Ok, I suggest you set up a MIDI event monitor and check what the KK actually sends out abd what the Virus receives in the input.
Pretty sure there’s some stray control messages.
Beiträge von ozon
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Cubase or some other controller sending MIDI Volume (Controller 7) messages?
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Current version is 5.1.7.0. There is no way to load the firmware without the Virus Control Center, which is not available for macOS newer than 10.14.
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The panic function only helps with hanging notes (which can happen when switching presets while playing) but not when a DSP crashed. It seems that support hasn’t fully understood the problem.
Did you point them to this thread?
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USB 3 and USB 2 are using physically separated wires and connections which are combined on the USB 3 connectors and cables. Therefore the Virus would connect to the USB 2 connector inside the USB 3 socket (check out Wikipedia about the technical details), and it should make no difference to connecting to a USB 2 socket.
However, the most critical part are the hubs. And there are huge differences in operation and performance (look up USB MTT). A USB 3 hub (which also contains a USB 2 hub) might use inferior components for the USB 2 to achieve lower production cost.
Inferior USB 2 components might have an impact on Virus TI compatibility.
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AFAIK though, the TI plugin can't manage your multis and then save them back to the Virus like the Aura plugin does ?
As already mentioned, it doesn’t manage Multis.
Also it can't backup an entire bank of patches in Single mode - again unless I'm talking nonsense.
It can make backups of whole banks. Mode is irrelevant for that.
It also only has one window of patches displayed at a time so dragging and dropping is not as easy - in Aura I can drag and drop from one bank to another.
Have another look… it’s even in the videos I made for you.
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I was happy with it for about 15 years now, but it is not usable anymore.
What changed? (it wasn’t the Virus, that’s a given)
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but for managing your library, Aura every day.
Then you haven’t found out the incredibly cool drag & drop power features plus the context operations of the TI plugin. Once you got used to them, you can’t understand why not every editor offers them.
PS: Some hints OTTOMH:
- Select a range of patches and drag them to another location within the same library
- Swap to patches within the same library by dragging one over the other
- Swap ranges of patches by dragging
- Sort patches with context menu
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Multis 0 - 15 don’t reference patches, they copy them. Thus, if you change the patch in RAM, it will not be changed in those Multi.
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Both the TI plugin and Aura editor can search by name in all the banks.
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I didn't know that, but then again I always store any edits that I make to the single patch to a ram slot and then reference it from the multi which circumnavigates this issue anyway.
Which only works for Multis 16 - 127. It’s really important to understand this difference.
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Aura plug in does way more than the virus TI plug in.
As someone using the TI plugin heavily for seven years, I have to disagree. The TI software isn’t available as standalone and it doesn’t manage Multis, but it has a better organized UI and does a couple of things much better than the Aura plugin. Some of the minor shortcomings can be overcome by future improvements, the more important ones like audio sync issues are simply not controllable by the Aura plugin and require elaborate workarounds.
So while the efforts of Aura Plugins are highly commendable, and their Virus editor is a good solution for some, it’s not a direct replacement for the original TI software and most probably never will be.
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Science left the building…
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Desktop Module (+ controller/synth #2):
- Is it possible to route TI2 aftertouch to something like a mod wheel or pedal?
General Virus Questions:
- Do those of you with the Virus use aftertouch often, or is this something I'm overthinking and don't really need?
- Are there good Virus piano patches out there by chance?
- You can route any source controller to any modulation destination within the Virus synth engine but AFAIK there is no way to change the outgoing MIDI events to something else.
- For me Aftertouch on my Darkstar is hard to control. It needs some force to activate but the difference in pressure for the lowest and highest values is very small. I rarely use it, but it is nice to have in certain situations.
- The Virus is not sample based and therefore doesn’t do Pianos very well. There are a couple of nice EP and Piano synth sounds also preset packs by sound designers such as Ultimate X Sounds which can be really nice for an arrangement. But none of them replace a real piano. There’s a thread about this topic on the forum.
My situation: I own a Darkstar TI2 and a Desktop TI2. Currently the Darkstar is set up in my home studio to act as main keyboard for everything via USB into the computer and then routed from Cubase to other synths. I like the fact that I can switch on just the Darkstar by itself and try something out without the necessity to fire up the whole setup (which I do rarely). Out of space restrictions I’m currently thinking of swapping the Darkstar for the Desktop and using a NI Kontrol 61 keys as main controller, because that keyboard is much smaller than the Virus 61 keys and would additionally allow to have better integration with NI Komplete (which I use rarely as well). So - first world problems. If I had plenty of space I would go with the 61 keys version, no question.
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Appreciate your thoughts and reflections. You’ve embarked on a journey to discover new ways to create music!
If further questions are about Cubase 8.5 setup, they can be posted here. But in general its more useful on forums to open separate threads for unrelated questions. It will make your question more visible to a larger audience, and therefore increase chances to get more answers. And it will later give other forum users a chance to find answers to similar questions.
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IMO
- The emulator is not suitable for the masses.
- Access Music should be more proactive to stay in business after milking that TI cow for 17 years.
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Need your help on this one Oli. This is going way over my head
[…]
The TI route seems very restrictive and takes me away from the Synth Hardware which is what I love. Standing in front and performing. I'm not feeling the TI at the moment TBH.
Ok, this is getting more difficult than anticipated.
On the positive side, you have a lot of different options at your disposal. On the negative side, you have a lot of options to choose from. It really comes down to what your goals are, to find a combo of options that suit your workflow.
Basic difference: Do you want to compose, arrange, record and produce? Then using Cubase and TI will be beneficial on the long run, you just have to figure out the details to adapt it to your personal style. Or do you want to perform live? Then Cubase and TI will turn into an obstacle, sooner or later and you should probably stick to the MPC Live and Virus Multis.
By showing you what the TI can do, I just wanted to open you perspectives and also give you the opportunity to use the software you already have, even if simply as librarian for your two Virus keyboards. Because the Virus Control plugin is a phantastic editor and librarian, which IMO is much better than any third party product. The drag and drop ordering of patches in libraries is something I’ve rarely seen in any other editor/librarian. It is also very stable and doesn’t require cumbersome manual synchronization between the editor and the synth.
HTH
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Hey Oli - slight problem - I don't have a 'Personal Libraries; - Only Public and my actual virus. Any idea why I don't have a Personal libraries ? I tried doing it in Public libraries but it just doesn't list them...
Figured it out - didn't have RW permissions on the Patches folder - added myself with RW permissions and now it works...
Oh… I thought that was something that went wrong on my system and didn’t expect you to run into the same issue as well. But yes, the installer (sometimes) doesn’t set permissions as they should be for user documents.
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The „stressometer“ indicates the complexity or „stress factor“ of the patch, not the current CPU load. A patch with level 1/5 can be played with much higher polyphony (something like 90 or so, we did some tests here on the forum) than a patch with level 5/5 (max polyphony about 6) before voice stealing will occur. Also, the Virus will apply several strategies before starting to steal voices, such as temporal „smearing“ where chords are audibly arpeggiated, envelopes become less snappy and LFOs fall out of sync, as well as audible degradation of complex sounds by reducing the harmonic spectrum which is most obvious on FM sounds.
Also important to know is that voice stealing and graceful degradation are handled differently in MULTI and SEQ modes. It seems that in SEQ mode, Part 1 can use both DSPs while all other Parts are only using one DSP with all odd numbered share one DSP and all even numbered Parts share the other DSP. This knowledge can come in handy to optimize distribution of load for an arrangement.
