One Synth Challenge #82: BR808 (Zendorf Wins!)

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(deleted by Mike777)

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Ok... My patience with BR808 ran out a bit more quickly than usual. It's certainly capable of greatness but working with modulation and automation felt too much like all work and no play to me so I decided yesterday to cut my track loose.
Ended up using no automation at all (except volume and pitch bend)...

So, ended up with a very simple little 120BPM house travesty that I still hope you enjoy! :D
Project file below for anyone interested (includes bonus melody outtakes!)

mehum - Baltic State
https://soundcloud.com/neophile/mehum-baltic-state

DAW: Reaper 5
BR808 instances: 11
Other plugins::
ReaEQ x3
TDR Kotelnikov x2
SPAN x2
Limiter No6
Luftikus
MJUCjr
Molot
ReaDelay
TAL Reverb 4
TDR Nova
ReaControlMIDI

Reaper project file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktmv5hoanoy0s ... e.RPP?dl=0

Good luck, everyone!

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nice work mehum!

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Dee.P.Tree wrote: You can import the FXB and export each FXP and then import these in an instance of the synth that works.
Ah, that's what I was doing wrong :dog:
Couldn't get the imported patch to work but I had to open a new instance of the synth and the sound worked.

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OSC is a Religion!

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ATM I'm using it in Linux (gonna test this in Windows 10 too) but it's very heavy on the resources.
Just 4 tracks and already over 50% dsp load. Lot's of pops and crackles (xruns http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/faq/start#qwhat_is_an_xrun).

Anyone else having these problems ?

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ballacr75 wrote:OSC is a Religion!
OSC is love, OSC is life! :hug:
All hale the OSC! :hail:

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rghvdberg wrote:ATM I'm using it in Linux (gonna test this in Windows 10 too) but it's very heavy on the resources.
Just 4 tracks and already over 50% dsp load. Lot's of pops and crackles (xruns http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/faq/start#qwhat_is_an_xrun).

Anyone else having these problems ?
Yuppers! Have you tried unchecking the threads checkbox? That bought me something, but this is still a cycle pig. If I do anything with br808, I suspect it will be much like rehashing the old modular days; laying down a track, and then doing another, 'cos the CPU load under WINE (fsthost in my case) is truly awful. This is sad as there are a number of great free VSTis (for instance pg8x, minimogue luxus, u no 62. The end is nearly listless.) that run wonderfully with little CPU load and few if any XRUNs. I wish you luck!

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Ya know, while this thing is a cycle/RAM pig and less than stable, I kinda like it 'cos whenever someone complains about the UI on ZynAddSubFX, I can point at BR808 and say that the guy doesn't know how lucky he has it. :P We could have gone to dozens of tabs instead. Then you have the Rum Tum Tugger phenomenon: always on the wrong tab. :roll:

Actually, to be fair, I think any multi-engine/multi-timbral synth with bundled effects is going to be a bit of a bear to program. On the other hand, I could think of a number of ways it could be kinder to the users if only the source code was freely available.

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caonoize wrote:On the other hand, I could think of a number of ways it could be kinder to the users if only the source code was freely available.
Here you go, BR808 is now open source under the LGPLv3 license. The LGPLv3 licensing of BR808 is possible because it uses neither the original VST SDK nor a direct pascal port thereof. Instead, a separate independent-implemented VST header (which is zlib-licensed) is used by BR808, which could be also the origin of the problems in some VST(i) hosts. I've tested BR808 under followed hosts at that time: BeRoTracker, Reaper and FLStudio.

And here the link to the GitHub BR808 project page: https://github.com/BeRo1985/br808 (Borland Delphi 7 is needed for compilation, and VSTi\VSTCore\UnitVSTiGUI.pas should be installed as IDE visual component.)

By way of explanation: I've open sourced BR808, after I've read this thread and especially your post. :)

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Thank you very much. Also I should say thank you for not flaming me after all I said. I'm sure that someone will sieze the opportunity to extend and optimize your synth. At the moment I'm hacking on ZynAddSubFX, and we've (mainly Mark) taken it quite a ways from where it started.

Your choice of platform is interesting. How did you find yourself writing DSP in Delphi/Pascal? I will confess to having a significant soft spot for Lisp and Smalltalk, but the FOSS implementations (and perhaps any implementations) likely aren't efficient enough to do heavy live synthesis. I think the norm is C or C++ with the occasional bit of assembler, and even these can get the CPU swamped.
Last edited by caonoize on Fri Dec 11, 2015 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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bero wrote: By way of explanation: I've open sourced BR808, after I've read this thread and especially your post. :)
O wow ..
Alas my coding skills go no further than

Code: Select all

10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10

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mehum wrote:Ok... My patience with BR808 ran out a bit more quickly than usual. It's certainly capable of greatness but working with modulation and automation ...
Nice track - given you have sort of "given up" on the beast.

I want to draw out some modulation tracks (in REAPER 5) for the filter cutoff and resonance. When I look at exposed parameters for automation, I only see "bypass" and "wet" ... so where are the other gazillion of parameters? What I want to do is to "phrase" a voice-like sound, and drawing automation seems to me the best way to get it just right.

Any pointers would be very useful. I was thinking that maybe there's a way to assign the parameter a CC#, and then draw out the required automation in a CC track lane?

Anyone else find that now and then you start up a new track with a new instance of BR808 and then go in to program up your patch, and what ever you do, nothing changes? Quit that BR808 instance and load up another into the SAME track, and go in and hack and it works ... even basic things like change the waveform doesn't work until I get an instance which is OK. This seems very odd to me, and very frustrating. Not tried the reaper trick of running the vst in its own process, so this may help - dunno.

I'm using the single output version as I will probably get the basic tracks going, freeze them down (to audio), and mute out those tracks - I need to conserve cpu on this 6 year old machine!

Any help most welcome here m OSC bros and sis's!

dB

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Thanks :)

What you do for automation is assign CONTROL to the parameter in question and select the CC number you like. Not that difficult, I guess, but I just couldn't be bothered :P Partly because I'm not used to working with Cc in Reaper. You can't control CC in a regular automation lane, right?

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mehum wrote: What you do for automation is assign CONTROL to the parameter in question and select the CC number you like. Not that difficult, I guess, but I just couldn't be bothered :P Partly because I'm not used to working with Cc in Reaper. You can't control CC in a regular automation lane, right?
Thanks there, I thought that was the way to do it, just got bogged down trying to get other things to work. Would be nice to be able to use a regular automation lane for CC :dog: , but it'll probably be OK using a regular CC lane in the midi editor :tu: - at least I can loop and adjust to taste ... we'll see. :pray:

Still trying to get a decent "speech" sound to work with a MIDI melody ... it's a bit hit and miss. :dog: So, I was going to "do my own thing", and use the formant filter and phrase it from there ... :hihi:

Whether I can get a track done before Xmas, I don't know. I may pass on this one - too many things to do - grandparent duties as well as looking after my mum who's 90, and who probably has many years to come as lots of relatives have gone past the ton, the best so far being 109!)

dB

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