KVR Audio

ericj23 · Post by **ericj23** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:23 pm

but you envy his enormous post count

Rik · Post by **Rik** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:25 pm

gol wrote:uh? cakewalk wasn't supporting VST's, and which trackers do/did (I only know 1 supporting VST's)?

Cakewalk supports VST with full PDC... they added several month ago PDC support in their VST adapter.
Also DirectiXer supports VST PDC.

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:30 pm

ericj23 wrote:but you envy his enormous post count

topaz · Post by **topaz** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:31 pm

at the kvr meeting someone said

"I wish SX2 had side chain compression"

soon after there was a huge row and everyone ran around shouting....

"NOOOO you dont need it, what makes you think that you know more than steinberg, after all they sold xyz amounts of copies"

bullshit, im lying.

Igor 4000 · Post by **Igor 4000** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:31 pm

This is very enlightening. In an art as precise and mathematical as music production, I didn't realize that ANY latency would be considered acceptable. Funny stuff.

Even funnier is reading the justifications for it..."an additional level of complexity", "only 61 samples", "use other hosts", "check every loop by hand"...this thread must be great fodder for those that consider FLS a toy.

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:43 pm

It's sad because FL studio is definately not a toy. It's a very serious package that can be used in any big time studio environment with ease. It just has some issues. Just like all other software have some issues. Remeber that Logic Audio never got off-line bounce on the PC even though users had been requesting it since version 3. Some fanatic logic followers even insisted that realtime rendering is sonically superior to off-line bounce!

FL Studio still has one of the best workflows for putting down ideas quickly and it's more than enough to do some killer loops in. It just has some issues..

Cheers!
bManic

cbenci · Post by **cbenci** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:43 pm

This thread is amazing! It reminds me of why I stopped visiting the FL forums.

The old, old story. Post a feature request to FL tech support forum, and we are told why it's a stupid request.

Report a problem to FL tech support (bmanic, I feel your pain, I have known about this problem for years) and we are told; don't be stupid, it's not a problem. But more often than not, it's fixed in the next update.

To even suggest that PDC on the master out is not a problem is stupid. IMHO it's not an issue open to interpretation, it's a bug that needs to be fixed.

I use FL Studio regularly, I love the software and would be lost without it. I don't expect it to be perfect, because we all know that we can't prove there are no bugs, only that there are bugs. But this constant attitude toward legitimate requests and bug reports is getting old.

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 2:59 am

simply fail completely to understand the need

I do understand the need (read, PDC is NOT useless), I just think it's not as important as you claim it is, since we're talking about let's say 1% of the plugins out there.

You lose the initial 61 samples from the beginning with Fruity Compressor, plus you lose 61 samples from the end. This translates into 122 lost samples from the loop which makes the rendered loop useless.

No, the first ones are delayed (so it's 61 samples of silence I guess), and the last ones are lost.
Btw 61 samples is nothing. Sytrus processes its envelopes each 96 samples, or each 4 samples when you switch 'HQ envelopes' on. Try it and see if you can hear a difference. Sure, it can introduce a click, but even 1 sample can, and rendered loops easily do when they're not noisy things like drumloops. Without crossfading, hard to prevent such clicking.
And finally this has no effect on song rendering. Well, per-mixer track latency has, and that's where it would be more useful to have PDC (again, for the few offending plugins).

I should find back that web page showing 'timing' problems in reason, showing that some notes were triggered off-time by a couple of samples. Truth is that no one would even notice that. But of course we don't say anything, since it's favor of FL

Now don't tell me that Reason-rendered loops are more usable.

especially when talking about features that are practically taken for granted with other applications

well, seeing the 2 closest FL competitors are Reason and Orion, that Orion doesn't have PDC to my knowledge, and Reason doesn't support plugins at all..

Considering how many ppl are using loop based material in FL, can this be that noticable?

In a drumloop, it's not noticable. I think we have several demo songs with fruity compressors inserted into different mixer tracks, and there's no noticable problem in them.
In a musical loop, it could result in clicking, but without crossfading it will click, with or without PDC.

And btw, if those loops are made to be timestretched in the target app, those 61 samples are nothing compared to the possible losses due to the timestretch. In fact, slicing/stretching loops will anyway reduce clicking, since bits of the audio are lost at random points.

Finally, wave files don't support fractional samples, so when you render something, it's already off-tempo by a fraction of a sample

look, things like this are taken for granted in just about every other host

no they're not

unless they're avoiding every single plugin that introduces latency

not very hard
I mean, it's harder to find those that do introduce latency

when it could be done within FL rather easily

no, not easily, and logically sometimes not doable at all

they added several month ago PDC support in their VST adapter.

it's a host thing, so if Sonar supports PDC, it's not through an adapter.

Also DirectiXer supports VST PDC.

well, a third-party plugin wrapper just can't support PDC.. I don't see how. It's about delaying everything BUT the offending plugin you know.
SO if you just need the app to tell it supports PDC, and won't bother testing, we could do that.

I didn't realize that ANY latency would be considered acceptable

if no loss is acceptable for you, you should stop using your PC, it's full of them. Don't watch TV, don't listen to MP3's, wait don't listen to CD's, they're truncated to 16bit. Don't live in the real world neither, it's too noisy and unperfect.

Post a feature request to FL tech support forum, and we are told why it's a stupid request.

it's not a stupid request, PDC can definitely help (when doable), BUT it's stupid to make such a fuss about 1% plugins for which it may help. There are other more important things.
In fact, it's only an important factor since impulse reverbs came in. BUT those (unlike compressors) introduce a huge, very noticable latency, and it's kinda bad for a realtime use.

it's a bug that needs to be fixed

did we ever claim that FL had PDC? no? then it's not a bug

jmh · Post by **jmh** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 4:44 am

Gol, it's nice to see you're keeping things rational (compared to the loyal fanbase taking discussions towards name calling so quickly and easily)

Per-mixer track PDC, that's where I see it as most important. It would streamline the process enormously as it would eliminate all unnecessary rendering, retiming, tweaking etc from the workflow and would allow doing things from beginning to end within FL. Sure, nothing prevents anyone from doing it right now - as long as none of the latency introducing plugins are in use.

As for Reason and Orion being the closest competitors. I see your point but I'd like to point out that FL is much more than Reason, and apart from the few good synths and some decent effects in Orion, it just ain't in the same league

(speaking as a registered user since day 1, who gave up on Orion after Platinum version appeared, which introduced a number of new features and still didn't address the annoyances it has had since the beginning...)

As for "logigally not doable at all", I for one still haven't really seen an explanation for this. After all, it's all about extra buffering and it seems that several other hosts have implemented it nicely.

FL could be so much more. But as it stands, there's a number of plugins (somebody probably has to collect a list of these so this point really comes across?) that can't be used that easily in FL. My assumption is that for exactly same reason the current DSP cards are not really usable in FL either?

I could see a number of things that could be realized along with PDC - or the buffering associated with it. For one thing, I have a lesser known card HardSID Quattro which I'd love to be able to use with FL. Sadly due to the wonderful SID chip used in it, it has a latency around 20ms that cannot be easily compensated for in FL (yes, there are workarounds, but they're just that, workarounds). Now, with extra buffering, it would be rather trivial to implement something along the lines of Cubase and its great feature where you can delay/advance tracks in relation to others - which is an excellent feature also when dealing with sounds that have longer attacks, to get the overall timing of such a sound / instrument fit better with the song. (The current workarounds, including an extra bar in the beginning of the song so one can manually do this, is somewhat clumsy and less usable in a 'realtime' situation such as composing where you'd like to be able to tweak the timing while you're listening to the music)

And it would be interesting to hear your take on the problems with UVI engine based plugins (which are increasing every day and include Stylus, Trilogy and Atmosphere from Spectrasonics, USB Plugsounds and UltraFocus, Motu MachFive and MX4). I wouldn't be surprised if it's an issue with the UVI engine (as this behavior is something I've surely never encountered with other plugins) but at the moment I'm inclined to assume it's an issue with the FL VST wrapper as these plugins seem to work correctly with other hosts.

And just in case it wasn't clear, for my needs FL is by far the most ideal, the workflow compliments my way of making music (15+++ years on C64 besides other platforms

- my stuff can be found on HVSC) and it just 'makes sense' to me. None of my criticism is meant to devalue FL in any way, it's quite the opposite really

JMH

* and not a posting goes by without editing a typo or two *

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:46 am

I still don't understand why gol fails to see that I'm ONLY interested in delay compensation on 1 single track! The master track! How hard is it to implement that?

As I see it now, rendering trough the master track is broken and could be easily fixed.
The master track during rendering introduces a gap of silence for the WHOLE loop! When other tracks are delayed inside a mix with 61 samples then it's not nearly as bad as there will always be something in the background and 'fill' that gap (unless the loop consists of 1 single element).

bManic

Wopelka · Post by **Wopelka** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:56 am

i'd like to hear how much 61 samples can be a problem.

sorry, i'm not a pro, just a bedroom musican (shame on me), so i need to learn.

could someone post a 16 bars track with a f**ked up FL loop? honestly, i'm not sure i'll be able to notice the missing 0.001 sec. but who knows?

spaceman · Post by **spaceman** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:57 am

I'm staying out of this one

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 5:07 pm

Gol, I don't know whether you missed my quick pointer, so here it is again:

PDC on master bus, the simplest possible way:

1) get the combined latency of all plugins in master bus using the standard VST spec call. (only problem here is if plugins do not report their latency correctly, very rare though.)

2) when rendering the final data, simply play back the loop/song that much longer. ie. use the combined latency from plugins to lenghten the playback.

3) Adjust wave start/end points based on the sample latency from the plugins. So you only need to fiddle with the wave start/end offset with this simple trick.

This is basicly what they are requesting. Simple eh? Why don't you just give it to them, instead of fighting back?

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 5:11 pm

This is EXACTLY what I need (and hopefully somebody else). I basically do all that now manually which is a royal PITA when making more than 100 loops.

Gol, please, pretty please! I'll be your slave for a month if you do this..

Cheers!
bManic

Glooper · Post by **Glooper** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 5:44 pm

Can't say I know much about anything really...

but...

I was thinking about this problem and remembered that the only time I've come across noticable problems with latency is with using SIR. However I use cubase SL1, Which confused me as I thought I read in this thread that it had PDC built in... so checked the sir website to see if it conformed to the standard and found this...

http://www.knufinke.de/sir/faq_en.html

which says that FL supports PDC when using plug-ins as an insert? Which seems to conflict with what's been said in this thread...

Also found out that my version of cubase only has limited PDC support

.. hence why I was getting wierd latency problems when using SIR as a send effect... which makes me think I should upgrade to SL2...

...

Ben

Does FLStudio have PDC?