Bug in Tyrell and maybe ACE

[News From The Sky]

Hey Urs,

I've found a bug in Tyrell 1.0.1 (and maybe ACE):

The knobs and faders can be mapped to parameters in Ableton Live, with the exception of the LFO 1 & 2 Rate, Phase, RateMod, and DepthMod.

To reproduce:

1. Add Tyrell to a MIDI track in Live.
2. Make sure that track is selected and the Tyrell interface is open.
3. In the Device Title Bar for Tyrell, click on the "Configure" button.
4. Click on various knobs in the Tyrell interface.
5. Note that for each knob you click, a green box with the parameter name, a fader control, and the parameter value appears in the Device panel.
6. Click on one of the LFO knobs listed: Rate, Phase, RateMod, or DepthMod.
7. Note that no green box appears in the Device panel.

I'm using Live 8.2.2 on a Mac (10.6.7).

LFO Delay and Sync work, as do most (but not all) of the menu switches (not working: VCA, Matrix1 Target, Matrix2 Target, and LFO Shape, Restart, Rate Mod Source and Depth Mod Source). I'm not sure if these are supposed to be remotely controllable. If they are, then there may be a bug in ACE as well (using 1.1) - the LFO2 waveform selector does not register as a parameter, even though VCO Sub Osc does, and the Filter Output types do. Also, the under-knob mode selects mostly do NOT work (ie, LFO1 TuneModus), with the exception of TriMode for VCO1 and the FModRes settings for both VCOs and both LFOs. The Snap switches are mappable, the Reset switches are not; Glide, Chorus, and Delay modes are mappable, VoiceMix1 and 2 VCA are not. This may all be behaving correctly, I just noticed that there seem to be some inconsistencies (the knobs are much more important to me than the switches anyway).

In case anyone's wondering what I'm on about: it took me a while to suss out this particular feature, but I've been able to get my APC40 set up to control ACE and Tyrell, by using the Configure feature. It's very useful to be able to tweak ACE patches with physical knobs - makes an already great synth even better - and ACE in particular seems to work well for this, as it has logical clusters of knobs which can be broken into groups of 8 with a little thought. Some things to keep in mind:

- the parameters will be assigned to the APC Device Control knobs in the order you select them (but you can re-arrange them); you can control up to 64 (8x8) with the APC, but you can't skip any

- in order to lock the APC to the specific instance of ACE or Tyrell, you can either choose "Lock to Control Surface" from the contextual menu on the Device tile bar, or (what I do) you can arm that track for recording

- to save your configuration in the Device Browser, you have to Group the synth to make it into an Instrument Rack (you can ungroup the rack after dropping it into a new track). This last pitfall threw me for a while, I don't know why Ableton doesn't have a direct way to just save the configuration mapping for plug-ins.

Anyway, I had such great results controlling my ACE with my APC that I tried to do the same with Tyrell and discovered this bug, which makes the LFOs mostly not remote-controllable.

Thanks again for your brilliant work, Urs, I love ACE and Tyrell and will probably end up with Zebra, Filterscape, Uhbik, etc.... Eagerly looking forward to Diva and Berlin Modular and whatever else you pull out of that pointy hat.

[Urs]

Some parameters are not automatable, and that's a relic from the past, requested by... dozens of Live users.

Until recently Live could only address the first 128 parameters of a plugin for automation. So I threw half of them out in Filterscape, presumably the ones rarely automated. TyrellN6's Lfos for instance are taken from FilterscapeVA, hence have the same restrictions.

Later on, another issue popped up: MacOS X would "forget" about automatable parameters in AU, if there were too many, say, more then 700 or so. Hence I had to cripple automation in Zebra from the get go. Interestingly, we recently had a similar issue reported so I guess that MacOS X isn't fixed yet.

Then, I took out many, many parameters that have drop down menus. I often add more entries with new versions, which would break automation in VST (but not AU). Hence not automating these is a good idea.

There you go. I've been reluctant too make all parameters automatable, for apparent reasons. Some of these reasons are gone, but I can't just switch everything on "go" - it would break old projects and might cause too much havoc.

In fact I now have a little app that helps me ensure that automation is still compatible from version to version, i.e. no parameter get added or dropped.

However, I've been trying to wrap my head around this. I'm thinking of a preference that allows for the full list of parameters to be automated. This however opens the door to new serious havoc. If people exchange projects with different settings, then we're in a huge mess. All of this only because Apple wouldn't fix a bug, Ableton wouldn't listen to users for years and Steinberg wouldn't implement proper parameter ranges, not even in VST3

It's frustrating. In Zebra at least you can use XYs, in other plugs you have to revert to MIDI learn.

[News From The Sky]

Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation Urs. That makes sense, and I can live with no LFO remote control as a minor limitation in an awesome free synth. And ACE works great!