New Virus TI2 kb

Hi all,

First post here, new owner, all that.

Buying the Virus was very much an impulse buy. I never had the occasion to play an Access rig before, for various reasons, so I was curious about the TI when I saw it at the store.
To cut a long story short, I went there with a few names in mind that I could fetch, but I sat down playing this thing for two hours, and left the store with it It's one very fine sounding piece of gear... Sound-wise, I was floored.

I have to specify I knew nothing of the Access "environment" as such, meaning Total Integration and co. I was just enamored enough with the sound of the beast to get it right there and then.

So, yeah it sounds the part. Some sounds I don't think I've heard before, and that's saying something.
As for actually working with it in a DAW environment, I don't remember as tedious an experience, and I've been doing that a long time...

As so many others, I've experienced glitches galore, synch loss, the works. Not sure, though, that only the VST is at cause here.
Based from the few tests I've made, I'd rather lean toward the DSPs wreaking havoc when they're overloaded, i.e. when polyphony is exceeded, or many parts playing at the same time.

I did a whole track, entirely with the VST, experienced lots of problems, then switched the project to pure MIDI, replicating the multi part ensemble as set up in the VST as a Multi on the synth, and playing it over MIDI without any VST loaded. It was almost even worse. Timing problems, sound glitches, etc. And that's over the Analog out, not audio over USB.
So I think the internal DSPs are more to blame than anything else.

So, floored as I was with the machine to begin with, disappointment crept it. Sure, it sounds incredible. Is it actually practical to use? I think not, even though there are workarounds to most problems - if you're in a studio environment, you sequence your track and then bounce the parts to audio one by one when the project is done. It's quite tedious, but I don't see any other solution right now.

It seems a lot of things are rather piss-poor in their implementation, I don't mind saying.
I think I'll keep the synth, but do regret its many hindrances so far.

Before the USB gurus wake up, my DAW is perfectly functional, running Cubase 6 64bits in W7, I run tons of very demanding VSTs without a hitch (Omnisphere, etc. Heavy stuff), and I don't have one single problem with it. The crap then lies with the Virus. Not the DAW.

Cheers

Indeed.

While an unexpected bad surprise, the fact is the vast majority of users seems to experience this, at one point or another, in whatever specific shape.
What is a bit irksome is that there are one or two guys from Access over in the support forum, saying they very seldom, if ever, ran across such sync and glitches problems. My butt.
I call that PR propaganda. Considering the quite high percentage of users with such problems, it's very unlikely they haven't had those themselves.

It gets even better, as rendering track by track to audio wav does include, at times, clicks and glitches.
Typical situation of an unfinished product, if you ask me.

They should be thankful (and, yes, also congratulated) the synth itself sounds incredible, otherwise it'd have been a no-brainer and I would have returned it in a heartbeat.

-Addendum: now that I have installed VC, my previously flawless Cubase 6 now crashes every time on exit. This is getting ridiculous. To put it mildly.
Some devs at Access should be fired on the spot.

Thanks for the advice. I made sure, though, that I got a fully free USB port, so that's not really the problem.
But you're quite right, using it pretty much these last few days, I have determined to the best of my knowledge that the problem instead lies when you ask the synth to perform too much, i.e. multiple charged tracks running at the same and it tries to decide which polyphony to allow first. Something like that.
Soloed tracks are, by and large, fine when you bounce them to audio, except for some weird stuff with automation at times, even if the track is soloed.

Ah well. I guess I'll have to make do with the limitations, the sound is worth it.