# VEP6 (Vienna Ensemble 6) Constantly Crashes



## iMovieShout (Mar 13, 2017)

Hello fellow VI-Control'ers,

Is anyone else experiencing *Vienna Ensemble Pro 6 (VEP6) crashes* ?

I've been scaling up the use of my Cubase 9 and VEP6 setup recently - i.e.. around 90 tracks of which just 8 are VEP6 slave tracks with Kontakt 5 and Spitfire samples loaded. I really need to scale this up to around 20 to 30 VEP6 tracks, but if it won't even load 8 without crashing, then whats the point?!? 

In order to get the VEP6 slave to successfully load all 8 channels I have to attempt to load up the instruments. This is taking hours, due to the number of times VEP6 freezes and eventually crashes. Note the host computer doesn't crash just VEP6. Loading all 8 instruments in to a standalone Kontakt 5 is fine - no crashes, no problems.

All my samples are loaded via Thunderbolt2 from a SSD NAS array (very fast). Loading any of these samples on to my DAW works fine. But loading them on to my VEP6 slave eventually results in a VEP6 crash. 

My VEP6 slave is a Mac Pro 6,1 12-core with 64GB RAM, and my Cubase / Nuendo DAW is a Mac Pro 6,1 8-core with 64GB RAM. Both are running Sierra and have around 200GB of free SSD space, and neither is exceeding more than about 15% CPU utilisation during the instrument load.

Any ideas anyone? Or can anyone suggest any serious contenders to VEP6? This is going to cost me dearly (in lost project work) unless I can resolve it quickly.

Many thanks in advance,
Jon


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## samphony (Mar 13, 2017)

Jon how do your VEP thread settings look like. How many audio and midiports have you set up per instance in the settings?

Maybe you can post a crash report also over at vsl.co.uk maybe @Dietz or Paul can take a look what is causing this. 

I sometimes get VEP crashes too when using lots of spitfire libs but I I am unable to reproduce most of it.

Im sure someone will have other troubleshooting suggestions as well.


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## iMovieShout (Mar 13, 2017)

I've added one of today's crash reports here.
Judging by your question - could the chances of a crash be increased if I have too many audio ins / outs / midi ports?
I've never modified these from the default settings. I'll have a go at reducing these to 4 / 4 / 8, with 2 buffers per channel. Also each channel has 2 threads assigned.
Thanks


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## Ashermusic (Mar 13, 2017)

Odd, VE Pro 6 almost never crashes here with Logic Pro X.


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## samphony (Mar 13, 2017)

Ashermusic said:


> Odd, VE Pro 6 almost never crashes here with Logic Pro X.


Do you use spitfire audio libraries?


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## mc_deli (Mar 13, 2017)

I can't remember anyone else on VI-c saying they use a NAS.
Are you saying your NAS connects to your DAW machine and your slave simultaneously?

On the surface NAS would seem to be thing that is different here.


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## Matt Riley (Mar 13, 2017)

samphony said:


> Do you use spitfire audio libraries?


I do. No trouble here except that I have to wait until my 55G template is loaded on my PC before connecting to Logic and pressing play. If I rush things, VEP6 crashes.


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## Ashermusic (Mar 13, 2017)

samphony said:


> Do you use spitfire audio libraries?



No.


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## samphony (Mar 14, 2017)

Matt Riley said:


> I do. No trouble here except that I have to wait until my 55G template is loaded on my PC before connecting to Logic and pressing play. If I rush things, VEP6 crashes.


Good to know. But you are hosting the libs and VEP on a on correct?

As I've said VEP works flawlessly for me if I use it but sometimes crashes. It's hard to pinpoint why that's why I guessed its the SF scripted libraries.


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## iMovieShout (Mar 14, 2017)

So, Ive set the number of audio in and audio out channels to 4 each on bith VEP6 slave and on Cubase VEP6 plugin and hey presto!! The VEP6 channels all load after 3 or 4 VEP6 slave crashes. Thats a massive improvement, though still not perfect. Further investigation seems to suggest that some of the Spitfire Audio samples for Albion V and Symphony Brass (possibly also Masse) seem to hang during either sample loading or during project configuration. 
Loading up other random samples from NI, Cinesamples, 8DIO, Output, Zebra, Chris Hein, SoundIron, VSL doesnt seem to have this problem. I will try EastWest and others later today. 

Can anyone suggest why this is? Could it be down to sample size, or VEP6 not carrying out error checking such as checking for hung loads and doing a retry, or some kind of script error ?

Thanks,
Jon


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## iMovieShout (Mar 16, 2017)

A quick update. ...well sort of !!
I've spent a good 2 days now, solidly trying to get VEP6 to behave. In conclusion - its bl**dy useless !!!! I can't believe a company like VSL can put out such shoddy software.

Here's what I've tried:
1) I gave up trying to get VEP6 to load my small 8 channel, 14 instrument template, and started again from scratch
2) With Preferences, Audio In and Out set to 4 each, and MIDI channels set to 4, I then created 4 channels, each with 2 instances of Kontakt 5 (latest update). 
- Channel 1 with 2 lots of Spitfire Audio LCO, saved the channel / project
- Channel 2 with 2 lots NI Strings Ensemble, saved the channel / project
- Channel 3 with 2 lots of SoundIron Piano, saved the channel / project
- Channel 4, crashed every time I tried to load an instrument, regardless of the instrument.

Tried these 5 times, and it crashed almost every time I tried to populate channel 4. Once it crashed before it even loaded channel 1 !!!

So, I don't get how this is supposed to work.

All of my previous templates created on a Mac Pro 5,1 with more than 40 instruments worked about 30% of the time before crashing. To solve that from crashing I upgraded to Mac Pro 6,1 with SSD array installed in a very fast NAS. So what on earth is going on?

Is there some sort of ideal set up for VEP6? Seems to me that no professional can work in this way, and there must surely be a way of running a music studio / setup without VEP6. I seriously need to find a reliable robust alternative to VEP6.

Please please, I need some ideas quickly as we're in danger of losing a major project now. 
Butt seriously on the line 

Thanks in advance,
Jon


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## Ashermusic (Mar 16, 2017)

All I can say is that over the last two years I have helped app. 50 working pros create Logic Pro/VEPro templates and they have none of this.


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## mc_deli (Mar 16, 2017)

jpb007.uk said:


> Jon


You didn't answer about the NAS - have you tried with a "normal" drive connection?
You are also not stating your specs and version numbers. It's the kind of thing that gets you better advice...


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## iMovieShout (Mar 16, 2017)

mc_deli said:


> You didn't answer about the NAS - have you tried with a "normal" drive connection?
> You are also not stating your specs and version numbers. It's the kind of thing that gets you better advice...


Hi,
We plugged our backup DAS directly into the Mac. Made no difference though. 
That said, a MIDI synth buddy arrived earlier ans has just been picking apart the problem. His initial findings seem to suggest a problem with the way the MIDI assignments have been setup with VEP6 and a mixing desk. 

Still investigating, but could it be possible for a MIDI data loopback to cause such a storm that it could crash VEP6 ?


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## mc_deli (Mar 16, 2017)

... we had grief in one studio with rogue midi from an AWS948 causing grief with Logic and PT running... but it might have nothing to do with your problem. 
But, again, you do realise you are asking unanswerable questions because you are not naming names, specs, versions etc...


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## Dietz (Mar 17, 2017)

mc_deli said:


> But, again, you do realise you are asking unanswerable questions because you are not naming names, specs, versions etc...



@jpb007.uk: Do yourself a favour and get in contact with [email protected], including all the information mc_deli mentioned above. The VSL support team should be able to solve your issue in blink. 

Best,


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## samphony (Mar 17, 2017)

jpb007.uk said:


> Hi,
> We plugged our backup DAS directly into the Mac. Made no difference though.
> That said, a MIDI synth buddy arrived earlier ans has just been picking apart the problem. His initial findings seem to suggest a problem with the way the MIDI assignments have been setup with VEP6 and a mixing desk.
> 
> Still investigating, but could it be possible for a MIDI data loopback to cause such a storm that it could crash VEP6 ?



Like mentioned get in touch with support. I had an issue in macOS 10.12.3 as well. I wrote back and forth with Paul 4 times yesterday. Moving to a new user account helped with my crasheus.


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## synergy543 (Mar 17, 2017)

I'm using VE Pro 6 with DP9 on OSX 10.12.2 on a Dell Hacintosh and its working fine. No such crashes.

The problem could be specific to your system.


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## Mishabou (Mar 17, 2017)

Same here VE Pro 6 with PT12, DP9 and CB9 on a nMP / OS X 10.12.2 and its been rock solid.


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## azeteg (Mar 20, 2017)

jpb007.uk said:


> I've added one of today's crash reports here.
> Judging by your question - could the chances of a crash be increased if I have too many audio ins / outs / midi ports?
> I've never modified these from the default settings. I'll have a go at reducing these to 4 / 4 / 8, with 2 buffers per channel. Also each channel has 2 threads assigned.
> Thanks



Your hang report shows a VST plugin hanging upon load. Unfortunately I cannot tell which one. A matching application log file (~/Library/Application Support/VSL/Vienna Ensemble Pro/logs) from the time of the hang, would help to tell which plugin is causing the problem.


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## procreative (Mar 20, 2017)

jpb007.uk said:


> Hi,
> We plugged our backup DAS directly into the Mac. Made no difference though.
> That said, a MIDI synth buddy arrived earlier ans has just been picking apart the problem. His initial findings seem to suggest a problem with the way the MIDI assignments have been setup with VEP6 and a mixing desk.
> 
> Still investigating, but could it be possible for a MIDI data loopback to cause such a storm that it could crash VEP6 ?



Please dont treat this as me being condescending but when you connected the DAS did you go into Kontakt and re-link the libraries to their "new" location?

It just seems to me having a network connection to the Samples as well as a network connection to VEP might be asking too much. As far as I know everyone else hosts the libraries used for each server directly on each machine.


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## iMovieShout (Apr 24, 2017)

So back to the drawing board on how to setup a VEP6 template . 
We've dumped our MacPro 5,1's and slower PCs as the NAS was getting confused with the many networks we had running. We now only run Thunderbolt.

So, what would you recommend for our template setup?
We have:
- 4 MacPro 6,1's all with 12 cores / 4 threads, 64GB RAM, 256SSD onboard
- Tons of VSL / VST3 libraries (about 8TB) including most of the biggies such as Spitfire, EastWest, CineSamples, SoundIron, 8DIO etc etc, all stored on very very fast Thunderbolt2 NAS (all disks are SSDs in RAID 0 which makes the load time to Kontakt in VEP6 very quick)
- Cubase 9 and Nuendo 7, Logic Pro X (if we really have to), and Pro Tools

Starting from scratch, what is the best way to get an 'all singing all dancing' template setup in Cubase that allows us to call up the samples and articulations in Cubase that we want when writing a new score instead of having to wade through a ton of samples each time? Seems like a simple question 

Is there an approach to doing this that has been tried and tested by the likes of the big film composers such as Harry Gregson, John Powell, Hans Zimmer, etc etc?


Many thanks in advance,
Jon


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## novaburst (Apr 24, 2017)

jpb007.uk said:


> Nuendo DAW



May I ask did you move a project from Nuendo to Cubase,


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## iMovieShout (Apr 24, 2017)

novaburst said:


> May I ask did you move a project from Nuendo to Cubase,


Hi Novaburst, 
No we keep our projects separate. Film scores in Nuendo, which is most of our work, and Cubase for smaller projects and SFX. 
Thanks,
Jon


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## Rob Elliott (Apr 24, 2017)

Yikes - I have 4 putters running VEP5 for years now with rarely a crash (all putters w7 and w10). Purchased VEP6 last Sept and STILL HAVE NOT INSTALLED.  Tells you how paranoid - or unwilling I am to 'be out of work'.  I'll watch this thread carefully.


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## Shad0wLandsUK (Apr 24, 2017)

Rob Elliott said:


> Yikes - I have 4 putters running VEP5 for years now with rarely a crash (all putters w7 and w10). Purchased VEP6 last Sept and STILL HAVE NOT INSTALLED. Tells you how paranoid - or unwilling I am to 'be out of work'.  I'll watch this thread carefully.


How do you make putters run software? 

Surely they are for hitting golf balls


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## Rob Elliott (Apr 24, 2017)

Shad0wLandsUK said:


> How do you make putters run software?
> 
> Surely they are for hitting golf balls


How do you think I keep my handicap under 10. It surely is NOT on talent. Ok, my little 'secret' is out of the bag....dang!


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## shelllink (May 2, 2017)

Hi everybody!
Don't want to make a new thread. I hope you don't mind if I continue this one...
The point is I'm getting an issue with VEP 6 ( OS Win 10). It freezes during unloading and I have to end the task from task manager. There isn't any problem during work or something. VEP on master machine. And I've checked everything's ok with CPU, Ram, DISK.


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## novaburst (May 2, 2017)

shelllink said:


> The point is I'm getting an issue with VEP 6 ( OS Win 10). It freezes



Is it an empty program you your unloading or what vst, or library's are you using with it when it freezes


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## shelllink (May 2, 2017)

There are just 2 kontakts.. some drums from NI and samples from project Sam. 
I didn't expect anything like that from the libraries. And I don't use any FX btw. I've tried to make a new instance with the same kontakts but it hasn't helped. And it happens when I work on the project in cubase some time ( an hour , more) If I just open and close that project everything is ok.​


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## ChrisFHH (May 2, 2017)

I had not exactly freezes but longer periods of stalling when loading and unloading. 
Switching off Windows Defender (or maybe other Antivirus Software) helped.


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## shelllink (May 2, 2017)

Well.. I'm trying to switch it off now. Although before i mean two days ago it was off..and I had the same problem . I had to format pc, install everything again.. I spent a day with it but nothing helped..


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## novaburst (May 2, 2017)

VEpro 6 appears to be very fussy from what I am reading on forums,

But also library's and vsts have known to course the program to crash,

I am still operating VEpro 5 but using in servers very stable.

My thoughts are VEPro 6 needs an update as it does appear to be inconsistent and very fussy, 

I did not hear so many issue's with VEpro 5 
So the issues are real.

Giving a comparison between windows 7 and Windows 10 would be good to know


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## shelllink (May 2, 2017)

ChrisFHH said:


> I had not exactly freezes but longer periods of stalling when loading and unloading.
> Switching off Windows Defender (or maybe other Antivirus Software) helped.


 Defender didn't help btw :(


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## jononotbono (Jun 2, 2017)

I just updated to the latest VEPro 6 (with OSX Sierra) update and now it's crashing quite a lot. Twice in past hour! It was stable for me before this update. Not sure why I bothered updating it when everything was fine. I guess I assume a release is actually going to work when launched? Here's a Crash report if anyone can decipher what it means?


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## iMovieShout (Jun 2, 2017)

jononotbono said:


> I just updated to the latest VEPro 6 (with OSX Sierra) update and now it's crashing quite a lot. Twice in past hour! It was stable for me before this update. Not sure why I bothered updating it when everything was fine. I guess I assume a release is actually going to work when launched? Here's a Crash report if anyone can decipher what it means?



Hi,
Yep welcome to the world of VEP6 !!!

I had the same issues with Vienna's VEP6 when we upgraded back in January. In fact we lost almost a month's work and revenue over February and March because of it. I had I.T. engineers, composer folk and all sorts of techie gurus over to check it out, and came up with nothing. We were pulling our hair out. Vienna were next to useless.

In the end, we gave up waiting for Vienna to help us, but in March we finally resolved the issue by doing the following (in no particular order):
- Scrapped and sold on our MacPro 5,1 systems, and replaced them with:
- MacPro 6,1 (Sierra MacOS, 8-core, 64GB RAM, 1TB Flash memory) for the front-end DAW workstation (Nuendo, Cubase and Logic, and a fair bit of other front-end stuff)
- MacPro 6,1 12-core, 64GB, 1TB Sierra) primary back-end running our strings, brass and woodwind templates (mainly Spitfire, CineSamples and Berlin)
- A couple of IBM Windows Server 2008 R2 machines with 512GB RAM and 48 CPUs to run all other templates and libraries
- MacBook Pro to run ProTools and other bits and pieces when required
- QNAP RAID NAS with Thunderbolt2 (VEP6 over Thunderbolt is fast and reliable), and 1GB ethernet for the Windows machines. This stores all of our samples, libraries, production data etc on RAID2 SSDs, with separate backups RAIDs).

All of the above seems like overkill, but I was running our studio on 3 maxxed spec 12-core 3.46GHz with 96GB RAM each MacPro 5,1's and a couple of maxxed out MacMini's before. Although they were performing well (except for VEP6), we experimented with the above new setup for 2 weeks (on borrowed machines), and it seemed to work. So we dumped the old kit (well sold it). Seems like overkill / overspend, but we actually saved money because the high-end Windows servers are actually 12-year old IBM 3850 machines (eBay for around £400 each, including 256GB RAM etc - just needed to get a couple of SSD's to get them to boot up and run faster, and cheap OpenGL 1.2+ compatible GPU cards (NI Native Access and some other apps need this to run), and 2nd hand Windows Server R2 license is about £40 from eBay), and the top-end MacPro 6,1's we upgraded ourselves from the basic Quad-CPU models.
I should add that in order to get the faster load times with Kontakt on the old 5,1's, I had SFP+ ethernet installed on the 5,1's and the NAS, and this definitely contributed to our VEP6 problems. Its hard to say if straight Thunderbolt2 and 1GB Ethernet is solely responsible for resolving the issues, but these definitely help.
The only issue we still have sometimes, is that VEP6 crashes at 12midnight. Not sure why, as nothing is running on those machines at that time apart from VEP6 - I keep them running constantly when working on a project, in order to reduce loading times (takes about 30 minutes per machine to load the templates).

Hope that helps, though probably not what you were hoping for 
Jon


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## jononotbono (Jun 3, 2017)

jpb007.uk said:


> Hi,
> Yep welcome to the world of VEP6 !!!
> 
> I had the same issues with Vienna's VEP6 when we upgraded back in January. In fact we lost almost a month's work and revenue over February and March because of it. I had I.T. engineers, composer folk and all sorts of techie gurus over to check it out, and came up with nothing. We were pulling our hair out. Vienna were next to useless.
> ...



Thanks Jon. I don't think there is a problem with overkill. If it helps to be completely bulletproof then why not? Sadly I don't have the economic means to scrap the 5,1 so have to use it for now. I have such a small set up compared to you (a 5,1 that I upgraded myself and a PC Slave I built) but we must use what we have. Since writing my last post, VEPro has gone back to being absolutely stable again so I just can't get my head around what is wrong. I hate having doubts of my system. The reason I went to Mac after spending most of my life using a PC is for OSX and stability. It's annoying that I am having problems from time to time but I'm not sure it's VEPro. It could be my unfleshed Nvidia 960 GFX card and running different screen solutions (despite the card saying it can happily run 3 x 4k screens) using the Nvidia Web Drivers? Could be faulty RAM? I don't think it can be a disk permissions issue as I am solely using SSDs and separate SSDs for everything (DAW, Project, Video, Samples etc) and manually check every folder to make sure they are Read and Write. I could go on but I'm sure you have heard enough about computer problems. If I could afford it I would just get a 6,1 but that has another problem. I would have to upgrade my PCIe MOTU and it just adds another massive expensive just to move to a very out of date Computer that's going to have an upgrade in a year and half. If I got a decent paying job between now and then, I wouldn't hesitate and it wouldn't be a concern at all.

Your set up sounds absolutely immense. If you don't mind me asking, what studio do you run? Sounds amazing. Also, are you hiring anyone? haha! Just messing about!

Jono


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## jononotbono (Jun 3, 2017)

Unbelievably typical. 1 minute ago...


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## mc_deli (Jun 3, 2017)

jononotbono said:


> Unbelievably typical. 1 minute ago...


Feel your pain. Hope you get on to VSL about it.


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## novaburst (Jun 3, 2017)

jononotbono said:


> Unbelievably typical. 1 minute ago...



Hi @jononotbono are you using VEpro 6 to run your existing projects from VEpro 5 if so then I would expect it to be glitch that is kind of a norm with any upgrade.

If this is not the case do you mind telling us your boot sequence when your setting up your projects with VEpro.

just another quick one, does this happen when setting up a fresh project with VEpro does unexpected quit still happen.

I have experienced that once or twice in version 5 I am using PC


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## jononotbono (Jun 3, 2017)

I would never use an old VEPro project with the latest version of VEPro. VEPro 6 always loads before my DAW of choice which is Cubase.

I have been using VEPro for quite a while now and I have only been having problems since the latest update.


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## novaburst (Jun 3, 2017)

@jononotbono seems to be pretty standard to me, hope it sorts it self for you , .........oh may I ask just one thing you are using VEpro as local server on your master too as well as 2nd machine server right, so every plugin and library (kontakt) and so on...... on your master machine goes into VEpro first then into your DAW, so you don't just load librarys and plugins strait into your DAW on your master, just wanted to know if you use VEpro this way.


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## kepler (Aug 10, 2018)

jononotbono said:


> I just updated to the latest VEPro 6 (with OSX Sierra) update and now it's crashing quite a lot. Twice in past hour! It was stable for me before this update. Not sure why I bothered updating it when everything was fine. I guess I assume a release is actually going to work when launched? Here's a Crash report if anyone can decipher what it means?



Hey @jononotbono a year later, but did this ever get sorted out? I'm literally getting the exact same crash error as you. New VEP user, and super bummed I can't get my template up and running! Just e-mailed VSL support and waiting to hear back from them, but seeing if you had the issue fixed somehow?


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## jononotbono (Aug 10, 2018)

kepler said:


> Hey @jononotbono a year later, but did this ever get sorted out? I'm literally getting the exact same crash error as you. New VEP user, and super bummed I can't get my template up and running! Just e-mailed VSL support and waiting to hear back from them, but seeing if you had the issue fixed somehow?



Things at the minute are very stable. VSL (at the time) took my error reports and sent me a fixed version. Get in touch with them as they are amazingly quick at fixing any problems that may occur!


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