Dewdman42
Senior Member
I just sat down to test out the new AU3 plugin in VEPro7. I wanted to report my experience, which is overall very favorable, though there are still some rough edges for Apple to work out in LPX.
- Was able to play perfectly a 90 track score into a single VEP instance, using 8 ports. YAY!
- First, just want to say, performance skyrocketed to supremely better using the VEP-AU3 plugin, compared to the multiport macro approach from before into a single VEP instance. I will be retiring the multiport macros for good soon. See new performance graph, this beats everything I have tested to date! https://vi-control.net/community/threads/daw-performance-test-results.82659/
- As of now, Apple has limited LogicPro to 127 midi channels through AU3 instrument channels, per VEP instance. Hopefully they improve that in the future, but I'm not hopeful due to ancient code in the enviornment.
- The easiest way right now to use this feature is to start out with VSL's AU3 templates. For now. The reason is because you have to manually create some mixer channel strip objects in the environment in order to have multiple ports. At least for now. Hopefully Apple will come up with a more elegant way to configure that. EDIT: I have provided some improved templates and instructions to easily create your own templates here: Templates and Instructions
- All Notes off doesn't work right in LogicPro now, it doesn't send allnotesoff to all ports, only to 16 midi channels, I guess on port 1. EDIT: Not sure now if this was fixed in 10.4.6
- When I create track stacks of some of these multiport tracks, it gets a little confusing because basically a completely useless VCA fader or BUS strip is created for the folder. Its useless because in this case we're grouping midi tracks into a folder, but not the actual audio output. Hopefully Apple will think that through a little more since its confusing and clogs up the mixer with useless channels. But basically the overall mismatch in my opinion is the disconnect between the source midi tracks and the returning audio channels from the instrument. In this case you can have up to 127 source midi tracks feeding a single VEP plugin instrument, which then can bring back audio through up to 16 stereo return channels of its own. Those are the only busses of any usefulness in LogicPro/VEP scenario. When you put hte source midi tracks into folders for organizational purposes, that's great, but LPX assumes you want them either summed or not, creating either a bus or a VCA fader channel in each case...but in either case those faders have no effect on anything whatsoever. So this is where the LPX paradigm in general is a bit of a mismatch from the reality of multiport AU3 instrument plugins and using large multi's in general.
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