Vortex VSTi - Multi Timbral Groove Machine Beta

[Astralp]

haha, I'm definitely in the zone at the moment Won't get much done tomorrow though, I'll be doing things like digging ditches and moving rubble!

Well, I haven't announced it properly yet, so beyond KVR it's not really drawing any attention. I wanted to get it more or less bug free before too many people played with it. Also considering a couple of weeks ago it was a multi-timbral midi sequencer, it's now become a fully fledged rhythm playground, the midi stuff is just a part of the feature set! I've been at it so hard, I still haven't quite got my head around the scope of it, and how to describe it etc... But, I think it's the best thing I've built, it actually brings in elements from all previous products like Black magic, Ammonite, TerraNova but I think is much more intuitive and easier to use than any of them, do you think? I'm pretty excited about this one

I'm also going to add the recorder so it can record to loops the way Black magic does which will be useful i think.

If you can identify reproducible midi bugs that would be great, it sounds as though it's behaving much better on your system now though?

[MarkSA]

Sorry Andy, Haven't had much time to test Vortex out.

Try and test it today.

There should be more interest in Vortex

[MarkSA]

Being trying it out.

The results so far, Beta 14 crashed Reaper many times while loading. But I managed to find a work around.

Multisequence. Preview and Virtual keyboards seem to cause note hanging. Hanging notes!!! Reaper just can't handle that sort of issue. Doesn't seem to have a good notes off system. No obvious button. Only F3. Panic doesn't work. Preview and Virtual keyboards seem to cause note hanging. I tried virtual keyboards in Cantabile and Reaper.

The best way to use this vst is with an external keyboard. It seems to clear most of the hanging note issues up.

[musikmachine]

Yes i have had issues with hanging or stuck notes as well. When triggering the notes via mouse or virtual keyboard the notes remain stuck on orange in Vortex. Only thing i've found to work is all notes off in Cantabile.

[MarkSA]

Yes i have had issues with hanging or stuck notes as well. When triggering the notes via mouse or virtual keyboard the notes remain stuck on orange in Vortex. Only thing i've found to work is all notes off in Cantabile.

I thought it was only me that had that problem. It would be nice to see at least the Virtual issue looked into/fixed? Some people may only want to use a mouse for triggering.

Still, Vortex shows a lot of promise.

[Astralp]

I think I will have to make the keyboard display only, I did try to explain in the manual but there will be a conflict if:

The preview keyboard is used with Hold, because they essentially do the same thing, you should use hold with an external keyboard and in that case not use the preview keyboard.

The preview keyboard has 2 purposes, firstly and most importantly to display incoming notes. It's secondary purpose is simply a way of holding a note whilst working on a sequence. It isn't meant to be used in making music at all, that should always be via an external device.

I think I'll make it display only because I can't think of a way of bullet proofing it as midi in, and the keyboard are 2 distinct devices, and hold comes before the keyboard (so that held notes are displayed). Hold + Hold is not good...

Mark what did you mean by managed to find a workaround?

I think I should probably re-initialize the presets, there could be some issues because of that.

[Astralp]

Mark, the trouble is that people expect to be able to use the preview keyboard for making music, which is not possible, it has to come from the midi in, it is only useful for holding notes. But, it is proving to be confusing, and it's fair to say that hold mode does the same thing but safely, you just have to trigger a note from your midi keyboard instead.

[musikmachine]

haha, I'm definitely in the zone at the moment Won't get much done tomorrow though, I'll be doing things like digging ditches and moving rubble!

Well, I haven't announced it properly yet, so beyond KVR it's not really drawing any attention. I wanted to get it more or less bug free before too many people played with it. Also considering a couple of weeks ago it was a multi-timbral midi sequencer, it's now become a fully fledged rhythm playground, the midi stuff is just a part of the feature set! I've been at it so hard, I still haven't quite got my head around the scope of it, and how to describe it etc... But, I think it's the best thing I've built, it actually brings in elements from all previous products like Black magic, Ammonite, TerraNova but I think is much more intuitive and easier to use than any of them, do you think? I'm pretty excited about this one

I'm also going to add the recorder so it can record to loops the way Black magic does which will be useful i think.

If you can identify reproducible midi bugs that would be great, it sounds as though it's behaving much better on your system now though?

Yeah i wasn't sure where it was going when you started to add all the extra bits, i thought it was gonna be like a gm module for basic playback. I haven't used all the plugins but i like the way it combines those things together. The pattern chaining and midi export will make it even better but yeah it's my favourite hg instrument so far.

Live performers will love Vortex i think. Also great for sketching out ideas, generating interesting loops and riffs, sequencing other plugins and external instruments and a decent sound and fx module.

Looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

[Astralp]

BETA 15

Right this one is a clean slate with all presets initialized, plus I've disabled the preview keyboard at least for the moment so that any hanging note bugs happening are caused by things I consider to be working as expected

If you can please:

* Delete Old versions before installing (Not the samples, they are ok)
* Use a fresh project when reporting bugs, as far as I'm aware it should work with saved projects but with all the stuff going on internally it may cause problems, so I only need to know about bugs happening in a fresh project.

If you get a bug, please try and make a note of how it happened if possible so I can attempt to recreate it

[Astralp]

Yep, it's definitely a performance tool, it's a lot of fun

[como baila]

Since my first go at this was tonight with Beta13, I guess I need to get cracking on 15!

In Cubase 6.02 32bit on Win7 x64 ...

1. Twice I got 'phantom' sequences where the display no longer showed and active note ... but the sequence continued to play. If I hit the note where the sequence had started ... say C3 ... while it was playing, it just doubled up on on the sequence, lighting the key and stopping when I reclicked display key again, but the 'phantom' kept right on playing. Nothing could crush the beast except bypassing the plugin ... but it came right back when I turned it back on. I had hold off and tried panic and the bar to the left of the display keyboard, but nothing worked till I closed and reopened the project.

2. This has probably come up ... but I couldn't find the name of the patch playing in the 'internal' synth anywhere.

3. When triggering the sequences from a midi file in cubase, Vortex didn't recognize 'note off' messages, but instead while triggering with a looped file, turned off the sequence on the next pass at the note in the file.

Am I missing a setting?

(Edit: Apparently yes! The 'hold' button. )

4. The CC mixer is great. Does it over ride all other CC settings in the sequences or the CC3 and CC4 knobs in the midi mixer? or just adjust in the left over range after those other settings?

This alone is worth the price of admission, especially when set up with my Novation Automap controllers!

5. Are the FX controls in the Synth/ FX page midi for both midi and the internal synths or only audio for the internal synths?

6. I'm probably just a little obsessive, but I'd like the thin velocity lines that show in the main sequence page to be at the left of their respective notes, instead of on the right.

7. I'd also like to see the piano scale keyboard redrawn with the white keys touching one another at the front as in a normal keyboard. I found myself having to really concentrate in order to set the scale. I suppose I'd get used to it, but it seems a small thing to make it look more 'normal' and easier to grasp more quickly.

8. It's cool that clicking on the red square by the scale keyboard can randomly select from a database of 1000 scales, so why can't we pick them directly somehow?

9. Digging around with Novation Automap I find all these 'Float To Volts Float In'parameters. Just curious. Future expansion?

Vortex has really got the 'I wonder if I can do this' juices flowing!

Thanks, Andy!

[como baila]

Quick follow up on Beta 15:

When you say 'uninstall' previous versions, does this mean anything other than deleting the old folders and dll in the installation directory and pasting in the new ones?


Also, another pet peeve about interfaces ... something that has always bugged me about Stylus RMX. I want to be able to also change the displayed window with a keystroke or midi command! What good does it do to have all this hands on control over a programs parameters and every 10 seconds have to go find your mouse and click on an icon so you can access a page you want to work with?

Perhaps this is a programming impossibility, which I certainly wouldn't know as I'm no programmer ... but boy would it be nice to be able to not only hit a key and have the respective sequence open for tweaking, but also have some midi note key switching that could quickly cycle through the pages of the gui from the selected sequence and back again. Maybe two keys in the lower register, one to go forward and one to go backward, or just dedicated keys for each page.

It would also be great to be able to switch midi note input between sequence triggering and step and/ or cycle recording on a selected sequence page.

What the heck, doesn't hurt to ask, does it?

Como

[MarkSA]

I think I will have to make the keyboard display only, I did try to explain in the manual but there will be a conflict if:

The preview keyboard is used with Hold, because they essentially do the same thing, you should use hold with an external keyboard and in that case not use the preview keyboard.

That's what I worked out to be the best method. It doesn't hurt to try things out. I just hope the hold function is going to be still useful.

I appreciate somethings can't suit all situations. It makes virtual keyboards not very useful. If it was me I would write in the manual.'Best results are obtained by using external keyboards and not virtual keyboards.' or something similar.

I think I got beta 14 to work is too keep rescanning vst's.

[Astralp]

1. Twice I got 'phantom' sequences where the display no longer showed and active note ... but the sequence continued to play. If I hit the note where the sequence had started ... say C3 ... while it was playing, it just doubled up on on the sequence, lighting the key and stopping when I reclicked display key again, but the 'phantom' kept right on playing. Nothing could crush the beast except bypassing the plugin ... but it came right back when I turned it back on. I had hold off and tried panic and the bar to the left of the display keyboard, but nothing worked till I closed and reopened the project.

I've now disabled the onboard keyboard, it is display only, so if you can try the latest beta and if you get hanging notes let me know if it is single sequence or multi-sequence and if possible the combination of events that caused it

2. This has probably come up ... but I couldn't find the name of the patch playing in the 'internal' synth anywhere.

The onboard synth is a rompler and is treated as an external midi device and so with all midi devices you choose programs via the program lists on the mixer page. I don't have any plans to add names internally as I want to keep external/internal evenly balanced, Vortex is essentially a midi sequencer, and the onboard sound engine is like an external device.

3. When triggering the sequences from a midi file in cubase, Vortex didn't recognize 'note off' messages, but instead while triggering with a looped file, turned off the sequence on the next pass at the note in the file.

Am I missing a setting?

(Edit: Apparently yes! The 'hold' button. )

haha, yes hold shouldn't be used except when playing live really, it could become confusing as you would have to make sure that the state of notes playing was the same at the beginning and the end if you see what I mean.

4. The CC mixer is great. Does it over ride all other CC settings in the sequences or the CC3 and CC4 knobs in the midi mixer? or just adjust in the left over range after those other settings?

This alone is worth the price of admission, especially when set up with my Novation Automap controllers!

Currently all settings will be used, but as the CC mixer happens in real-time it will always ovveride other settings as it uses absolute values.

5. Are the FX controls in the Synth/ FX page midi for both midi and the internal synths or only audio for the internal synths?

Just for the internal sounds as they are DSP and so there is no sound coming in. I could actually try adding some audio inputs so that external audio could be sent through.

6. I'm probably just a little obsessive, but I'd like the thin velocity lines that show in the main sequence page to be at the left of their respective notes, instead of on the right.

I'll have to think about this one..

7. I'd also like to see the piano scale keyboard redrawn with the white keys touching one another at the front as in a normal keyboard. I found myself having to really concentrate in order to set the scale. I suppose I'd get used to it, but it seems a small thing to make it look more 'normal' and easier to grasp more quickly.

This is on my list of things to do

8. It's cool that clicking on the red square by the scale keyboard can randomly select from a database of 1000 scales, so why can't we pick them directly somehow?

I will be adding a popup for common scales, it would be overkill to list all of them I think. It will be the same scales featured in ARP.

9. Digging around with Novation Automap I find all these 'Float To Volts Float In'parameters. Just curious. Future expansion?

They haven't been labeled yet, or they should be invisible to the host, for teh time being stay away from ones which aren't labeled sensibly

Vortex has really got the 'I wonder if I can do this' juices flowing!

That's great to hear! It will be continually developed over coming months after v1 is released and so feature requests are always welcome. The main thing on my mind is to keep it easy to use and intuitive. ARP became a bit overcomplicated as new features and requests were added which I want to avoid with Vortex. Having said that all useful features of ARP are already in there so it has a good head start in that sense.

Thanks for your feedback

[Astralp]

When you say 'uninstall' previous versions, does this mean anything other than deleting the old folders and dll in the installation directory and pasting in the new ones?

That's correct!

Also, another pet peeve about interfaces ... something that has always bugged me about Stylus RMX. I want to be able to also change the displayed window with a keystroke or midi command! What good does it do to have all this hands on control over a programs parameters and every 10 seconds have to go find your mouse and click on an icon so you can access a page you want to work with?

I've assigned CC12 for changing the sequence via a knob in the next version.

Perhaps this is a programming impossibility, which I certainly wouldn't know as I'm no programmer ... but boy would it be nice to be able to not only hit a key and have the respective sequence open for tweaking, but also have some midi note key switching that could quickly cycle through the pages of the gui from the selected sequence and back again. Maybe two keys in the lower register, one to go forward and one to go backward, or just dedicated keys for each page.

I'm reluctant to use midi Notes for this, but I could assign CCs for increment/decrement?

It would also be great to be able to switch midi note input between sequence triggering and step and/ or cycle recording on a selected sequence page.

Not too keen on this idea, as I can see a minefield of confusion with new users wondering why the sequences aren't triggering, although step recording is something I'd like to add at some point, just not sure on the best way to add it yet.