Esession/Virtual Glass Plug-In- Remote Recording

After a few false starts due to the quirks of Logic 8 Pro & the Esession Virtual Glass AU Plug-In (developed by Wayoutware) , I finally got the essentials of Virtual Glass running with master/slave and remote session/transport control between my friend Nate Tschetter in Nashville & me here in Bay Area, California.

H/W & APPLICATION SETUP:

Two remote MacBook Pro's running Logic 8 Pro & both using wireless Airport Extreme's. Because of suspend/resume quirks in Logics audio engine, you have to continually re-awaken the audio processing to ensure you hear the talkback and mix. This was eventually done by permanently inserting the default Logic metronome on playback with the volume near zero so its actually inaudible, but is effectively "triggering" Logics audio-engine. Inconvenient, but a manageable workaround once you understand what is actually going on! This ensures that the A/V bi-directional transmission stays "on"!

PLUG-IN & SYSTEM SETUP:

The Virtual Glass plug-in needs to be inserted on the Master Bus in Logic Pro 8 but don't try and tweak I/O buffers after insantiating the plug and starting the session. This causes a fatal Logic crash! You need to setup up your Sound Control Panel System Prefs and Logic I/O prefs, before instantiating the plug-in and starting the session else you are asking for certain disaster!

REWIRE & TRANSPORT CONTROL:

Enabling a Send/Receive scenario using Rewire in the audio settings of the host plug allows one remote user to control the transport of both DAW's so they stay in SYNC. This seems to work perfectly though only on absolute bar/SMPTE transport locations. The cycle loop info is not sent or updated.

I/O

What's awesome is that I could use my FreeTalk wireless headset as a monitoring interface for I/O within Logic. No other audio I/O required! This requires setting both the system Sound preferences and the Logic Audio I/O preferences to Freetalk USB. Then, you just tweak the input volume in the Sound Control Panel and it works like a dream - without any other audio interface! You can walk around wirelessly, monitor, drop into record and sing in scratch vocal ideas or lyrics without being tied to a studio mircophone. You heard it here first - this is a great way of working and a sub $60 USB2 stereo audio interface! Great for sketching out song ideas where absolute quality does not matter!

Latency Comp

Now this is still the thorn in the producers side...the ideal setup between Logic I/O latency buffer, Virtual Glass latency buffer and the idiosyncacies of Rewire Master/Slave (Send/Receive Sync) are definitely not crystal clear at the outset. After toying with this for hours, there appears to be little help on the esession website. In tests, we could get 2 remote tracks "in sync" on either the source system or the destination system, but never both systems. This may require a very specific workflow approach so that settings are made in the MASTER plug, and tracks are laid at that end. Then new settings are made at the SLAVE end and tracks are laid.

Tracking

We successfully tracked both audio and virtual instruments remotely but the SYNC was not clear and the monitoring experience differed at both ends. We are sending a bunch of questions to esessions and will report back on these fundamental usability issues.