I recently completed a composition in Sonar and for the first time, hosted the East West Play instances in VE Pro 5. I began the project in Sonar without VE Pro and started having a few audio pops when I had about 3/4 of the final number of instruments loaded. Bumping up the ASIO buffer helped a lot but I still tend to get some glitches from time to time during playback or rendering. I have a fairly powerful system (check the specs in my sig).
 
I decided to try VE Pro 5 and all I can say is "Wow, what a difference!". No glitches, no pops, even with the full set of instruments loaded. The project consists of 39 tracks, all loaded with East West Hollywood Orchestra Gold instruments. Some of the tracks are fairly heavy legato samples, although I did not use the Powerful System sample set. 4 instances of QL Spaces Convolution Reverb are also included. All of the instruments were streamed from disk as opposed to being fully loaded into RAM. With this set of instruments in Sonar, I would normally end up freezing a couple of virtual instrument tracks to keep things running smoothly. I may also have loaded the more intense instruments completely into RAM.
 
Setup
Initial setup was very quick. Configuring the project in VE Pro was simple and very similar to setting things up in Sonar. Once VE Pro had the instruments set up, connecting to VE Pro and routing the tracks was pretty straightforward. I added one instance of VE Pro as a virtual instrument to Sonar. I chose multiple outputs but ended up routing everything in VE Pro to its 1 and 2 channel master bus, so I really only needed on audio track in Sonar.
 
One thing I needed to do was to increase the number of MIDI ports in VE Pro to 16. I have 14 separate Play instances, one for each section of the orchestra. Each play instance in VE Pro is routed to a separate MIDI port. This allows me to load multiple articulations into each Play instance and route a track from Sonar to a MIDI Port and Channel. For example, the Play instance with 1st Violins are setup as MIDI Port 9 in VE Pro. When I route the track in Sonar, I simply set the track to use MIDI port 9 of VE Pro and the correct channel for the articulation. I had 6 tracks of 1st Violin, each with s separate articulation. I also increased the thread count in VE Pro from 2 to 4.
 
Use
I added 4 effects sends in VE Pro for reverb, one for each section and loaded QL Spaces onto each send buss. This is the same way I would set up reverb in Sonar. I did the coarse mixing in VE Pro and like I always do, used automation lanes in Sonar to manipulate CCs like Expression and modulation. It really was very similar to the way I use the console in Sonar. In essence, VE Pro replaced the console for me.
 
Results
I was expecting that using VE Pro would add significant overhead to managing the project, but it really didn't. The performace increase was significant. I didn't have to set a high ASIO buffer and it just worked. And I did this on ONE system. VE Pro was running locally on my DAW, not on a slave PC. It really made a difference for me. I hate being distracted by software or hardware issues when composing (and I design software in my day job).
 
Just thought I'd share my experience. Maybe it will be useful to someone.
 
VE Pro Project

Thanks!!!! Really informative.... will try out as soon as I can afford VE PRO5!
 
 

Thank you Dave - that is very informative and helpful. I'm considering adding VEPro at some point, as I run out of CPU on my main Sonar system.

Let me ask: Are you preferring a multitimbral EWQL Play setup for any particular reason? I tested both multitimbral and individual Play instance, and did not measure any differences.
 
With careful configuration of Play it does seem like i could reduce some amount of clutter in Sonar as there would be fewer synth tracks, as one synth track would receive from multi midi tracks.
 
Thanks again for sharing your findings.

Allan - I have one instance of Play for each section of the orchestra. Each of those contains 1 - 7 articulations. Each articulation is driven from a single midi track in Sonar. I find it easy keep things organized that way. And EW recommends multiple Play instances. Even if I wanted to, I can't fit everything in one instance of Play. Also after reading EW forums, this seems to a common configuration.

Dave - thank you for the clarification. Your blog post on this is excellent, and I think I'll try to mirror that today.I'm currently using one Play instance for each instrument/articulation so that ends up cluttering Sonar with far more synth tracks than necessary. Thanks for clarifying - this looks like good work flow and since Play works fine Multi-timbral that's a good and tight setup.
 
 

Let me know how it works for you!

UPDATE:
I made 2 changes that make working with VE Pro even better:

1. I am now working decoupled. This means that the VE Pro project does not load automatically with Sonar. This is working so well (in conjunction with #2 below) that I saved the VE Pro project as a Metaframe in the same folder as the cakewalk project. This will now be my starting point for new orchestral projects. Since the Metaframe is decoupled I can load it once in VE Pro and then switch to another Sonar project that uses the same template wihtout reloading the samples. Great time saver. 
2. I moved the Hollywood Orchestra samples to a USB 3 SSD. Load times are WAY shorter now. Big difference over 7200 RPM internal mechanical drives.

 For me, this is revolutionary...

I always open the metaframe & not the project first. I do save the metaframe as a project for backup.
Save the metaframes as you would templates for different uses. I only need to load my samples once using my default metaframe, the open or close projects by disconnecting.

Also make sure you learn channel sets.
My default is a 12GB metaframe or project consisting of 16 channels x 8 sections. I make default channel sets for each section (stngs, brass, winds, perc) also master section & busses.

You can click+hold (to select multiple faders) then save them as a channel set.
Then you can swap out or build projects or templates just by importing any channel set you saved..

I don't understand why running VEP on the SAME machine would result in smoother operation, lower latency settings, and higher track counts... wouldn't it all be the same, if not greater (VEP itself) load on the machine?  Does VEP handle instrument loading/cpu management differently/more efficiently than Sonar? 
 
I've always thought that VEP folk are using multiple machines... If it is indeed true that one can have larger Kontakt/Play/O2 templates this becomes my next purchase...along with a memory bump...
 
Thanks Dave and carl... guess I gots me some readin' and thinkin' to do... metaframes?  
 
As a songwriter who struggles with the complexities of routings and zillions of knobs/choices I've shied away from this.  Even have an old 950 cpu box sitting at my friends computer shop doing nothing... maybe it's time... oh but this is gonna hurt my brain.
 
All it wants to do is fire up Sonar and a couple instruments and put my latest climate thoughts to music/voice...