PRO TOOLS NOTES

VST Instruments in Pro Tools

Published in SOS July 2002
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Technique : Recording/Mixing

Screen 1: Ugly VSTi Interface uses the MSP-PI DirectConnect Plug-in.

Pro Tools users have looked enviously at those who can run VST Instruments for long enough, and this month we explain how it's now possible to run them within Pro Tools.

I guess that one of the most popular requests amongst Pro Tools users would be support for VST Instruments. This month, an email from an SOS reader asking about the possibility of using HALion with Pro Tools prompted me to investigate new technologies that make it easier to integrate 'other' software instruments with Pro Tools.

First off, Pro Tools doesn't support VST Instruments or Rewire directly, and probably never will. However, Digidesign have DirectConnect, a similar technology to Rewire, which enables audio from other stand-alone music programs to be routed internally into Pro Tools (TDM or LE). I wrote about this last year in my three-part Pro Tools series, which you can read online at: www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr01/articles/protools.asp. DirectConnect has been further improved this year with a version that supports reduced latency, which can be download

Quick Tips     If you need to add a new track when mixing, it's often much quicker to select a current track and use the Duplicate Selected Track(s) command instead of New Track. You'll need to delete the audio from the new track (triple-clicking selects all), but you'll save time because your basic channel plug-ins/sends and null automation settings will already be there. In order for Pro Tools TDM's single-key commands to work, the Edit Window must be active, which becomes particularly apparent when you work with two displays and don't have to actively swap between Edit and Mix views. Also, the state of the toggle switch for single-key mode is stored on a per-Session basis, so if you open a Session and they don't work, check the switch. Emagic's Logic 5 has joined the likes of Performer and Pro Tools in gaining the ability to import and export OMF files. OMF (Open Media Framework) is a generic project/song file format that's designed to facilitate the process of moving your work between different applications -- a bit like an audio equivalent to the Standard MIDI File.

ed from www.digidesign.com/download/dc.html.

DirectConnect is great for many applications, but the VST Instruments style of working (where the soft synth is opened up within the main audio package like a plug-in) has some distinct advantages: it's less fiddly, instrument settings are recalled with the song file, and the process of automating parameters is simpler. There are TDM plug-ins that behave just like VST Instruments except that the instrument code is running on Pro Tools' DSP chips instead of the host CPU: examples include Access' Virus and Indigo, and McDSP's Synthesizer One. Until recently the discussion ended here, but two new options have appeared: VST 'shells', which I'm going to look at in this column, and HTDM, which I'm going to discuss next month.

If you haven't come across them before, VST 'wrappers' (or 'shells') are plug-ins that run within applications not able to support VST plug-ins directly, like Pro Tools, and allow a VST Instrument to be launched from within the wrapper. So, effectively, a VST wrapper sits between Pro Tools and a VST instrument and allows communication between the two. Now, if some bright spark were to code a VST Instrument wrapper that could take a MIDI input (using OMS on the Mac) and output audio via DirectConnect, suddenly you could use almost any VST Instrument with nearly the same level of Pro Tools integration as you could with Reaktor, for example. And this is exactly what's happened -- the VST wrapper is called Ugly VSTi Interface, and the bright spark is MAX/MSP programmer Leigh Marble. Best of all, it's free.

Ugly can be downloaded from: www.netspace.org/~leigh/max, though you'll need to make sure that Pro Tools is set up correctly to use DirectConnect before you can use it. DirectConnect works in both Pro Tools LE and TDM, and even Pro Tools Free, but it's currently only available to Mac users. If you're not sure if your system is DirectConnect-ready, check the System Folder for 'Digidesign StreamManager' (in the Extensions Folder) and 'DirectConnect' (in the DAE Folder's Plug-ins directory). If you don't have these files, you can either run the Pro Tools installer (DirectConnect is part of the basic install), or download them from Digidesign's web site. Every DirectConnect application has its own Pro Tools plug-in file, and Ugly comes with the MSP-PI file that must be dragged into your Plug-in folder within the DAE Folder.

To test Ugly, I downloaded a freeware VST Instrument called Cheeze Machine (which can be downloaded from: http://bigtick.pastnotecut.org). I created a VST Plug-ins folder in my Pro Tools folder and copied Cheeze Machine across, although this step isn't actually necessary.

Start a Pro Tools Session and create a new stereo aux input track. In the first insert slot, choose the MSPStereo plug-in, which is the link between Ugly and Pro Tools. Pro Tools may take a moment to add this plug-in, but

Screen 3: Audio Output settings in Ugly VSTi.

afterwards you'll see the DirectConnect Plug-in window for 'MSPStereo' (see screen 1) with the pop-up selector reading '(no links available)'. The next step is to run Ugly VSTi Interface (see screen 2). Click on the Output Options button and set Output Device to DirectConnect and Output Channel to DirectConnect1 (see screen 3).

Click Load Plug-in from the main Ugly window and select your VST Instrument (in my case Cheeze Machine) from the file selector -- the instrument should load and display its control panel. In Pro Tools, set the MSP DirectConnect plug-in to MSP Stereo I/O 1, and finally, to make sure that the audio is getting into Pro Tools, arrange your windows so you can see both the Pro Tools mixer and the Ugly window. Make sure the aux channel's fader is up on the Mix window, and you should be able to hear some sound when you click around in Ugly's keyboard display.

As Pro Tools uses OMS for MIDI, it can take advantage of OMS's IAC (Inter Application Communication) services. Unless you've changed any IAC settings in the OMS Setup application, you'll probably already have an internal MIDI buss called '(infinity) IAC Bus #1'. Create a MIDI track in your Pro Tools Session and see if this entry is there in the track's pop-up output list. If not, you'll have to go into the OMS Studio Setup application (from the Setups menu), and activate an IAC buss by double-clicking the IAC driver icon.

Once you've got a MIDI track with an IAC buss output, switch back to Ugly and set its MIDI Input Device to the same IAC port and channel -- your Pro Tools MIDI track will now have control of the VST Instrument. For a more detailed look at setting up this kind of arrangement, check out the link above to my April 2001 article.

Using Reason & Pro Tools Together     In addition to VST Instruments, something else I'd like to see supported in Pro Tools is Rewire, enabling me to stream the audio output of Reason directly into Pro Tools. And there's some good news -- the author of Ugly VSTi Interface will soon release Refuse, a commercial Rewire-to-DirectConnect converter that will handle up to 16 audio channels, and also be able to lock transport control and improve synchronisation between the two applications. I'm fairly confident that I'm not alone in regarding this as fantastic news. In our studio we currently have the main Pro Tools machine sending Beat Clock to an iBook running Reason, and also to another copy of Reason running on the Pro Tools machine itself. The tedious part is having to route the audio output from both copies of Reason to the headphone jacks on both Macs. Quality issues aside, the biggest pain is that when we want to record into Pro Tools for mixing, the process has to be repeated in several passes since you can only record two tracks simultaneously using this method. With Refuse it should be possible to record all (or at least up to 16) Reason tracks in a single pass, and if your processor can cope, there's really no need to record the Reason audio tracks into Pro Tools, other than for peace of mind. I've got high hopes for Refuse and will be taking a more detailed look at this clever program in a future Pro Tools Notes once it's been released.

Although Ugly should be compatible with most VST Instruments, I can't answer the original question of whether you can run HALion with Pro Tools, since I don't have a copy myself. I'm guessing it suffers the same problems as trying to run HALion with Logic, for example: lack of multiple outputs, not being able to load and save patches correctly and so on. But if anyone manages to try this out, I'd be grateful if you could let me know by sending an email to sos.feedback@soundonsound.com.

Next month, we'll be continuing the theme and looking at Digidesign's new HTDM technology, which will hopefully bring a host of directly integrated software instruments to Pro Tools.