Poly-Ana 1.0 New VA softsynth. 1 week full functioning demo

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I've been playing around with the 1.0 demo. I have to say I'm awfully impressed with the sound. I may have to pick this one up as it matures.

...because some of it reeks a bit of work in progress at the moment. I managed to crash it twice in the first half an hour of testing. The first crash happened as I was sustaining a big pad with a pedal and moved outside cubase to another window. (in fact I was just typing a message to a friend while playing the pad that "this synth rules dude you have to tr.." *crash* "oh shit". :lol: ) Cubase SX3 froze and I had to restart it.

it crashed the second time when I was simply browsing through some of the more adventurous presets. The synth engine went in some kind of infinite loop and there was nothing I could do about it. This time it didn't crash the whole host, simply had to unload polyanna.

(Cubase SX3.1, latest version in a rock stable system.)

OK the GUI is big I can live with that, and the parchment theme makes things readable, but it has one seriously annoying "feature". When I open the gui it completely re-initialises itself, and this takes a good while every single time. This happens *every time* the GUI comes on the screen, whether from outside the host or from a different workspace. From programming my own plugin I know this is a trade off with bitmap mem usage vs. drawing the GUI on the screen, but how about you initialise the GUI bitmaps in constructor instead of in open()? it would make the synth feel much more robust and completely eradicate the slow opening of the already pig/big GUI. These days we have enough memory to keep the bitmaps in all the time so you wouldn't have to resort to the unnecessary mem saving by initialising the bitmaps in open(). (I'm speculating on your GUI code here, but I suspect I'm on the right track)



The midi learn implementation is the best I've seen in any synth to date.

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Thanks Kingston. I appreciate your comments.

In all honesty, I think all software is forever a work in progress. GOOD software anyway. But you're right, there's room for improvement and some buggy behavior still.

There are some states it can get in where, either something is going way out of range, or maybe a denormal bug is coming into play and performance suddenly collapses and stays there. I've noticed this particularly when making random patches in hosts that do that. I'm on the case but it's a hard bug to track down as it's hard to reproduce. For now, if performance suddenly drops just reload your project because once it "breaks", it doesn't get better until the instance of Poly-Ana has been reloaded. I do expect this will be fixed completely, soon.

I haven't seen it crash while switching to something else, but could be possible. I'll torture test it more, though I've certainly sent people messages while using it.

You're absolutely right on the GUI speed vs memory footprint issue and the rationale I used there was: Some people NEED as much RAM as they can get (I don't, I'm not a big sample guy, but to those who are RAM is a big issue.) So Poly-Ana gives back all that GUI RAM (I think it's about 40 MB) when the interface is closed, letting you use it for samples. So the idea is you only lose the RAM to the GUI when you can see the GUI. If the sound is all set and you don't need the knobs, then why hold all that RAM hostage? (And GUI demands from other products are comparable here, Poly-Ana's memory footprint isn't unusually big even with the big shiny knobs. ;) )

That said, it only takes a couple of seconds to load on my 6 year old P4 box. I hardly notice it. What kind of CPU are you on?

I suppose I could make this an option and then everybody will be happy. Yeah, should be easy enough, consider it done for the next version (probably before the end of the month, updates are frequent at AQ.)

And thanks about the MIDI Learn. I've wondered why others manage to make it so much more complex. I do think I should probably add an editor, so you can see them all at once. (But then you can use a text editor on the .pam files too!)
Last edited by AdmiralQuality on Fri Apr 06, 2007 11:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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AdmiralQuality wrote:That said, it only takes a couple of seconds to load on my 6 year old P4 box. I hardly notice it. What kind of CPU are you on?

I suppose I could make this an option and then everybody will be happy. Yeah, should be easy enough, consider it done for the next version (probably before the end of the month, updates are frequent at AQ.)
cool. I've noticed the frequent updates, hence the detailed report. ;) The CPU is athlon X2 and it opens the GUI in about a second, but I personally prefer insta-load as I switch around the host editors/mixers/screens awfully often. 40mb is peanuts for a GUI these days. even my small one eats around 10-15mb.

I didn't quite figure out the oversampling bit on the options. Seems to default to 4x setting, or is it per patch? doesn't seem like it's saved as a global option...

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OS setting is per patch.

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Ah. In that case may I suggest a switch somewhere on the main GUI? right now it's hidden behind two pages.

Also, an additional option on the oversampling setting would be quite kosher: "auto-mode" for the 8x setting for off-line rendering - otherwise known as the getCurrentProcessLevel() where returned 4 indicates offline. At least Cubase/Nuendo and FL studio support this with grace. maybe others too.

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Kingston wrote:Ah. In that case may I suggest a switch somewhere on the main GUI? right now it's hidden behind two pages.
Agree.

Also, an additional option on the oversampling setting would be quite kosher: "auto-mode" for the 8x setting for off-line rendering - otherwise known as the getCurrentProcessLevel() where returned 4 indicates offline. At least Cubase/Nuendo and FL studio support this with grace. maybe others too.
Interesting, I did look into a way to detect that but didn't find a suitable solution.

Also, the oversampling setting is really part of the sound now, it affects the sound and fine-tuning of the filters, that's why it's saved with the patch. Sometimes the lower quality is a feature; who's to say someone doesn't want a particular patch to sound low quality? So for those reasons I decided the OS setting goes in the patch. It's not meant to be a transparent thing, and I don't want it automatically imposing some setting on you just because you're rendering. Set it where you want for what you're doing. ( Or do like I do and ignore it and always leave it at 4x. :) )

Thanks again, good suggestions.

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AdmiralQuality wrote:Interesting, I did look into a way to detect that but didn't find a suitable solution.
I check it once for every processreplacing() (NOT per sample :lol:). Works and doesn't notch the CPU at all.

but yeah, obviously with upsampling related parameter scaling an auto mode might lead to surprises with something as complex as your synth.

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Kingston wrote:
AdmiralQuality wrote:Interesting, I did look into a way to detect that but didn't find a suitable solution.
I check it once for every processreplacing() (NOT per sample :lol:). Works and doesn't notch the CPU at all.

but yeah, obviously with upsampling related parameter scaling an auto mode might lead to surprises with something as complex as your synth.
Yeah I just didn't think all hosts always represent all rendering as "off-line". Had been over this thouroughly and while I don't remember all the details offhand, I remember the conclusion. :)

Oversampling was kind of exposed as an afterthought in this design. (It was even going to be Top Secret that the engine used an oversampling technique.) Originally it was going to do all kinds of second guessing as to what oversample ratio to use, even being automatically adaptive to the project samplerate. Ultimately I gave that idea up in favour of letting the user set it wherever they want it. No point limiting people. Sometimes less is more. Let the user decide.

There's also some discussion above about filter tuning tweaks required between different oversampling ratios. Basically the filters track pitch more accurately at higher settings. So here again the fine tuning of the sound is very dependent on the OS setting used, so I just give you the real setting now and consider it part of the patch.

Again, hope to provide an option to compensate for that someday. But had some problems when working on it before and also don't want to add any more CPU unless I can compensate by optimizing something else. It's high on the list though.

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Any Ideas when we can expect the manual?
Cubase 6, Alesis Fusion, Virus Ti, Korg Triton & Digital & Analog Collection, K2000R, Yamaha CS1x, Komplete 9, Kirk Hunter Libraries, NVA Taiko Drums, Uhe Ace, Bazille and Zehbra, Polyana, Jamstix 3, Toontrack Drums and more libraries and VST's

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mchannemann wrote:Any Ideas when we can expect the manual?
Hopefully by the end of the week? Early next week?

Emphasis on *hopefully*. Sorry folks but I've only got 2 hands and there's been a bunch of business development stuff pressing... trying to figure out how I can continue to feed myself and pay my rent so I can keep the software coming to you all and not have to take on a day-job (which would be BAD for producing manuals, new products, updates, support...) "Food and rent" isn't an exaggeration, that's the actual situation I've gotten myself into here. So sorry, but the manual has been mostly on the backburner these last couple of weeks, trying to let myself get back to it ASAP but there's life and death stuff that's a higher priority at the moment. :(

And even that won't be the final manual, but I do promise to fill in the missing controls and expand a bit more on the ones already documented.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions though. :)

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I guess it's already been said (without looking through the whole thread/forum), but I see that CM is having a look at PolyAna next month - congrats AQ ;)

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thread title wrote:Try Poly-Ana 1.0 free.
Where ?
Is it really 100% free ( full non expiring version not a demo ) ?
[====[\\\\\\\\]>------,

Ay caramba !

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Mutant wrote:
thread title wrote:Try Poly-Ana 1.0 free.
Where ?
Is it really 100% free ( full non expiring version not a demo ) ?
OK i just checked 1st post and everything's clear now.

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 21#2461121
[====[\\\\\\\\]>------,

Ay caramba !

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Mutant wrote:
thread title wrote:Try Poly-Ana 1.0 free.
Where ?
Is it really 100% free ( full non expiring version not a demo ) ?
It is 100% free to try, for a week. FULLY FUNCTIONING, NOTHING IS DISABLED. You can actually use it, save your sounds and projects, make and FINISH songs with it. All I ask is if you're still loving it after the first week then PLEASE buy it.

I've tried to make this the fairest deal anywhere. (Short of giving it away free anyway -- there's a year and a half of my life in there, FULL TIME (hell, OVERTIME! Make that 2 regular-man years) so I need to treat this as a business to keep bringing new products to all of you. New products that are actually different than all the other same-old products out there, that actually provide an ALTERNATIVE in sound and features.)

Cheers!

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AdmiralQuality wrote:It is 100% free to try, for a week.
I'm completely broken right now - yes i have ~120$ but this is for new boots and pants which i absolutely have to buy, so i'm kinda afraid of falling in love with a synth no matter how good and having to walk around in old clothes :cry: :wink:

You may want to change "free" to "free for one week".
[====[\\\\\\\\]>------,

Ay caramba !

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