I am dabbling more and more into composing film score type music that is a hybrid of orchestral and synthesis music. I have a pretty powerful main DAW machine and don't see me being able to get much more juice without a hefty investment, which means bucks that I don't have!

One of the areas I've been considering is slave machines and then using Vienna Ensemble Pro. I'm wondering whether anyone here uses this kind of setup at all? Is it straightforward to set up? What kind of spec do you need for the slave machine? Would a used gaming PC with some upgrades work for a slave?

Grateful for any thoughts and advice!

 

I often use my Thinkpad laptop as a slave via Reaper's Reamote. It's just a matter of turning on the laptop and starting Reamote on it. It's just a little program that runs core GUIless Reaper, and showing you which plugins are running and how much resources they use. It works kinda "automagically". All you need to setup is network IP. I don't even have to look at it. You can safely turn off the screen. Of course, you have to have the same plugins installed on both computers. I think this is an excellent way to utilise all the computers you have, when you need more power. If you're going to use just two computers, a crossover network connection will do, but if you're going to use more computers, you're going to need a good quality network switcher.

So yes, any computer will do. Depending on what you're going to run on it, just like with your main computer.

 

at other daw's it wold be rewire ?

 

Great explanation mate. Only one thing to add. Following Reaper uncompromised philosophy ReaMote is fastest compared to Vienna's. But for some reason that means you have to "spend" two licenses, where aplicable.

Vienna works with only one licenses, more complete but a bit slower and hungrier on resources. Also, there's no recent warez version of Vienna's.

 

How does it affect the latency? Can you play live guitar for example and monitor through a vst running on Reamote without any additional delays? What about playing a kontakt library via MIDI keyboard when the kontakt is running on reamote and you're playing your MIDI keyboard on your mai frame machine? If there is latency, does REAPER offset everything correctly if you record that while monitoring, etc...?

In general, can you please share your experience with live monitoring of both MIDI and audio and latency when using reamote. Thank you

 

If you tweak carefully you can get low latencies (on a 1GB ethernet LAN), but there's inevitably latency introduced by the network. I don't know if it's suitable to live playing.

I've tried that and it works, people say in previous versions you couldn't so perhaps not the most stable thing. For sure @SineWave knows much more than me.
There're settings to optimize the latency.

One important thing. With reamote you must put all the effects of a track assigned (or not, in the main one) to the slave. That is: you can't load an VSTi in your master and assign VST effects that work on the slave. Again, Reaper uncompromised efficiency.

 

https://www.musiclab.com/products/midioverlan/info.html

 

Working with a ReaMote slave over the network introduces quite a bit of audio latency indeed, but depending on your hardware you could get a usable latency for real-time use. However, I think its best use is for mixing, when you need some additional CPU power, or when you just want more comfortable CPU usage on your master computer, and the audio latency is not important.

What latency you get when you offload CPU processing to a slave computer is this: network send latency + slave processing latency [it doesn't use the ASIO driver on the slave side, but there must be some additional latency happening here], then network receive + master ASIO latency. So it effectively adds 2xnetwork latency that doesn't have to be that big depending on your network hardware, plus slave processing latency. Maybe a couple of milliseconds plus slave processing latency? If you make your ASIO latency low enough, like 64 or 128 samples, set ReaMote processing to "synchronised" latency, you could get a rather low latency while playing a slave VSTi.

You can read about it here: https://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/ReaMote

Speaking of using a slave computer for playing VSTis, it would be better to just send MIDI to it with ReaStream, or some other MIDI over network plugin/software, like what Mykal mentioned. However, ReaPlugs are free and work with any DAW.

Cheers!

 

Last edited: Apr 25, 2019

completely agree:
some other midi over network stuff :
rtpmidi:
http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/rtpmidi.html
copperlan:
http://www.copperlan.org/index.php/download
midioverlan:
https://www.musiclab.com/products/midioverlan/info.html
ipmidi:
https://www.nerds.de/en/ipmidi.html

have fun

 

@Xupito, there is VEP 6 released by team vr

 

If you don't need audio back to the main DAW with compensated latency using ReaMote or VEP is like killing flies with a flamethrower. Go for these cool MIDI network utils.
But I think the OP asked for the first case.

 

VEP is designed to be able to play VI's on slave with very low latency. A nice thing is it's ability to make instrument presets ie orchestral layouts and add each one as needed during sessions. I use as dedicated fx processor also. It can delay compensate or you can offset if needed. Reamote looks cool too but I'm married to Abe...

 

Wondering myself if VEP would work within Sonar well. I'll have to do some digging.
Also, wonder what happens to your projects if the slave PC crashes. Any way to "flick a switch" to revert back to a single computer hosting the project.
Might be a good thing to do when the project is reaching completion and all the heavyweight plugs are active on it.
Great post, @Bunford! Didn't know about VEP until now.

 

A couple of eLicenser dongles would be your biggest cost using the existing gaming machine. And VEP, I think 7 is on pre-order now.

 

yes, you're right he was. I was just agreeing with what @SineWave said regarding networking midi.
cheers.
.

 

Just bounce the server, and reconnect the instances. Otherwise you'd be loading gigs of samples to the master, the sole reason you off loaded them in the first place.

 

Feature-wise VEP is clearly superior to ReaMote. It should work on Sonar @digitaldragon , but I don't remember by heart.

 

I'm not using any VSTi's, so no sample based instruments in play here. Primarily interested in running some bus processing (reverbs, delays) on the second PC to give the main system some relief. And since some of the things are acustica products, relicensing to a new or rebuilt pc would be a challenge.

 

Last edited: Apr 25, 2019

You can boot the session without the network browser open on slave and use on single computer. If you decide you want to use during a session you can connect to the browser on slave and it will reload all of the plugins. Or if you have the slave open when you open the session on main it will automatically connect and load everything. I love slaves.