KVR Audio

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 8:23 pm

On the topic of tails...

I hate this feature. (I know many disagree.) But my reasoning is it causes CPU load to jump up by surprise, making it so you discover, say, in mid-take that you've overtaxed your system, rather than before you start a take, just for one example of how it can really mess with you.

But they also don't make much sense for instruments which typically have near zero CPU load when not producing output (all voices are inactive).

I'd still argue that silence should actually be silence though. Just because. Or at the very least, provide an option to turn off "self-noise". Then hosts that want to second guess your plug-in by yanking processing when they detect silence can do it if you want to let them. (Another reason this idea is bad is because there's conceptually non-audio tasks that you do in the process function, and if the host stops calling it because it thinks the plug-in is silent, that stuff can fall behind. CPU management should be the user's job. Freeze or render stuff you're not currently working on and disable the plug-ins. And if you need to shunt power from one plug-in to another in mid song, you can always automate a bypass. At least then it will be an explicit decision by the user, and not something that happens by surprise.)

electro · Post by **electro** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 8:32 pm

Can you keep JX-8P .syx format?

Mutant · Post by **Mutant** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 1:11 am

AdmiralQuality wrote:I'll try another scope plug-in on it.

Try the best one.
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 6&t=380389

ENV1 · Post by **ENV1** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 5:33 am

I was able to solve the font problem with MS Paint.

Turns out that using a bold font (Arial Black in this case) would actually yield a pretty useful result, so thats what im going to use since it is as good as its ever going to get at that size.

The printings are finished too, now i can go for the details.

click for fullsize

Spitfire31 · Post by **Spitfire31** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 5:37 am

Nice! A few scratches and coffee stains might make it a bit more 'lived in'?

I'd really like to see some contrasting colours for SAVE and LOAD, though! You have a certain level of artistic freedom there, since they're not on the h/w original…

/Joachim

ENV1 · Post by **ENV1** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 5:43 am

Yep, that all falls under details.

(As always i will try a couple of different things and see what i like enough to keep it.)

squidlr · Post by **squidlr** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 6:07 am

ENV1 wrote:

Looks amazing - better looking than most of the synth UI's in Logic Pro X - so clean and easy to read!

Timfonie · Post by **Timfonie** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 6:32 am

I agree. With this beautiful and realistic looking interface PG-8x invites even more to program this very nice plugin.
Thanks a lot for this ENV1 and Martin !

crimsonwarlock · Post by **crimsonwarlock** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 7:51 am

ENV1 wrote:
crimsonwarlock wrote:
ENV1 wrote:
EvilDragon wrote:None of the antialiasing modes in PS look even halfways decent?
No.

Its hopeless.
Get a copy of GIMP (it's free), it smokes PS and the likes for graphics processing
Has the same crummy AA as PS on small fonts, in some cases its even worse.

Been there, done that.

Hmmm... think you simply tried some default setting then. I did some very extensive testing on this subject with a friend (who is a web designer) in the past and we found that PS is the absolute worst in this regard while GIMP totally shines because of it's available selection of interpolation algos. To be honest, I'm on Linux and design with Inkscape, which gives a very high quality pixel render of the design. Then downscale in Gwenview which uses the same undelying algos as GIMP iirc. The Ragnarök GUI was done this way.

crimsonwarlock · Post by **crimsonwarlock** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 7:55 am

ENV1 wrote:I was able to solve the font problem with MS Paint.

Turns out that using a bold font (Arial Black in this case) would actually yield a pretty useful result, so thats what im going to use since it is as good as its ever going to get at that size.

The printings are finished too, now i can go for the details.

click for fullsize

Totally stunning

Syntilla · Post by **Syntilla** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 12:09 pm

Spitfire31 wrote:You have a certain level of artistic freedom there, since they're not on the h/w original…

The controller, no.
But the synth itself had the membrane type buttons Martin uses on his UI (which I prefer).

For any latecomers who might be interested in what this thing actually sounds like, the current beta can be downloaded from back on page 85.

Teksonik · Post by **Teksonik** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 12:23 pm

Spitfire31 wrote:A few scratches and coffee stains might make it a bit more 'lived in'?

Please no...........

Anyway the latest version is fantastic. Any chance Martin will implement this in the near future ?

1wob2many · Post by **1wob2many** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 12:26 pm

Spitfire31 wrote:Nice! A few scratches and coffee stains might make it a bit more 'lived in'?

Please God, no. Don't people look after their hardware properly?

*

* I see Teksonik beat me to it while I was typing.

Yes, I know it's all down to personal taste...but I would be constantly trying to clean off the coffee stains with screenwipes.

Interesting information regarding fonts. I've tried (and failed) at doing skins in the past and it was trying to get a decent looking font that was probably the most frustrating part. My first solution was to modify a pixel font for my own purposes but that was not terribly pleasing on the eyes. I then resorted to using MS Word with the page colour set to close to that of the skin background, taking a screen print of that and cut and pasting (with a bit more fiddling) into my graphics program. The results weren't too bad.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 12:34 pm

ENV1 - what say ye?

ENV1 · Post by **ENV1** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 1:14 pm

crimsonwarlock wrote:Hmmm... think you simply tried some default setting then.

No, ive checked everything there was to check.

Maybe theres a difference between GIMPShop and TheGIMP?

(I was using GIMPShop.)

Anyway, if you think that there really is a way to make 5px high fonts look as sharp as they get with MS Paint by using something other than MS Paint then i would certainly like to know about it. If you want to do some testing, just make a RGB 77, 79, 80 background and print some 5 pixel high letters on it. (Font color 212,212,212.) If you manage to get a result that matches or even trumps what i have now in terms of sharpness and clarity, dont hesitate to tell me how i can reproduce it. Id be more than glad to hear all about it.*

*Because the fact that Paint has no layers makes this method extremely tedious as i always have to print the texts on a piece of background, save as BMP, then remove the background-color pixels in PS, and then distribute the words/numbers/etc manually to their proper positions. And this always takes a lot of time, plus it makes the whole thing very inflexible because the color of the AA pixels (which of course have become static after printing them on a BMP) wont allow for changes of the background color anymore, except for a tiny litte bit. A little bit too much and youll begin to see ugly pixel-seams around the text, which means youd have to do it all over again by printing the texts on a new background color and then putting everything into place again. Being able to use transparency-supporting layers would therefore help a great deal.

PG8X (inspired by the JX8P): new beta version uploaded