From claire_trikes_aust@iprimus.com.au Tue May 18 17:47:26 2004
Subject:Re: V-Stack for B4, crossplatform questions

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on your VSTi's. I had a similar
problem and below is how I solved it.

In a nutshell, before you go and buy another soundcard see if you can
drive the seperate virtual channels on your existing sound card with
multiple simultaneous copies of either the applicaiton or drivers -
this is what worked for me.

I'd been running B4 for a while on a PC (wihtout screen, mouse
keyboard) for a while for gigs and it has worked great - with a
fairly ordinary SoundBlasted Live! Card. Had no problems supporting
both keyboards (USB) with multiple instruments (B4, EVP73, Lounge
Lizard and a bunch of other VSTi's)but latency was a bit slow - about
25mS.

I decided to move 'up' to a laptop. Then the problems started. On-
board sound on the laptop was appaling (and unbeleivably high
latency). Bought an ECHO INDIGO io PCMCIA sound card. Beautiful
sound and very fast - but the drivers from ECHO would only support
one application - despite the fact they have 8 virtual channels.

Anyway, to cut a long story short. I solved the problem of having
multiple keyboards by running two simulateneous copies of Chainer
(the VST host I use) and getting each copy to launch a different
audio driver. One copy uses the ECHO WDM drivers and the other copy
uses drivers I down-loaded from the net (Wuschells ASIO4ALL). This
has been working quite well but is a slight annoyance to set up each
time.

By the way, this means that I now can concurrently run not only all
of the 'standard' keys programs (Hammond, GPiano, EPiano etc) but
also a huge program called Orchestral (from EDIROL) it has a few
hundred orchestral instruments and the string and brass sections are
to die for.......

(Just for fun I have set up a patch that runs all instruments at
once - hit a chord and you get great 'attack' from the Grand Piano,
then the strings and brass slide in with some Hammond underneath - in
the right place it sounds truly awesome.....- and that's only the top
keyboard ! )

If you have any info on what steps you take to manage the
different "velocity/weighting" curves for using the same volume pedal
for all instruments I would love the hear them.

Best regards,
Claire
Australia

"theb3freak" wrote:
>
> > I run a P4 3gig and the power helps with running multiple VSTi,
> > however its the soundcard that i supsect is not allowing me to
run
> > VSTack and Logic on the same PC. Still working on this and will
let
> > the list know if im succesful > trying 2 sound card setup soon.
>
> I know of someone using a virtual soundcard feature to send VSTack
> output to one "virtual" card and Logic to another virtual card.
I'll
> bet the 2 card setup will do the trick. I'm waiting to see your
> results, but think you'll get their.