UVI Falcon - hybrid instrument - version 3.01 released - rumors, ads, praise, mud wrestling and off-topic inside!

[sircuit]

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but it would be really great if we could create unencrypted .ufs Falcon soundbanks for free. That way they show up in Soundbanks, work with search, and can be distributed easily. Then if people want to do commercial encrypted sound banks they can pay for the UVI license to do so.

Just an idea...

+2!! That would be super handy for my own stuff just so I get it sorted and searchable.

+3!!! Also for my own stuf. One ufs to rule all my presets

[sircuit]

I fixed this two weeks ago but the update is not yet released.

Thanks for the report.

Feature requests proposals (since you're preparing a future update):

- in Logic Pro X, when the on-screen keyboard (Logic calls is Musical Typing) is on, it captures key-presses so at the moment in Falcon, when using this keyboard, every time I need to input numerical values, I have to deactivate this on-screen keyboard first.
I know is possible to implement this so Falcon can capture the typed numeric values while the keyboard is on screen, because other synths can do that. Thank you!

- the possibility to modulate (or at least macro assign) the Envelope parameters (Attack - Decay) in the Slice sample player - it's a tremendous tool to introduce variation (in transients) when playing drum loops, for example

[otristan]

You can index/search stuff on the HD folder if you add them to the soundbank preferences page and select indexed

[EvilDragon]

Being able to set polyphony globally (something like "instrument polyphony override") would indeed be a great thing.

[padillac]

You can index/search stuff on the HD folder if you add them to the soundbank preferences page and select indexed

Cool! Is there a way to re-index without restarting Falcon / removing and re-adding the path?

[sircuit]

You can index/search stuff on the HD folder if you add them to the soundbank preferences page and select indexed

A sample preview in search browser (with a future upgrade to preview patches), similar with the one in file browser could come really handy. I mean, without no rating system or description, the search only narrows a haystack but is still a haystack

OK, it took me almost 10 hours but I managed to make an interesting bass generator for techno music (that style of gliding notes, but all the pitch processing is happening inside Falcon - usually this type of bass involves lots of careful pitchbend drawing so it's quite time consuming - now I can get a cool pattern in minutes). And I'd like to take a moment to thank you guys for developing such a powerful tool. I could do this only in Alchemy from all the synths I own.

Now the "but" part: my entire patch was built around one 1-bar LFO synced to "Song" and from there may routings with modmaps via Envelopes.
It would be nice to let the analog envelope be retriggered at any level using the manual trigger (I used a 1/4 LFO again, synced to Song). But in order for these envelopes at program level to be "manually" triggered, I also had to create a dummy osc which receives a 1-bar note, just to get them running - which, I don't know, defeats the definition of "manual trigger" for an object.

During the same patch creation, I also had the idea to be able to generate a note (a G0) using a script and that note to play automatically, whenever the transport is playing. I know I'm asking too much from you, but if is just few lines of code (I did a good half hour of searching in documentation but I could not find a generator fuction, just processors of existing midi data), can you please write a G0 note generator, 1 bar in length and to play as soon the transport is playing? I have some more ideas which could use this kind of "internal" trigger.

Well that's about it (for today

[otristan]

Just override the transport callback and play a note for a bar and voila !

Code: Select all

function onTransport (playing)
	if playing then
		playNote(31, 127, getBarDuration())
	end
end

You can use beat2ms() instead of getBarDuration() when you need tempo based timing but not the whole bar.

[otristan]

You can index/search stuff on the HD folder if you add them to the soundbank preferences page and select indexed

Cool! Is there a way to re-index without restarting Falcon / removing and re-adding the path?

You can right click the Search node and call Reset Database and this will delete everything and start indexing from scratch.

[Echoes in the Attic]

I was really starting to like Falcon, but I've had too many ilok issues and all my ilok plugins are not usable so I'll have to sell Falcon. I hope you guys move away from ilok some day, I'd almost certainly buy it again.

[EvilDragon]

A sample preview in search browser (with a future upgrade to preview patches), similar with the one in file browser could come really handy.

At least previewing the samples is already possible in the right-side browser. See the bottom.


The main browser (when you double-click a part) could also follow these settings, right now it only does so for loops, but not for individual samples. Not sure why.

[EvilDragon]

I think one of the things that irks me the most about Falcon is that it ALWAYS rescans and mounts all the UFS files when it's loaded. This can take too much time especially with a lot of libraries (and yes, I have them all on SSDs), and you're looking for a patch from a particular library, but you have to wait until it actually shows in the Soundbanks area of the browser... This makes Falcon slow to use when inspiration strikes... This is simply a bad design.

I wish all the libraries that were successfully mounted were cached so that they are shown INSTANTLY the next time you load Falcon, and only rescan/remount a library if you don't find it at the location where it was previously. Would be much more comfortable and MUCH faster to use.

[ThomasHelzle]

I think one of the things that irks me the most about Falcon is that it ALWAYS rescans and mounts all the UFS files when it's loaded. This can take too much time especially with a lot of libraries (and yes, I have them all on SSDs), and you're looking for a patch from a particular library, but you have to wait until it actually shows in the Soundbanks area of the browser... This makes Falcon slow to use when inspiration strikes... This is simply a bad design.

I wish all the libraries that were successfully mounted were cached so that they are shown INSTANTLY the next time you load Falcon, and only rescan/remount a library if you don't find it at the location where it was previously. Would be much more comfortable and MUCH faster to use.

I totally agree. I had to not-automount most of my libraries and load them only on demand by manually go to their path.
I find this especially silly since I actually see several ways to solve this:
- Build a cache the first time the library is loaded like you say. Since the .ufs files are monolithic anyway, nothing changes 99% of the time, internally the structure stays the same.
- Since the .ufs files are monolithic, why not include a fast to scan inventory at the beginning of the file and only read that? This is 2018, it can't be that reading in a couple of files takes ages (especially since the internal browser also handles this so bad and if you had already started browsing inside some library, it throws you out back to root level when the slow initialisation is finally done.

This together with the unclear and clumsy saving of files makes the whole experience somehow dumb and I use Falcon much less than I expected because of it.

For instance, I recently had a really hard time with the Bohemian Cello library and saving my changes to a preset for it in a way that would work on reload. To this day I don't understand the logic and lost several recursions of it, even though I thought I did everything right (saving programs, saving multis...).

I mean, Kontakt really is a mess in this regard, but as clumsy as it is, I never had a problem actually saving something and it's up in no time, since it doesn't try to load stuff from scratch each time - it would take half an hour here if it did it the way Falcon does it.

Cheers,

Tom

[EvilDragon]

Yeah, because in Kontakt (Player, in this case), only SAMPLES are monolithic, and programs/multis are in normal folders as normal files, and you can save your modified programs/multis in those same folders, and they show up right there in Libraries tab. There's no "mounting", you add a library and it's there and it stays there until you move it elsewhere, at which point Kontakt asks you for new location and that's it. It's a much better system overall.


Would be great to hear some thoughts from Olivier on this, because this is really one of Falcon's bad points IMO.

[EvilDragon]

For instance, I recently had a really hard time with the Bohemian Cello library and saving my changes to a preset for it in a way that would work on reload. To this day I don't understand the logic and lost several recursions of it, even though I thought I did everything right (saving programs, saving multis...).

The logic is clear: you can't save anything to UFS files. When you save a modified program or a multi (regardless to which library/soundbank it belongs), it goes to your My Documents folder (on Windows: My Documents\UVI\Falcon\My Programs). This separates it from the library it belongs to, which is a really bad decision (it would make more sense if Falcon KNEW that this patch you saved belongs to THAT soundbank, and showed it as user patch in the Soundbanks tab when you open that library!). So you need to take care of that too (either by placing it in a subfolder, or naming the patch so that you know to which soundbank it belongs). Either way, it's too much work.

[otristan]

Just put your UFS folder in the "places" part of the browser and don't auto mount those.
Just need a double click to mount a soundbank.

Regarding the monolith with all the files, it avoid silly mistake where you can remove presets or stuff like that.
Easy to copy and move.

Design choice, different philosophy.