Dusting off the Signaldust...

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Bump. :D

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The first post in a thread can't be a bump. You'll break the internet!

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I wonder how he managed to do that. Now we have an internet singularity going on here. Not good :scared:

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Frantz wrote:The first post in a thread can't be a bump. You'll break the internet!
Fortunately the internet is designed to be fairly fault tolerant. It will probably recover.

Anyway, cool to see that at least someone (besides me) is watching this forum.

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I drop by often, too, to see if there's any news about, well, just about anything, because everything you release is always worth it. ;)
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

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I've been meaning to ask a few questions and I guess this thread is the one I'll pop in ..


Any chance you'll release Valo? I mean, I have the beta from several years back and it's great sounding, stable and all, but the one instance limit is sometimes a little off-putting .. I can use it as it is, and I do (it's in my secret weapon compartment, far mightier than any pair of nunchakus), but it would be nice if it didn't have that limitation. I understand you've probably come a long way since that one and you might not feel like releasing it as it might not represent your skill level today, but it really is quite something and I'm sure a lot of people would enjoy that.

Any chance of releasing gui-less versions of your plugins? I'm one of the handful who have been missing out on your stuff since you built that framework of yours.. Since the DC chorus? Lots of good stuff! Some of the plugins wouldn't work without their interfaces (the sequencer thingy at least), but then some would.. I'd like to keep this machine running for a few years still but I hate that I miss out on the good stuff ..

In the compressor-thread you said you're aiming for OSX versions and you know someone has to ask it.. What about Linux? It's the future, after all. ;)



Anyways, thanks for all the good stuff, congrats on the forum here and nice to see you've taken the step towards releasing commercial stuff as well, I wish you good luck, not that you need any luck really with the skills you got.

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I'm also all for GUIless version of all plugins, if possible. Even though your GUIs look really great to my eyes and they're absolutely functional and easy to use. But I still often use GUIless Tila 1 rather than Tila 2... ;) GUIless plugins are also more stable, in my experience.

Speaking of GUIs, there are still a second to two seconds delays in initialisation of all of your plugins and it happens always, no matter if you have previously loaded any of your plugins. It's just that delay is a bit too long. Not by much, but it's a noticeable delay. I'm not saying this is something I cannot live with, though. Especially because I really like using your plugins and there's nothing that could stop me from using them except if they suddenly started to crash Reaper, of course. :)

And I'm thankful to the bone for your work, mystran. :hug:
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

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ras.s wrote: Any chance you'll release Valo? I mean, I have the beta from several years back and it's great sounding, stable and all, but the one instance limit is sometimes a little off-putting ..
I could, I guess.. but it's not just dated in terms of sound, it's also dated in terms of programming practices, it's a separate code-base not using any particular framework or anything, so quite messy and realistically trying to provide any kind of support could be quite problematic. I could release it as "unsupported freeware" but I don't really like doing that.
Any chance of releasing gui-less versions of your plugins? I'm one of the handful who have been missing out on your stuff since you built that framework of yours.. Since the DC chorus? Lots of good stuff! Some of the plugins wouldn't work without their interfaces (the sequencer thingy at least), but then some would.. I'd like to keep this machine running for a few years still but I hate that I miss out on the good stuff ..
Hmmh, is this a problem with OpenGL? I've thought about writing a software fallback to allow them to run anywhere, but the work involved in getting acceptable performance out of that is non-trivial (which is precisely why I use OpenGL for the time being).
In the compressor-thread you said you're aiming for OSX versions and you know someone has to ask it.. What about Linux? It's the future, after all. ;)
The Linux audio APIs are not really that great and there is a lot of complications with releasing anything on Linux that isn't open source, so I really don't think it's worth the effort. I've heard some reports that at least some versions at some point during the past few years did successfully run with Wine though; not sure what the current situation is, though.

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DuX wrote: Speaking of GUIs, there are still a second to two seconds delays in initialisation of all of your plugins and it happens always, no matter if you have previously loaded any of your plugins.
Always for every new instance, or for each new plugin?

There's a lot of initialization work to be done in many of my plugins when first loaded, though most of that should stay in memory after that and shared between instances. This way I can keep the plugin binary sizes reasonable (short downloads, etc). I could theoretically add installers to do some of that, but I've opted not to do that so far, to keep things simple.

Anyway, I'm aware that there are some delays sometimes that I can't currently explain. I've tried figuring out what's going on, and I'll continue to keep an eye on it and try to improve it, but I'm afraid there doesn't seem to be any easy way to fix this completely.

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mystran wrote: I could, I guess.. but it's not just dated in terms of sound, it's also dated in terms of programming practices, it's a separate code-base not using any particular framework or anything, so quite messy and realistically trying to provide any kind of support could be quite problematic. I could release it as "unsupported freeware" but I don't really like doing that.
Well it does read 2008 on the tin, so maybe people would understand that it's a bit dated on several aspects. Still, it's great sounding and it has a lot of great stuff, like the way the modulations work.

Please do consider lifting that limit (I don't mind the four voices) and releasing it..
mystran wrote: Hmmh, is this a problem with OpenGL? I've thought about writing a software fallback to allow them to run anywhere, but the work involved in getting acceptable performance out of that is non-trivial (which is precisely why I use OpenGL for the time being).
That's exactly it ("Multitexturing with texture-env-combine not supported by OpenGL."). I think my drivers are up-to-date and this computer isn't that old, 2007 model I think.. I never bothered to ask about it since I figured it's just the way it is, things have to move on, etc. The way I understand it is that by making it work through OpenGL, you make the graphics card do the work instead of the CPU and that makes sense, if I actually had a graphics card capable of doing that, I'd prefer it myself.

I'm just out of luck here, yet I would love to get a hold of the plugins, ..

mystran wrote: The Linux audio APIs are not really that great and there is a lot of complications with releasing anything on Linux that isn't open source, so I really don't think it's worth the effort. I've heard some reports that at least some versions at some point during the past few years did successfully run with Wine though; not sure what the current situation is, though.
Qtractor, Ardour, EnergyXT and Traction, and in a few days Bitwig too, support native VST(i) on Linux, so you wouldn't have to work with LADSPA/LV2/DSSI/the next new thing, if that is what you mean. Loomer, Pianoteq and Linux DSP provide (commercial) plugins on the platform too, and it's the usual 32/64 bit hassle they deal with. Loomer also has some shared library dependencies, but that's about it. I do understand there's simply way too many possible OS/hardware combinations to make providing closed software a simple thing, but I think it's still worth the effort; the 'ecosystem' in Linuxland is very nice overall and there might be a niche market there, simply because there are no 'competitors'.

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ras.s wrote:
mystran wrote: I could, I guess.. but it's not just dated in terms of sound, it's also dated in terms of programming practices, it's a separate code-base not using any particular framework or anything, so quite messy and realistically trying to provide any kind of support could be quite problematic. I could release it as "unsupported freeware" but I don't really like doing that.
Well it does read 2008 on the tin, so maybe people would understand that it's a bit dated on several aspects. Still, it's great sounding and it has a lot of great stuff, like the way the modulations work.

Please do consider lifting that limit (I don't mind the four voices) and releasing it..
http://www.signaldust.com/files/valo.zip - no restrictions build, but pretty much code from 2008 (not sure if I changed something a bit later, but it should be close). I'm not sure why this build doesn't have the copyright/version notice visible, but I don't think it's worth trying to fix that right now.

The current status would be "totally not supported" but I believe it should work, as least mostly.
mystran wrote: Hmmh, is this a problem with OpenGL? I've thought about writing a software fallback to allow them to run anywhere, but the work involved in getting acceptable performance out of that is non-trivial (which is precisely why I use OpenGL for the time being).
That's exactly it ("Multitexturing with texture-env-combine not supported by OpenGL."). I think my drivers are up-to-date and this computer isn't that old, 2007 model I think.. I never bothered to ask about it since I figured it's just the way it is, things have to move on, etc. The way I understand it is that by making it work through OpenGL, you make the graphics card do the work instead of the CPU and that makes sense, if I actually had a graphics card capable of doing that, I'd prefer it myself.
I see. Well, the features I use are from early 2000 but it's possible that some later integrated cards might lack support. I'm sorry about it, I've not received a lot of complaints, so I've been under the impression that it should mostly work except on very old systems.

Unfortunate the texture-env-combine stuff specifically allows things like interpolating between multiple frames and similar things that help keep plugin size and memory use to the minimum (by avoiding huge animation strips). It's the type of stuff that is totally trivial for even a slow GPU, yet quite CPU heavy if done on software, so specifically the reason I've been using OpenGL in the first place.

Pure software fallback is possible (at least with some minor compromises to quality), but like I've mentioned before it's not exactly trivial to make it fast. I'll make a mental note to consider that as a slightly higher priority thing, but it takes quite a bit of work to do properly, so it'll have to wait until I have some time for that. Sorry.
mystran wrote: The Linux audio APIs are not really that great and there is a lot of complications with releasing anything on Linux that isn't open source, so I really don't think it's worth the effort. I've heard some reports that at least some versions at some point during the past few years did successfully run with Wine though; not sure what the current situation is, though.
Qtractor, Ardour, EnergyXT and Traction, and in a few days Bitwig too, support native VST(i) on Linux, so you wouldn't have to work with LADSPA/LV2/DSSI/the next new thing, if that is what you mean. Loomer, Pianoteq and Linux DSP provide (commercial) plugins on the platform too, and it's the usual 32/64 bit hassle they deal with. Loomer also has some shared library dependencies, but that's about it. I do understand there's simply way too many possible OS/hardware combinations to make providing closed software a simple thing, but I think it's still worth the effort; the 'ecosystem' in Linuxland is very nice overall and there might be a niche market there, simply because there are no 'competitors'.
Well, maybe some day, but really as a platform for GUI development, Linux is not exactly very friendly and I still don't see it as high priority as OSX. It's not that I'm afraid of Linux, I used it as pretty much my only desktop OS from around 1995 to maybe 2007 or so, I've worked as a Linux admin (working with both servers and desktops) and I even wrote my very first audio code on Linux.. but in the grand scheme of things, I'm afraid I just don't have the resources to deal with that platform right now..

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mystran wrote: http://www.signaldust.com/files/valo.zip - no restrictions build, but pretty much code from 2008 (not sure if I changed something a bit later, but it should be close). I'm not sure why this build doesn't have the copyright/version notice visible, but I don't think it's worth trying to fix that right now.

The current status would be "totally not supported" but I believe it should work, as least mostly.
Wow.. Just.. Wow..!! A good thing just got better! A big heartful thank you! This is really great, Valo will be all over my tracks. It didn't get the attention it deserved in 2008, but it's just as magnificent now as it was then (sound never gets old, does it) -- except now with the limitations removed, it's even greater.

And by the way, I must say you really have an eye for interface design. Simple, elegant, to-the-point, no wooden panels and faux screws. And things like not putting labels on everything (and increasing UI size with effectively dead space), as things are described with a mouse-over; good design.
mystran wrote: Unfortunate the texture-env-combine stuff specifically allows things like interpolating between multiple frames and similar things that help keep plugin size and memory use to the minimum (by avoiding huge animation strips). It's the type of stuff that is totally trivial for even a slow GPU, yet quite CPU heavy if done on software, so specifically the reason I've been using OpenGL in the first place.

Pure software fallback is possible (at least with some minor compromises to quality), but like I've mentioned before it's not exactly trivial to make it fast. I'll make a mental note to consider that as a slightly higher priority thing, but it takes quite a bit of work to do properly, so it'll have to wait until I have some time for that. Sorry.
No need to say sorry when you just gifted me (and everyone else reading this!) a great synthesizer. Plus, as you just wrote, you got a solid reasoning behind doing it the way you are doing it and you really shouldn't compromise, if it only affects a handful of people and fixing it takes your focus away from innovating the signal processing internals.

I understand it might bother you slightly from a programmer point of view, but it's a minor issue really if it affects only few yet gives a significant performance boost to everyone else.

mystran wrote: Well, maybe some day, but really as a platform for GUI development, Linux is not exactly very friendly and I still don't see it as high priority as OSX. It's not that I'm afraid of Linux, I used it as pretty much my only desktop OS from around 1995 to maybe 2007 or so, I've worked as a Linux admin (working with both servers and desktops) and I even wrote my very first audio code on Linux.. but in the grand scheme of things, I'm afraid I just don't have the resources to deal with that platform right now..
Yea, I understand you totally and agree with OSX being a priority, whole lot more people using that for audio right now and for a long time to come. Supporting Linux can be a headache too, for a whole variety of reasons (ranging from the variety of system configurations to people not understanding there's no one Linux ..). But here's me hoping that day will come, though. ;) With the release of Bitwig, people might be more interested about that platform too. (And if we get pedantic, a lot of things advertised as 'multiplatform' are in fact 'dual-platform'..)



One more thank you for giving an update on Valo, I've been meaning to ask about that for some time and good I finally did -- and even greater you decided to give it! I'm running out of words for praising it. ;) Thank you.

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Just had a quick play with Valo. Have to say I was blown away by the sound.
Valo kicks arsse:) Thanks for deciding to release it.

I do have one question, is 2008 the new "Old School"?

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MRT wrote:Just had a quick play with Valo. Have to say I was blown away by the sound.
Valo kicks arsse:) Thanks for deciding to release it.

I do have one question, is 2008 the new "Old School"?
Well, it sounds quite dated to my ears, but I admit I'm probably biased as I mostly play with the latest&greatest prototype code, much which should in practice be toned down for more reasonable CPU even today.. so .. I don't know. Anyway, if you like it, feel free to use it now.

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Valo is amazing (!).

One small niggle: wheel doesn't work.

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