First of all congrats on VDL2.  The improvements in all of the samples are unbelievable. I think I was the first one to pick it up in Dayton and it was hard to pull myself away.

I had seen someone mention AU Lab as a good alternative to Kontakt.  Has anyone gotten this to work for them?  I know for more advanced scoring (particularly Indoor arranging) the Banks in Kontakt are desirable, but the price tag is steep if all I need in the meantime is a few more channels.

Justin

PS - These are kind of unrelated but I didn't think they need a whole new topic.  The new forum format broke most of the intratopical links but the topic id's are right.  You might want to get the forum admin to do some SQL wzzardry  to change any link in the old format to the new format.

Also Jim, you mentioned you don't use the IAC driver by default.  Is that because you've found one that works better?  I remember seeing the post but I can't find it anywhere.

Hi Justin! Thanks for the VDL2 kudos, and I'm glad to hear you've been enjoying it!

I haven't personally tried the AU Lab thing, so I can't give any first-hand experience. I've used Bidule many times with great success, and I think it's a cool program. Brady Sark had great things to say about RAX which you can load AU instances of VDL2, as well as record them, plus I think it's less expensive than Bidule. There's a good listing of these sorts of host programs started at:
https://www.tapspace.com/forums/index.php?topic=672.0

As you can imagine, there are so many ways to apply VDL2 within different programs, there's a lot of new things to discover. If you have any findings, feel free to share them with us here.

Regarding your other points, thanks for the heads-up on the broken links. I hadn't yet stumbled across any of those, but the proper authorities have now been notified.... Feel free to let me know if you find any other problems.

Regarding Apple's IAC driver, it works great for one instance, but when you get to the point of needing to send MIDI out to more than 16 channels, there's a bug with Apple's IAC driver (in Panther...not sure about Tiger). You can create more than one ";port"; or ";bus";) in Audio MIDI Setup, but unfortunately, only port 1 works. It was only through much trial and error that I discovered this, and later learned that this is indeed a known issue. Instead, I use MIDI Patchbay (http://pete.yandell.com/software/) which allows me to set up multiple ports that work correctly.

If you decide to use Bidule, you'll find that it also offers its own virtual midi cables (found in the Midi-in/midi-out section of the pallete). So that would be another option there. But then again, MIDI Patchbay is free, and RAX is cheaper...so you might find that to be a better option.