think this is one the main things why people would want to use a tool like this? And recently I’ve seen the strength of this working with a dear friend of mine again.

So stop promoting this tool as if it only benefits people that use ‘microphones’. It’s equally beneficial to people that want to share midi!

And then there’s these ‘knobs’ on the upper side…sigh… They are extremely hard to control. With very little movement they shift from 0 to full! You really have to try very hard to get them somewhere in between? Maybe better to make these slider even with a very short range to fit the gui. IMO opinion always better than these very awkward knobs!

Even with these side notes and the annoying issues I’m having with the talkback I still say this is a great application! It’s made possible for me to collaborate with someone I worked with in the past and only spoke on the phone the past years because he now lives thousands of miles away. Now we can see each other on cam and at the same time exchange musical ideas again. I’m enjoying every minute of it!

Thanks for that! Hope you benefit from the remarks I made? Please keep up the good work!

5

first, “I can only and ‘always’ hear the performer when I have the ‘mic recording’ knob is turned up.” What is the ‘mic recording knob’?
second, repeated: the Performer can be heard at any time thru the VST Connect Monitor plugin.
Open the Control Room (Studio) mixer, at the bottom choose ‘Inserts’ and check the Monitor section. There should be the VST Connect Monitor plugin inserted after the main Monitor output. The signal that is beeing received from the Performer is routed there at any time, only the “Perf Monitor” dial is in between.
If you listen via Headphones, you need to move that plugin there (if you have a later version, it may already be present). btw, the flowchart does name all VST Connect plugins. If you follow the red line in the graph you can see how the Performer signal gets to after the Main bus. Cue and Monitor can be found at the top and bottom of the right section.
Your talkback has absolutely nothing to do with that. I suspect you have the DIM level set too low. This will defeat sound of the entire output signal whenever you engage Talkback. The idea behind DIM is that when you engage Talkback, the artist should not get too much back from your monitors. This is common practice in Control Room recording situations. You can change dim level in the VST Connect plugin and in the Control Room.
All of this is also mentioned in the in-depth section of the provided link.

6

I’ve had a similar issue a few times where everything is ok except talkback. The simplest and fastest fix was to remove VST Connect Pro (manually seems to work better than the macro function for some reason) and reinstate using the macro. This always solves the issue for me. Thankfully its rare but I do notice that it always happens if VST Connect is saved in the session, so I always remove it once the session is done. Not an issue for me as it only takes 1 or 2 mins to set everything back up.

7

Thanks for the tip. For me it’s like always since it started. And even with your workaround it just won’t work. But for now I can work like this, turning up/down the recording level of the mic to communicate with the performer. Although it’s not very convenient. I think it may be some sort of corruption somewhere in Cubase. I had similar routing issue in the past once and it went away after I trashed my preference. But for now don’t want to do that because I’m rather busy and have no time to experiment. Will try later. Thanks again for the reply.