The Sound Board

Vienna Ensemble Pro 8 has been update to v 8.1. It's a free update for existing users.

The changelog is extensive:

https://www.vsl.co.at/manuals/changelog ... semble-pro

Arguably the most far-reaching change is the AI integration:



If this really works, we could be building templates a lot faster from now on. Repetitive tasks can be outsourced to your AI assistant.

Wow, that's actually quite impressive. This might be the first implementation of AI in this field, with which I can't disagree nearly at all. This is precisely the type of tedious task I'd want facilitated on a day-to-day basis. I look forward to other companies (thinking of DAWs here) following tasteful suit.

Yes, I agree. This seems genuinely useful. It can potentially save hours of doing repetitive tasks. That's a good usecase for AI for me to. It's not trying to take creative decisions from the user, but automating repetitive tasks. I hope DAW developers will follow in this path.

How would it work in practice does anyone know?

Paul shows some examples in the video. Of interest to you is probably that you can prompt AI to set a certain cc to activate/deactivate a channel or instance. If you have a template with dozens of instances and hundreds of channels, AI can set that for every channel for you.

How well it works in practice I do not know yet. The potential is huge. Whether that potential can be realized remains to be seen.

Guy, it looks like we will be calling for new template tutorial videos from you.

I just did a small test telling Gemini to create a new instance, add everything from Synchron Strings Pro. Bam, done, after answering several questions if it can do this command and that command.

It created a bus where each instrument was connected. Told it to delete the bus and let each instrument have it's own output. Done.

Told it to add disable/enable automation for CC121. Done.

Adding or editing automation parameters this way is a dream come true.

That sounds amazing Thomas! Can it make adjustments to existing templates?

Yes! It can do a checkup to see if you by any chance have done an error in automation for example. It found a duplicate in one of my instances which were done manually.

I'm still struggling to wrap my head around it. Almost everything I do is a bit fiddly - each Kontakt instance has a variable number of outs in VE Pro, I bus things on a case by case basis. Setting up Kontakt keyswitches and Cubase naming and notepad editing is most of the work tbh. Then when it comes to automation, I set up the first channel manually and the rest is all click and drag, so that's not much of a faff.

So I'm struggling to see what the AI Gods could do for me here that will make a huge difference. I guess I'd need a totally different workflow to make use of it.

A thorough, and well planned video tutorial for the new AI integration in VE-Pro 8.1 would be very helpful, I don't think I see any on YT. I think VSL should post more detailed video tutorials about this feature.