Nothing but trouble..

[MBTC]

Today, the beautiful desktop crawled herself back on to a UPS truck (total shipping expense back to seller, including destination insurance was about $30 US out of pocket for me). I don't regret the experience at all, it demonstrated to me how powerful current soft-synths are on a good PC, and although I do love the sound of the Virus, for DAW work it cannot justify the $2k pricetag. I can only hope someone takes notice of the post above this and turns the next generation Virus into something that I can truly use. To summarize that would mean perfecting "total integration" and fixing latency issues with USB. I'll even take firewire at this point.

[mitchiemasha]

Sorry to hear you gave up on the virus. Goodbye!

[MBTC]

I only gave up on it in its current incarnation, not permanently. I'll follow it's progress and buy again if the latency issues are overcome.

[feedingear]

As I stated earlier - no latency issues for me, if it is set up properly.

[boborulz]

Same here...

[MBTC]

I set it up according to Access' recommendation for my host, and the latency persisted. Beyond just the latency, the performance of VC inside the host was atrocious, just interacting with it using the mouse was a nightmare (and this is a Core i7-965 with 6GB, Win7 64bit). It's possible that those of you with no latency issues are getting good results with the 32bit driver and the 64bit still has bugs to work out.

Either way, I'm glad for those of you it works for -- all things considered, including the disappointing polyphony, I just decided it would not be worth the hassle for me in its current form.

As I said, I'm not giving up completely. I'd love to incorporate the great Virus sound into my music someday. My guess is that if the next iteration of the product supports the full throughput of USB and the software becomes a bit more stable, Total Integration might become a feasbile option for a lot more folks (including me).

[mitchiemasha]

easy fix. Try using cubase instead of FL. I have FL but would never dream of tryimg to use it to control my studio. It just doesn't have the lil extras for Devices.

For instance

I've naily finished TI'in my CS2x. Has took me ages to write the scripts in cubase, thankfully it figures out the sys ex, hexidecimal numbers for you, in the midi device manager. You can actualy get the tune em up software and cubase to run together so now thanks to a lil midi controller bay on my carillon I can tweek and edit, store and reload all of the sounds from my aged yamaha with out having to go anywhere near it.

All that is taking the time is writting the patch names. Was extremely easy to suss out and I can also share the Script with other CS2x users when Finished.

FL is great but I would never try using it other than with soft synths.

I bought my virus because it's the best and I'm proud to own one.

[MBTC]

I understand what you're saying, it's just that converting my workflow to another DAW (and getting up to speed on it in the process) is not really an easy fix. I did consider that (based on feedback from others) most of my latency woes might have been alleviated if I were using Cubase, although I read about some Cubase users having issues with it too (as well as Logic, Sonar and Live users), so I wasn't quite sure that was going to be the real solution.

I have considered switching to Cubase or Live at some point, its just that the timing of this particular Virus purchase was not the right time. I had 30 days to evaluate the virus and make a decision, which with my work schedule is not enough time for me to spend more money on a new DAW, get up to speed on it, then figure out if the combination of the two are going to be something I'm happy with in the long term. A better path would be for me to learn Cubase at some point down the road, then try introducing hardware into that equation.

But again, if I were in any way involved in pro music or even aspired toward pro music, I would be able to dedicate much more time to experimenting with DAWs, different setups and finding what works.

I regret the Virus is not in the cards for me right now, but maybe one day. FL is not the greatest out there, I'm just so familiar with it that it's never in the way, and for a hobbyist type that only uses softsynths its a great host.

[mitchiemasha]

Id's say stick with FL for that then but if you ever want to branch into hardware I'd pick up another daw.

[DIGITAL SCREAMS]

Originally Posted by MBTC

The first thing I did after unwrapping the Ti2 was download OS4 and load it up, then after remembering hearing some horror stories I backed off the beta and installed the last public release version (actually 3.3x.. dont recall version exactly). That experience in itself was troubling, because of course the back-level version (OS3) was not smart enough to clean up all pieces of the beta version (OS4). This sort of installer-snafu is very common in software shops -- beta these days means "try at your own risk" so some of the testing is short circuited in favor of getting it in the hands of the risk-taker user base. The difference these days is that there has been a trend of off-loading the quality assurance process to the customer under the premise of a "beta" release. I went to Access's site, and it seems this OS4 "beta" was the first release I was encouraged to download. Back in the good old days of higher quality software, beta software used to only go out to designated customers who were willing to test software in exchange for something in return; it would have been arrogant to release software into the mainstream without investing properly in alpha (inhouse) testing. Today there is a trend of "customer is our test bitch, why pay?".

For example, back then, if I tested Access' software and provide them useful feedback, I should then get a free Virus Ti2 in exchange for my time and experience with the product. If I examined at how many hours I spent dinking around with this synth to get the beta working right, then multiplied that number by the hourly rate I charge my clients, Access owes me a free Virus and about seven grand. So at that point I cannot justify giving them two grand for the priviledge of being their beta tester

All of that said, I want to make clear that I loved the sound of the Virus, and being a fan of subtractive synthesis above any other type (actual sound design and creation is important to me), I definately appreciated the knob interface on this desktop module. The polyphony was a bit weak, I loaded up some sort of D50 Digital Piano sound (I know, I know.... why the faerk would I want to emulate a 1980s digital synth with this thing??? Just out of curiosity)... But this sound was showing as a 5-bar patch! This means with only a slight amount of handi-work on the keyboard, I was able to rob it of polyphony fairly quickly. So for purposes of that sound, the Virus felt like a monophonic D50! This is absolutely laughable compared to what my PC (currently a Core-i7 965 running Windows 7 64-bit) can do with a mediocre soft-synth and achieve the same quality sound.

Now when you read the last few sentences there, please don't think that I am saying a Virus sounds no better than the Roland D50 did. I'm also not saying that softsynths sound better than the Virus. The Virus, by itself, sounds better than any softsynth out there. But the advantages it brought to my particular table did not justify the $2,200 US pricetag once I factored in the latency issue. And by adding high quality FX plugins to soft-synths, with certain sounds, I can match or exceed the virus sound (at the expense of CPU, but my PC's CPU resources 'runneth over' whereas Virus polyphony does not!... obviously they see the softsynth movement as a threat or they wouldn't bother with total integration to begin with, right? Let's face it, softsynths threaten hardware and the difference diminishes month over month). More importantly, in a complicated mix I am unlikely to be able to tell the difference between a virus and a good quality softsynth+fx.

I did realize that for pads and sounds with slow attack, I could probably find a way to work enough beautiful sounds into my mix that I could get some use from it even with latency problems, but the latency issue, lack of quality control in the software, and other issues simply made the pricetag not worth the returns for me.

One other bit of food for thought -- it seems that despite the "USB 2.0" marketing, the TI (and repackaged same TI2) actually run at the USB 1.1 max speed. So maybe the next generation of products will have a data bus that reduces the latency enough to be usable? It's just hard for me to believe it is purely a host issue -- latency should be a matter of the driver, the hardware capabilities (USB 2.0 in this case), and in my research the latency is not DAW specific (if it is, I'd suggest to the Access QA team that testing and certifcation with more DAWs translates to more sales). I've seen users complaining across many hosts, at the end of the day VST is VST, USB is USB, and if they aren't getting proper coverage on the platform (Windows) that holds more than 90% of marketshare, something might need looking into. Also some might consider my Windows 7 64-bit setup dicey, but that argument is no longer acceptable since Windows 7 has been the fastest selling OS in history, Microsoft is the second most profitable company in America this year kicking sand in Apple's face, and 64-bit adoption has been amazing over the last couple of years, even starting with the seemingly jinxed Vista.

I do hope they find a way to address the problems I had, and be careful to fund their own testing process rather than using the customer as a free tester. I will keep an eye on progress and perhaps be a future customer?

Oh man.

Sorry to hear your woe's but the TI2 works fine for me in Cubase 5.

Virus hardware and software is very solid on my system. Its impossible (given the complexity of peoples set ups these days) trouble shoot your issues. I'd say your sequencer and 64bit system are not compatible. Even with a '5 bar patch' on your virus you should get ample poly - are you getting this even when you've disconnected all midi/usb cables from the Virus?

DS