Clickyness due to instantaneous voltage changes

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Hello, I've been using Silent Way and have discovered that it is creating all sorts of clickyness that seems to be coming from Silent Way's instantaneous control voltage changes. For example when you have velocity control on an envelope and repeatedly send different velocities to Silent Way, it will switch the control voltage instantaneously causing clicks; this also goes for when envelopes restart. These clicks seem to happen regardless of how slow the envelope is. A very tiny amount of slew on all these control voltage changes should get rid of these clicks. Looking at the waveform, it looks like 7 milliseconds of slew should be good enough.

Edit: Looking at the waveform (as in looking at a recording of silent way controlling my synth)

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I'll see what I can do for a future update.

Thanks for taking the time to write.

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I'd like to know if anyone else is experiencing this because it seems odd to me that i would have clicks like this so consistently.

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No one else has mentioned it, only this related but not identical thread:

http://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7523

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By the way, how have you got Silent Way connected to your synth, and what synth is it? (Also, what's the host app?)

On reflection, it's not clear to me that Silent Way's CV changes being so sharp is the cause of your problem. If they were being applied digitally, then yes - but assuming the CVs are controlling an analogue synth, it would be quite some synth that responded instantaneously to a change in CV.

The clicks on your recording sounded more digital than analogue to me. Is it possible that some of the Silent Way CVs are finding their way directly into your audio?

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Ok, I was testing Silent Way for a while and came up with the following conclusions:

-Setting Attack and Release of envelopes to at least 0.003 seconds will get rid of some clicks.

-One type of click is caused by instantaneous voltage changes such as velocity midi data. a 0.003ms of slew will probably fix that.

-Another type of click is caused by the very nature of the Silent Way envelopes. If the attack AND release on my analog envelope is high, you can quickly and repeatedly trigger the envelope so that it slowly reaches the peak of the attack phase. Silent Way's envelopes reset instantaneously causing a click regardless of settings.

-My analog envelopes do create clicks or thumps with certain settings in which the envelopes are changing too fast.

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I've been trying to duplicate the issue you are describing with velocity but have not been successful. What are you controlling with the velocity voltage? VCA, filter? What interface are you using?

I can easily duplicate the envelope issue but as you said, i can get the same kind of clicking out of my analog envelopes when they are set too fast.

An adjustable slew might be nice to have on the Silent Way plug-ins but certainly not a fixed amount. Personally, I've enjoyed processing CV generated by Silent way with Reaktor. It'd be very easy to solve this issue that way as well.

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Justin3am, yeah, the velocity-changing thing is subtle. I'm controlling the filter with it and playing legato lines so as not to retrigger envelopes therefor you hear just the velocity-voltage change. It would just be nice to have it a tiny bit less than instant.

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I have this feature in beta now. I'd appreciate it if you'd help me test it, so I can be sure I've fixed the right problem, as I'm finding it very hard to reproduce with my modular synth.

If you're willing to beta test, please let me know which plug-in(s) and what format (Mac/PC/AU/VST).

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I use Windows XP Pro, Reaper 3, VST... all plugins? I will definitely help beta test.

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Here's a beta of the LFO plug-in:

http://expert-sleepers.co.uk/downloads/ ... _win32.zip

You'll see that each channel has a new 'Smooth' control. Positive values give you slew rate limiting - negative values give you filtering.

Let me know if that helps. If it does, I'll add it to the other plug-ins.

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The non-resetting envelopes really solve all the problems. As for the LFO, the negative values of slew seem to have a nice effect. Actually, I would just increase the possible amount of slew filtering. After that, if you can have a slew for the 6 individual outputs I think it'd be perfect.

Great work! thanks!

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Thanks for testing it. I'll add the slew to the remaining plug-ins over the next week or so.

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