# Build for a VE Pro Slave



## cleverr1 (Feb 5, 2022)

Hi,
I'm considering options for a first PC based VE Pro slave and I was wondering what are criteria for this to be successful.

Are there any o/s optimizations for this type of build?
Is DPC latency important as it is with a DAW build?

I'm planning to run some gigabit ethernet to my garage. I've ruled out basing the build on a rack mount server due to the noise of the fans. I've noticed that a refurbed HP Z640 or Z440 can be picked up at a good price / performance point with an 18 core Xeon, 128GB Z640 with everything except the SSDs for the libraries costing around £850.

Would this be a good option?
What are others running that they could recommend?

Thanks in advance.


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## ChrisHarrison (Feb 5, 2022)

Same! 

How do I build a pc with a TB of ram. Maybe start with a motherboard that can hold that much. Who makes one?


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## KEM (Feb 5, 2022)

I have a i7-6700k with 32gb of ram and I’m doing fine so far and my template has hundreds of tracks consisting of sample libraries within Kontakt, Spitfire Player, and SINE. So an 18 core Xeon with 128gb of ram would be totally fine for pretty much anything you could possibly need


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## cleverr1 (Feb 6, 2022)

ChrisHarrison said:


> Same!
> 
> How do I build a pc with a TB of ram. Maybe start with a motherboard that can hold that much. Who makes one?


A dual CPU HP Z840 has 16 slots and can support up to 2TB. If you have somewhere cool enough and noise isn't an issue a HP DL380 gen 9 supports up to 3TB.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 6, 2022)

After some Googling I found that HP Z series workstations are certified by Avid and are commonly used in high end studios. So a HP Z640 looks like a good choice. The single core performance of the Xeons isn't great, but in the context of running Kontakt, Sine and Spitfire players this shouldn't be an issue.


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## David Kudell (Feb 6, 2022)

I use the old Mac Pro 2013 trash can with 128GB of RAM and it works great. It’s a 10 core Xeon. I run all my strings, brass, and winds on it, 3 instances of VePro. Then on my DAW rig iMac Pro 2017 128GB of RAM, I also run VePro with 4 instances - my percussion, choir, pianos/mallets, and tutti/ensembles. I have a lot of libraries, about 1800 tracks.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 6, 2022)

David Kudell said:


> I use the old Mac Pro 2013 trash can with 128GB of RAM and it works great. It’s a 10 core Xeon. I run all my strings, brass, and winds on it, 3 instances of VePro. Then on my DAW rig iMac Pro 2017 128GB of RAM, I also run VePro with 4 instances - my percussion, choir, pianos/mallets, and tutti/ensembles. I have a lot of libraries, about 1800 tracks.


Thanks for sharing! This looks like a great approach organizing the libraries by type. 
I currently have a disorganized Cubase template that's sprawled to around 200 tracks which takes what feels like an eternity to close and load projects for each cue. I've recently binged on many new libraries in the sales so I want to do this once with VE Pro and get it right.


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## David Kudell (Feb 6, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Thanks for sharing! This looks like a great approach organizing the libraries by type.
> I currently have a disorganized Cubase template that's sprawled to around 200 tracks which takes what feels like an eternity to close and load projects for each cue. I've recently binged on many new libraries in the sales so I want to do this once with VE Pro and get it right.


The loading time and also the saving time is where VEPro makes sense. Working on films is what convinced me as every scene/cue is it’s own project and you end up with tens of projects. Doing revisions and printing stems is so much faster when you can load projects quickly. Also it’s nice to have everything loaded rather than having to enable tracks.

The downside is you have to mix via CC11 and 7 instead of track automation, which totally works but just takes a bit of getting used to. I highly recommend checking out Anne-Kathrin Dern’s videos on her template, as I’ve based my setup on hers (and recently had the opportunity to write additional music for her so I know it works well).


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## cleverr1 (Feb 7, 2022)

David Kudell said:


> The loading time and also the saving time is where VEPro makes sense. Working on films is what convinced me as every scene/cue is it’s own project and you end up with tens of projects. Doing revisions and printing stems is so much faster when you can load projects quickly. Also it’s nice to have everything loaded rather than having to enable tracks.
> 
> The downside is you have to mix via CC11 and 7 instead of track automation, which totally works but just takes a bit of getting used to. I highly recommend checking out Anne-Kathrin Dern’s videos on her template, as I’ve based my setup on hers (and recently had the opportunity to write additional music for her so I know it works well).


Cool thanks. I did the ThinkSpace "Template in a Weekend" course yesterday and the Anne-Kathrin Dern videos look very useful.

Is the CC11 and CC7 use because you're sharing VE Pro outputs between groups of instruments?

The choice of approaching the number of VE Pro outputs looks like a balancing act between flexibility and keeping things uncluttered.


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## Jeremy Spencer (Feb 7, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Thanks for sharing! This looks like a great approach organizing the libraries by type.
> I currently have a disorganized Cubase template that's sprawled to around 200 tracks which takes what feels like an eternity to close and load projects for each cue. I've recently binged on many new libraries in the sales so I want to do this once with VE Pro and get it right.


If you still plan around 200 tracks, maybe you don't need a slave?? You can use VEPro on the single machine, which would allow you to leave everything loaded between projects (load once). Also, Cubase has a cool "disabled track" feature which means your template could have thousands of tracks, and they only load when you need them.


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## wickedw (Feb 7, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Cool thanks. I did the ThinkSpace "Template in a Weekend" course yesterday and the Anne-Kathrin Dern videos look very useful.
> 
> Is the CC11 and CC7 use because you're sharing VE Pro outputs between groups of instruments?
> 
> The choice of approaching the number of VE Pro outputs looks like a balancing act between flexibility and keeping things uncluttered.


When it comes down to mixing I would say that this very much depends on how you setup your outputs and how you want to approach your mix. The idea of a template is that a lot of the mix balance is already done. By doing most of that in vepro it means that as you make changes to the balance you'd get the benefit in all of your projects based on the template right way. That's good and bad (because you might not want to effect a mix of another project). 

At other times you might want to have more control within the daw for the mix, so you have to balance that a bit. I have had it so that every instrument had it's own outputs (3 in specific, more for strings (separating the shorts out). I would then do all balancing/eqing/reverb in cubase This isn't really an ideal setup I found. You end up with too many outputs, it effects loading times, etc. So I started looking at what I can bundle and managed to reduce the amount of outputs of vepro dramatically. I did this by grouping the same or similar instruments from a specific library into the same outputs and then apply eqing/reverb within vepro. So now for example all SSW Flutes are 3 outputs + reverb (same channel for the entire library). The flutes alone used to be 12 channels, and I never touched them. Apply this principle on all your libraries and you see how many outputs you can cut. 

Ofcourse I now have less flexibility within Cubase, But when mixing time comes I can just print stems and you gain all your flexibility back.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 7, 2022)

Jeremy Spencer said:


> If you still plan around 2000 tracks, maybe you don't need a slave?? You can use VEPro on the single machine, which would allow you to leave everything loaded between projects (load once). Also, Cubase has a cool "disabled track" feature which means your template could have thousands of tracks, and they only load when you need them.


This is now Plan A  Having gone through Guy Michelmore's "Template in a Weekend" short course I realise that a lot of what's in my current template is done inefficiently. I plan to build a new template with VE Pro on my existing machine. If it does start to get too big I could always migrate it onto a slave at that point. Crazy thing is that an 18 core Z640 with 128GB RAM and 1 year warranty costs just £300 more than it would cost to upgrade my DAW to 128GB.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 8, 2022)

Thanks all for the invaluable advice given in this thread!

I started the process of documenting the template I want to use and it's clearly going to be many times the size of my current version.

My plan is to continue building a new template on my existing 64GB i9 9900k DAW. However, I now understand a bit more about how I'd like this to scale and concluded I'm going to need a slave device.

I've pushed the button and ordered a refurb'd HP Z640 with 2x 18 core Xeons and 256GB RAM. So in parallel with building the template on existing kit I'll do memtest86 and burn-in tests on the Z640 to prove any hardware issues. Once confirmed stable I'll migrate over the VE Pro Server duties. I'm juggling SSDs to make the big data copying smoother, but I suspect there'll be a lot of faffing with authorising libraries etc. ahead.

I'm really looking forward to when all of this technical stuff is out of the way for some considerable time and just having what I need to focus on making music.


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## David Kudell (Feb 8, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Thanks all for the invaluable advice given in this thread!
> 
> I started the process of documenting the template I want to use and it's clearly going to be many times the size of my current version.
> 
> ...


Let me know how the Z640 works out, looks like a nice setup for a VEP machine, especially with lots of cores and 1TB memory max.


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## StefanoM (Feb 8, 2022)

I use an Intel i9 10980XE 16 Core, with 128 GB

so for a VEP Machine, a good multicore CPU and a lot of RAM is a nice starting point.


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## Sergievsky (Feb 10, 2022)

What buffer sizes are you folks running at? What if I want to run a project at 64 (at most, preferably 32) from beginning to end, what kind of cpu/ram will I need for that? (I don't do megatrack orchestrations...but still, lots of cpu-hungry VIs along with kontakt/sine/spitfire tracks, I still reach the limit on my 2017 10core 128ram imacpro)


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## David Kudell (Feb 10, 2022)

Sergievsky said:


> What buffer sizes are you folks running at? What if I want to run a project at 64 (at most, preferably 32) from beginning to end, what kind of cpu/ram will I need for that? (I don't do megatrack orchestrations...but still, lots of cpu-hungry VIs along with kontakt/sine/spitfire tracks, I still reach the limit on my 2017 10core 128ram imacpro)


No chance running that low a buffer. And not really necessary. 512 works fine, I know folks using 1024.


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## Sergievsky (Feb 10, 2022)

David Kudell said:


> No chance running that low a buffer. And not really necessary. 512 works fine, I know folks using 1024.


At mix that's ok, but don't you have too much lag when sequencing? Or is it not the same with all apps? (I use DP) I can do 128, but anything more than that my piano playing goes to sh*t. Or is it a constant switching of buffers, low when sequencing then up when mixing? (which I'd rather not do)


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## Jeremy Spencer (Feb 11, 2022)

Sergievsky said:


> What buffer sizes are you folks running at? What if I want to run a project at 64 (at most, preferably 32) from beginning to end, what kind of cpu/ram will I need for that? (I don't do megatrack orchestrations...but still, lots of cpu-hungry VIs along with kontakt/sine/spitfire tracks, I still reach the limit on my 2017 10core 128ram imacpro)


I'm at 128. Also use an Apogee Element interface.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 13, 2022)

The HP Z640 arrived yesterday. First impressions are good - it's quiet and had zero errors running memtest86 overnight. I have Spitfire, Sine, Opus and NI Komplete 13 CE and VE Pro installed. It won't run Latencymon, but dpclat.exe shows it to be constantly around 1000 micro secs, so looks ok for audio. Template wise so far I've done BBCSO woods with a track per articulation and a keyswitch version for the a3 instruments. I'm building the template along the lines of @David Kudell's with an instance per orchestral section. I plan to run VE Pro locally on the DAW machine for the sound design type instruments because they're already installed and it has better performance per core.

I have some questions for those with experience of VE Pro:

I took a decision to send all of the articulations for each section out of VE Pro to a single stereo output with a view to level mixing with CCs and if any corrective EQ is needed doing it within VE Pro. Are there advantages/disadvantages to this approach vs doing something else?

Is 1Gbps ethernet fast enough to support a large number of tracks hosted in VE Pro?
I'm unclear where bottleneck is as loading a big ensemble library playing chords with a hoof on the loud pedal quickly results in heavily digitally distorted audio. It could just be an overloaded buss, but I've never seen that natively in Cubase.
[Edit - Turns out this is because of a maxed out CPU core, but this wasn't a real world test, more to understand what happens at the limit]

Thanks in advance!


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## David Kudell (Feb 15, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> I took a decision to send all of the articulations for each section out of VE Pro to a single stereo output with a view to level mixing with CCs and if any corrective EQ is needed doing it within VE Pro. Are there advantages/disadvantages to this approach vs doing something else?


As an example, here's my VEPro returns for strings:

STR VLN
STR VLA
STR CELLI
STR BASS
STR ENSEMBLE
STR SOLOS

Most of my strings go through those returns because they all have a good amount of room sound and I don't need to add much reverb. Then I have another set of returns dedicated to Cinematic Studio Series because I add more reverb to those.

CSS VLN
CSS VLA
CSS CELLI
CSS BASS
CSS ENSEMBLE
CSS SOLOS

Woodwinds are:
Flutes
Oboes/EH
Clarinet
Bass Clar
Bassoon
Solo WW
WW Ensembles FX

Once you have these in Cubase, you can send them to whatever groups you want. So if you just need to deliver a single Woodwinds stem, all those VEPs can route to that. Keep in mind you can route groups to groups, so it's kind of like a pyramid where you have more groups at the top and you can route however you need to make as few stems as you want.


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## David Kudell (Feb 15, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Is 1Gbps ethernet fast enough to support a large number of tracks hosted in VE Pro?


Yep, plenty.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 16, 2022)

David Kudell said:


> As an example, here's my VEPro returns for strings:
> 
> STR VLN
> STR VLA
> ...


Thanks! - that makes a lot of sense. So are you sharing the same VE Pro outputs for e.g. STR VLN between violins from different libraries and mixing inside VE Pro (except CSS as you mentioned), or do you have different versions of such outputs for each library which have nested groups within Cubase?


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## cleverr1 (Feb 21, 2022)

Having spent most of my weekend working on a template I've concluded that it's a tedious task 
Something strange sometimes happened with running multi output versions of Kontakt where the output setting within Kontakt was different to the real VE Pro channel being used. I worked around the issue by selecting whatever Kontact output routed to where it was needed. I hope this is a consistent thing and the outputs won't move around in the future.

I found the Artifical Harmonics website who built me a custom VE Pro / Cubase template which includes several of the libraries I have which was a great starting point. Kudos!

Does anyone know of other sources of VE Pro templates or even just VE Pro instances that could be merged?

My wish list is something for the following:
Hollywood Orchestra Opus Diamond
Metropolis Ark 1
Century Brass
Century Strings
Sonokinetic orchestral and sordino strings

In particular I'm hoping for a HOOpus VE Pro instance as that's a daunting challenge.


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## David Kudell (Feb 21, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Something strange sometimes happened with running multi output versions of Kontakt where the output setting within Kontakt was different to the real VE Pro channel being used. I worked around the issue by selecting whatever Kontact output routed to where it was needed. I hope this is a consistent thing and the outputs won't move around in the future.


I noticed this recently, you mean where the names become different, like “Low+Groups” or something? it seems like a new bug that’s cropped up. Not sure if it’s an update from Kontakt or VEP.

I’m not sure about templates to download. For me, I feel like building it is essential to know how the thing works because once I get on a deadline composing, I don’t want to be trying to figure out how someone else set up the routing or grouped things.

The answer to the question from your last post is, I always group libraries together and the only time I do a different group for a specific library is if it’s more dry and needs more reverb to match the other ones, since I have my reverb send in Cubase. That way I can add more reverb to just those returns.


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## cleverr1 (Feb 21, 2022)

David Kudell said:


> I noticed this recently, you mean where the names become different, like “Low+Groups” or something? it seems like a new bug that’s cropped up. Not sure if it’s an update from Kontakt or VEP.


My issue was that for example Kontakt showed output st2 as connected to 3/4 but the signal still came out of 1/2. When I set it as st3 showing as 5/6 in Kontakt it then routed to 3/4. Whilst doing this made it work, something's definitely not right.



David Kudell said:


> I’m not sure about templates to download. For me, I feel like building it is essential to know how the thing works because once I get on a deadline composing, I don’t want to be trying to figure out how someone else set up the routing or grouped things.


I totally get that!

I'm still learning so I'm unclear about which type of layout I'll end up preferring.

Elements of the off the shelf templates I've used so far are great as placeholders. They're something to work with whilst getting to understand more about the libraries and how to best configure them. I'm reviewing and tweaking as I go. However, the instances I've created myself are most familiar and "logical" to me. I suspect that further down the road I'll have a clearer idea about how to structure my ideal template.

After 2 weekends worth of installation and template building I'd really like to write some music! 

OT - The HP Z640 has been rock solid so far. I need to go through my current template and purge as its using total RAM of around 120GB but I'm able to load and release the current ~450 track Cubase template in seconds. This is definitely "The way".


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## cleverr1 (Mar 1, 2022)

I've hit a bit of a glitch. At just over 700 tracks the z640 CPU is steady at over 30% when connected to Cubase but not playing anything. The trouble is that's 30% of the total CPU, but it's all on one processor. The processor VE Pro picks when initiated varies, but in the current configuration it's not using both processors. Also the max thread setting in the options is 36, (should be 72). This also means it can't use 128GB of the 256GB RAM.
I've contacted VSL support hoping that there's a setting somewhere to enable multi CPU use. It may be possible to work around this by running a separate virtualised O/S and setting processor affinities, but that feels potentially messy.


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## David Kudell (Mar 1, 2022)

Interesting, will be curious to hear what the fix is. For reference, my 8 core trash can Mac Pro has 3 instances, each getting 5 threads (15 of 16 threads used by VEP) and the CPU of each instance is around 25-35% on idle. It works fine. Buffer is at 512 / 1 buffer. I can go to 1024 / 2 buffers if needed but havent needed to. But that’s single processor, I think dual is only a windows option.


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## cleverr1 (Mar 2, 2022)

Thanks for that info - it's a good reference. I haven't had a chance to test my system with a proper arrangement yet (far too busy building a template to actually make some music ) but it seems comfortable at 512 buffers with 2 buffers in the plugins.

I got half an answer from VSL who confirmed that each instance can only access a single CPU, which would explain why the highest setting in the default threads section is 36 here. I've gone back to them asking if VE Pro Server x64 itself supports multiple CPUs.


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## cleverr1 (Mar 8, 2022)

From the response from VSL support it seems their devs don't understand this citing that Windows will distribute the threads to the best of it's abilities.

If I run Prime95 all 36 cores show as active so this proves it's not about Windows so looks like a limitation of VE Pro Server x64.

I'm hoping that they'll put this on the backlog as a feature request, but at this time it's looks like a dual socket machine isn't the way to go.


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## cleverr1 (Mar 13, 2022)

On a positive note I was initially unsure if a single CPU could make use of more than half the RAM - It can:




This huge number reduces to around 35GB over time. I think it's the Spitfire players as I purged all the Kontakt instances.


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## cleverr1 (Mar 23, 2022)

I now understand the issue with VE Pro 7 x64 Server not supporting dual CPUs:








Processor Groups - Win32 apps


The 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and later versions of Windows support more than 64 logical processors on a single computer. This functionality is not available on 32-bit versions of Windows.



docs.microsoft.com





Seems it wasn't written to support multiple processor groups and my HP z640 presents 2 processor groups.

Windows 11 takes care of this automatically for apps that aren't multi processor group aware but the Xeons in my HP z640 aren't on the Win 11 compatibility list

The good news is there's a workaround:








Bitsum. Real-time CPU Optimization and Automation


Real-Time CPU Optimization and Automation. Keep your PC responsive during high CPU loads and automate process settings with rules. Apps run YOUR WAY!




bitsum.com




I've got this running and the CPU load is now distributed across the 2 processors. The timing of playback seems unaffected.

However, VSL should fix this.


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