Advanced View


The Advanced View offers many new creative options. Take your time to explore these features with the help of our video tutorials and by studying this manual! This screenshot gives you a first overview. If you hover over any widgets, you'll see a tool-tip, providing you with a short description.

The Velocity Histogram in the upper left corner of Vienna Instruments PRO shows the received velocity of every key you play on your keyboard – a nice way to monitor your playing. 24, 56, 89 and 109 are the most common velocity split points of Vienna Instruments sample collections.

It is also a very helpful tool to find the right velocity curve for your master keyboard, as the visual feedback allows intuitive settings. Moreover, you can freeze/unfreeze the Velocity Histogram by double-clicking into the histogram display so that you can get a general image of your playing dynamics.

The RAM/Sample Display shows the current RAM usage and total sample count of all samples you have loaded in all instances of Vienna Instruments PRO.

Optimize will keep the used samples in RAM, all other samples will be discarded. To take advantage of this feature, activate "Learn" and play back your arrangement. "Off" will reload all samples in this instance.

The Output Volume of each Vienna Instruments PRO instance is displayed by the Output Meters in the upper right corner. There are up to 4 stereo channels available for each instance of Vienna Instruments PRO , and additional stereo outputs will be added if more outputs are used (assignable in each Matrix Strip). If there are no additional outputs available (e.g., when working on your laptop without a soundcard), the output assignments are not lost, but routed to the available outputs.

Scale lets you adjust the display size. You can choose between 100% and 200%.

Settings

General

  1. Show Tooltips: Disables all mouse-over tooltips. ON by default.
  2. Auto Cell Naming: Enables/Disables automatic cell-naming when loading presets, matrices and patches. ON by default.
  3. Auto Humanize Matrices: Enables/Disables loading of a matched humanize preset when loading matrices and patches. ON by default.
  4. Auto Humanize Presets: Enables/Disables loading of a matched humanize preset when loading presets. ON by default.
  5. Force Enabled Cells: Loads all cells enabled, when a preset or matrix was saved with disabled cells. OFF by default.
  6. Synchronize Control Map: When enabled, all Controller Mappings and the Real-Time Controller Area of all Vienna Instruments instances system-wirde are synchronized whenever a parameter is changed.
  7. Double-click Disables Cells: When disabled, cells can only be disabled via the context menus. ON by default.
  8. Enable Cells on MIDI Activity: When enabled, disabled cells will load in the background when triggered by MIDI Notes. Default: Disabled
  9. Show PrgCh from 0: When enabled, Program Changes start at "0". Disabled, they start at "1". OFF by default.
  10. Confirm Preset Overwrite: Confirmation Question before overwriting Preset. ON by default.
  11. Confirm Matrix Overwrite: Confirmation Question before overwriting Matrix. ON by default.
  12. Legacy Monophonic Legato: When enabled, all Legacy Presets will load with monophonic legato enabled. OFF by default.

User Interface

Adjust Brightness: Adjust the brightness of Vienna Instruments PRO with this little application.
Play around with the sliders to find the right settings for your screen, you can always go back to the default settings (Reset). The new settings will be applied after the host is restarted.

Remote control

MIDI Driver and RC Setup: Essential settings to use our VI PRO Remote Control App.

MIDI Settings

  1. Middle C: Define C3, C4 or C5 as middle C. Default: C4
  2. MIDI Dump CC: Choose a MIDI CC to trigger a MIDI Dump. Default: Off

Audio Engine

  1. Default Preload:
  • Allows to change the preload (precache) size in number of samples.
  • For normal HDD a minimum size of 16384 is recommended, while a fast SSD drive can use lower settings.
  • Using the "start-offset" setting will eat into the preload, thus a higher preload might be needed when adjusting start offset.
  • Directory Manager offers the possibility to set different preload settings for different disks and/or directories.
  • When Directory Manager settings are applied, this control will be disabled.

  1. Streaming Threads: The number of threads devoted to sample streaming. The default value (4) is appropriate in most cases. Systems with more than one harddrive or SSD drives for sample streaming could benefit from setting a higher value. Streaming Threads define the number of simultaneous reads from the drive.

  2. Mixing Threads (instance): The number of threads devoted to streaming PER INSTANCE. The default value (4) is appropriate in most cases, the threads are split per slots. Systems with more than one harddrive or SSD drives for sample streaming could benefit from setting a higher value. Too many used instances might result in crackling, in which case you should reduce the number.

  3. Preallocated Voices: The number of voices allocated by the first instance of VI PRO. When more voices are required from the playback, additional voices will be allocated dynamically up to Maximum Voices.

  4. Maximum Voices: The maximum amount of voices possible to playback. When this limit is reached, voice stealing will occur, and notes can start dropping out.

  5. Instance Voices:

  • A limit for the maximum number of voices allowed per VI PRO instance. Setting this to a lower value than Maximum Voices allows for voice stealing to first occur within the single instance.
  • This can be useful for polyphonic instruments with long sustain, for example, piano or harp, since these might otherwise start stealing voices from more crucial instruments using less voices, such as a solo violin.
  1. Unlimited Bounce Polyphony: Checking this box will allow an unlimited number of voices to be played back on bounce. Memory will be allocated dynamically during bouncing to accommodate the extra voices.

Global Actions

  1. Full Reset: Resets the entire instrument to startup state.
  2. Disable All Cells: Disables all cells of an instance (un-loads all samples).
  3. Enable All Cells: Enables all cells of an instance (loads all samples).
  4. Auto-Name Cells: Applies Auto-Naming to all cells of the instance
  5. Auto Humanize: Applies Auto-Humanize to all cells of the instance
  6. Reload Samples: Reloads all samples of an instance (can be useful for debugging WIN or OS X memory handling).
  7. Normalize Powerpan: Scales powerpan settings for the entire instrument. Resulting powerpan settings will be spread over the entire stereo panorama.

About streaming threads and mixing threads

Streaming threads are a global setting and the default value (4) will be the sweet spot for most computers.If you experience streaming dropouts, you can increase this value on a powerful computer.

Streaming dropouts sound different from CPU dropouts and can be distinguished like this: when voices shot down with a "plopping" sound, you are experiencing Streaming drop-outs and you should increase the streaming threads. SSD drives will help tremendously in this situation.

When voices drop out with a digital crackle, it is a CPU dropout and you should increase the latency of your soundcard to compensate for the CPU demands.

Mixing threads is a new setting that was added specifically for Synchron Strings. It is applied per instance / system-wide. By default, Vienna Instruments was working with 1 mixing thread until now, meaning that sequential processing of all slots contained in a cell was applied.If you are using multiple slots in Vienna Instruments, like with the ROOM-MIX presets for Synchron Strings, a setting of 2 will be helpful and cut processing time for these presets in half. If you are working with Vienna Instruments PRO for all other sounds, it might help to load the Synchron Strings Presets in the regular Vienna Instruments instances, with a mixing threads setting of 2, and leave your VI PRO Settings as they are, for best performance.

  • Show Licenses: Displays a list of available licenses
  • About Software: Displays information about VI Pro
  • Product Web-Site: Takes you to the VI Pro website

You can also change between Sequencer, Basic View, Advanced View. Clicking on Basic View / Advanced View below the Vienna Instruments PRO logo also changes between Basic / Advanced View.

The Load Progress Bar below the Vienna Instruments PRO logo shows when wave loading is in progress. The loading progress will be shown in all instances of Vienna Instruments PRO, since wave loading is done globally for all instances. The loading progress does not lock up Vienna Instruments PRO, and you can even play the already loaded samples, while loading is still active.