*sold*

[Kriminal]

Well, ive been trying really hard to reproduce this tonight, and no luck at all, and i really gave it some stick. As you havent used OP for a while, maybe it was fixed, i seem to remember it was mentioned a few times a long time back, prob TLS, so it could be a prob that was resovled

For me the error occurred one or two weeks ago, I only have OP that long.

OK, can you narrow it down to any particular synth or think of any other things going on that i can try?

I agree. Although I'll never say host XXX is buggy, I just stop using it. And reporting bugs... I do that when I'm beta-testing or when I've used a product long or intensive enough to feel committed to the developer. Otherwise I usually just find workarounds.

Which is why lots of software is buggy, cos the dev isnt told, just flamed for not fixing things he doesnt know about. If i paid good money for an app, and it was buggy, i'd complain to the bloke i bought it from!

[grymmjack]

So you don't like the default skin? Don't use it. My ORION has every single thing right at my finger tips.

Let's see it bones.

[The Chase]

So you don't like the default skin? Don't use it. My ORION has every single thing right at my finger tips.

Let's see it bones.

http://www.novakill.com/skinz.htm

[BONES]

Let's see it bones.

Them. I've made 6 over the years but I only keep 3 of them up to date, its way too much work for things I no longer use. If the next update requires too much work I will probably drop STEALTH as I no longer use it either. I use LIGHT on my laptop [shithouse screen with really bad brightness/contrast] and NOVA-II on my workstation.

[Sascha Franck]

http://www.novakill.com/skinz.htm

Those don't show anything in terms of screen efficiency.

[BONES]

Except that the mixer channels are less than half the width of the defaults and that seemed to be one of Shane's big gripes. So anyway, here is an example at 1024x768 that shows that I can see the whole mixer and every instrument's toolbar. I can access any effect by clicking on its label on the mixer [insert and send] and I can access any piano roll from the instrument's toolbar. When I need the Playlist I can just pull it up from where it is. Of course on my 1680x1050 monitor I have room for the whole Playlist to be visible, for the Master Section of the Mixer to be right next to the rest of the Mixer and to place my instruments so that none of their UI is off the edge of the screen.

This is the LIGHT skin for v6.2 [sorry about the 16 colour GIF but I was trying to minimise file size]. It is pretty much an identical copy of NOVA-II that has been recoloured.

[Sascha Franck]

Well then, BONES, that's gotta be the most ugly screenshot I've ever seen. Uninformative mixer, all plugins overlapping. Cubase land. Pure shite.

[BONES]

What's the mixer not telling you? The mixer is telling you absolutely everything you need to know. Feel free to show us all how Logic does it. As for overlapping plugins, show me any host that can display them all fully without covering up any other useful part of the UI. At least I get to choose what I overlap, what's minimised and what is fully visible.

[Sascha Franck]

sure will, just not now.

[BONES]

Read what I just tacked on, too.

[Shane Sanders]

Only five instruments with small GUIs are loaded and you are already nearly out of screen space, BONES! Two instances of any NI product and you'd be really out of luck.

Five Function keys in FLS along with a modular approach to screen ergonomics make FLS a clear winner in the screen litter battle.

In FLS, the plug-ins don't have to litter the screen at all. One keystroke (F6) brings up a panel that lists them in any order you want (You can change your mind at any time). You click on the labeled button for the instrument which is a tab about half the size of a penny in height, and voila, that instrument's GUI smoothly shows up for editing in precisely the same screen location that you left it the last time. On a decent sized monitor, you can have about 30 of them available before you need to scroll at all. And when you do need to scroll in FLS, the program actually knows what a scroll wheel is. Click on another instrument tab and the previous one goes away (since you can only work on one at a time anyway unless you have Shiva's arms). There's no need to stack the entire GUI of anything on the screen, ever.

Effects are even more transparent because they live in a logical list that shows the signal flow. You click on the name of the one you want to edit and its GUI appears. Click on another and it appears while the other one leaves. If you don't want to see any of them, just click on the name of it which is a toggle for appear/disappear. If you want to see more than one on screen as in Orion, simply double click the header of the FX panel for that instrument and it minimizes to the size of a standard header bar. All of FLS panels behave this way.

On the other hand, because Rich has made the horrible tactical mistake of slaving the piano roll to each instrument, you're gonna have to move things around a lot the way you have it set up in order to take advantage of your actual monitor real estate. It's going to expand the note editing area based on where the corner of the panel is located unless you have them all full screen (which would mean you can't do any EQ or anything else mixer-related while editing a phrase). So while you have them neatly stacked in your screen shot, you'll have to keep neatly stacking them every time you do anything to a note if you move the panel so that you can actually see the pianoroll. And everytime you add or remove an instrument it's gonna jack up the layout in a different way. Yikes.

In FLS, if you want all windows to go away so that you can see the help file for a third party instrument in a browser you've got loaded in the background, just hit F12. Nice. I'd go so far as to say that in terms of work flow, one could probably scientifically demonstrate that it is superior to Orion if the number of clicks and the ergonomic impact of shuffling crap around on screen were a factor (and those things are real-world issues). Additionally, FLS provides a much more comprehensive set of tools with which to route data to both instruments and effects, not to mention that many things can be saved as state-presets for later recall.

At any rate, I hope my posts help someone in the market for a host weigh the good and bad.

[BONES]

Only five instruments with small GUIs are loaded and you are already nearly out of screen space, BONES! Two instances of any NI product and you'd be really out of luck.

Ummm, 1024x768, hardly anything like an average monitor resolution these days. Although when I had dual 1024x768 I always kept ORION on one monitor and never had any major hassles, even with a dozen instruments up.

In FLS, the plug-ins don't have to litter the screen at all. One keystroke (F6) brings up a panel that lists them in any order you want (You can change your mind at any time). You click on the labeled button for the instrument which is a tab about half the size of a penny in height, and voila, that instrument's GUI smoothly shows up for editing in precisely the same screen location that you left it the last time.

<CTRL+J> brings up a generator list and tells you what the're doing [great for getting rid of unassigned effects], so its sort of the same. You can also minimise all you rinstruments and click on their label in the Mixer to bring them back up too, the only difference being that you can have them all up at once, not one at a time.

On a decent sized monitor, you can have about 30 of them available before you need to scroll at all.

Which sounds great but 20 of the 30 could be one-shot drum samples or something so it becomes a limit that I quickly reached every time I used Fruity.

And when you do need to scroll in FLS, the program actually knows what a scroll wheel is. Click on another instrument tab and the previous one goes away (since you can only work on one at a time anyway unless you have Shiva's arms).

Shame if you want to look at the settings on one instrument and mimic them on another or if you just want to be able to quickly see which instance is set for which sound.

On the other hand, because Rich has made the horrible tactical mistake of slaving the piano roll to each instrument, you're gonna have to move things around a lot the way you have it set up in order to take advantage of your actual monitor real estate. It's going to expand the note editing area based on where the corner of the panel is located unless you have them all full screen (which would mean you can't do any EQ or anything else mixer-related while editing a phrase). So while you have them neatly stacked in your screen shot, you'll have to keep neatly stacking them every time you do anything to a note if you move the panel so that you can actually see the pianoroll. And everytime you add or remove an instrument it's gonna jack up the layout in a different way. Yikes.

I don't quite grasp the logic of that but what ORION does is make it so that you can see all the things you need for a particular task at the same time. I always run my PR's maximised [the default] because I cannot think of a situation where I would be tweaking PR stuff and needing to play with the EQ at the same time. OTOH, tweaking an instrument's front panel and EQ together, along with effects settings for it and other channels, is something I have to do on a very regular basis so I can have all the elements that make up the signal path of a particular channel on-screen at the same time so that I can smoothly move from one element to the next as required. Not only that but I can compare it to other channels whilst I'm doing it and quickly tweak them to accomodate changes too. The difference is that Rich has a deep understanding of music production where Gol, by his own admission, does not. So whilst FL may suit amateurs down to the ground, experienced musicians/producers will see great benefit in the way in Rich has prioritised the layout of ORION.

In FLS, if you want all windows to go away so that you can see the help file for a third party instrument in a browser you've got loaded in the background, just hit F12. Nice. I'd go so far as to say that in terms of work flow, one could probably scientifically demonstrate that it is superior to Orion if the number of clicks and the ergonomic impact of shuffling crap around on screen were a factor (and those things are real-world issues).

Sure, if you want to do things the brain-dead, default way but ORION offers heaps more flexibility in its workflow than Fruity ever could. All you get from FL is workaround after workaround to try to cover for its fundamentally flawed drum-machine paradigm.
Your take on it is very interesting because one of the big attractions for me when I first saw ORION was how much less window clutter there was in comparison to Fruity 2.7. Since then Fruity has had even more window types grafted onto it and looks even more cluttered than it did then whilst ORION has remained as slick as ever, only more customisable.

[M'Snah]

OK, can you narrow it down to any particular synth or think of any other things going on that i can try?

Probably Toxic, but I didn't write it down at the time. If it happens again I'll post exactly when/how it happened.

Which is why lots of software is buggy, cos the dev isnt told, just flamed for not fixing things he doesnt know about. If i paid good money for an app, and it was buggy, i'd complain to the bloke i bought it from!

well... I usually don't like to ask beginner questions. I browsed the Orion forum but didn't find anything regarding this specific issue. Only when it was mentioned here I jumped in to add that it still exists.

[Kriminal]

OK, can you narrow it down to any particular synth or think of any other things going on that i can try?

Probably Toxic, but I didn't write it down at the time. If it happens again I'll post exactly when/how it happened.

Toxic?

that piece of shit..the thing wont even render here

I made a great tune with the update, and took me 3 days to render it, i havent used it since. Maxx is aware of the prob, should be fixed in V3.

[Kriminal]

Which is why lots of software is buggy, cos the dev isnt told, just flamed for not fixing things he doesnt know about. If i paid good money for an app, and it was buggy, i'd complain to the bloke i bought it from!
well... I usually don't like to ask beginner questions. I browsed the Orion forum but didn't find anything regarding this specific issue. Only when it was mentioned here I jumped in to add that it still exists.

trust me, i made my feelings quite clear on the forum about toxic and the problems with it