User manual

666
Synchronization
Activating VST System Link
3. If you now open the Input or Output Routing pop-up menu, you will find the
specified System Link ports added to the list of MIDI inputs or outputs.
This allows you to route MIDI tracks to VST instruments running on another computer,
as described in the application examples (see
“Using one computer for VST
instruments” on page 668).
The “Use Selected ASIO Ports for Data only” setting
If you are sending huge amounts of MIDI data at once, there is a small possibility that
you might run out of bandwidth on your VST System Link network. This will manifest
itself by notes “choking” or timing becoming erratic.
If this happens, you can devote more bandwidth to MIDI by activating the “Use
Selected ASIO Ports for Data only” option on the VST System Link page of the
Device Setup dialog. When this is activated, the VST System Link information will be
sent on the entire channel instead of just one bit, more than enough for all the MIDI
you could ever hope to use. The downside is that you can no longer use this ASIO
channel for audio transfer (do not connect it to a speaker!), thus leaving you with only
7 audio channels in our ADAT cable example. Depending on how you work, this might
be a reasonable compromise.
Hearing the network audio
If you are using an external mixing desk, hearing your audio really is not an issue – just
plug the outputs of each computer into the desired channels on the external mixing
desk, start playback on one of the computers, and you are good to go.
However, many people prefer to mix internally inside the computer and just use a desk
for monitoring (or maybe not use any external mixer at all). In this case you will need to
select one computer to be your “main mix computer” and send the audio from your
other computers into this.
In the following example, we assume you are using two computers, with computer 1
as your main mix computer and computer 2 running two additional stereo audio
tracks, an FX channel track with a reverb plug-in and a VST instrument plug-in with
stereo outputs.