Unify by PluginGuru; The next big thing?

[DrMEM]

Regarding latency, only a few people are reporting latency issues. I made a note of your earlier posting on the topic, and noticed you said you were using Win7 with an RME Fireface audio box. One other Fireface user was having all sorts of issues with sluggish response, and it turned out to be vertical-refresh setting for his NVidia video card. Probably no connection but I mention it just the same.

The main thing I wanted to ask about latency was: can you give an example of a specific set-up in Unify where you find the latency unacceptable? If I can reproduce it, I can figure out what's happening.

This is not the kind of latency that we are asking about. We are asking you to fix the plugin delay compensation issue. Please search this thread for the word latency and you will find the issue.

The problem is that Unify is not reporting its net latency (as determined by the plugins that introduce latency loaded within it) to the DAW host correctly.

[DarkStar]

^^^
You mean
-- get all the delay values from the plug-ins.
-- sum them for each layer (possibly rounded up to an integral number of audio buffers),
-- sum them for the longest possible signal path: the longest MIDI layer, longest Instrument layer, longest Aux layer and Master layer,
-- pass that value to the DAW

---------------
Second batch of queries:

(a) in the User Manual, are "lanes" the same as "layers"?
(b) some plug-in names are very long, can I give them shorter aliases which are used by Unify?
(c) From the User Manual "Signals above 0 dB will almost certainly be distorted"; is that correct? I thought that such signals would only get distorted once they hit the analogue domain.
(d) can the factory / bundled plugins be used in other DAWs?
(e) can I load Unify as an instrument into Unify?

[dbender]

^^^

(e) can I load Unify as an instrument into Unify?

Be careful! – that'll cause a blackhole

[Cinebient]

^^^

(e) can I load Unify as an instrument into Unify?

Be careful! – that'll cause a blackhole

Well, some rare apps could do that indeed, they are hosts and also works as plug-ins within themselves.
Why not?

[dionenoid]

@dionenoid Thanks for your feedback.

Regarding latency, only a few people are reporting latency issues. I made a note of your earlier posting on the topic, and noticed you said you were using Win7 with an RME Fireface audio box. One other Fireface user was having all sorts of issues with sluggish response, and it turned out to be vertical-refresh setting for his NVidia video card. Probably no connection but I mention it just the same.

The main thing I wanted to ask about latency was: can you give an example of a specific set-up in Unify where you find the latency unacceptable? If I can reproduce it, I can figure out what's happening.

Thanks in advance and best wishes,
-shane

There's 2 kinds of latency issues really :

1) Internal latency : This is easy to reproduce. Take the init patch, duplicate the sinewave layer. Add a plug-in that has latency, you'll hear that the second layer is delayed.
I tested this with all kinds of plug-ins, both in daw and standalone, and also with all kinds of instruments both internal and external.

Try for example Fabfilter Pro-Q3 in Linear Phase, because that one is very obvious. Or Pro-L2 : different modes or oversampling on, very obvious delay. But also DMG Limitless, or Equilibrium in FIR mode. Oeksound Soothe. IK Saturator X and Tapes. All Newfangled stuff. All Acustica Audio stuff. Almost all UAD plug-ins. Melda plug-ins when oversampling is on. And a whole bunch of plug-ins that use some sort of oversampling or lookahead.
Overall a lot of popular plug-ins that cause this internal latency, meaning that layers are delayed, going out of sync, between each other.

2) Latency reported to daw : Every plug-in that causes this internal latency, also adds to the overall latency of Unify and this is not correctly reported to the daw.
In other words, add an UAD plug-in somewhere inside Unify and every note you play is delayed. Add another plug-in like Limitless and the latency becomes even greater. Bypass them and Unify plays tight. So something is wrong there.

In a lot of cases you don't hear the differences, for example when you're making pads or other slow moving stuff. But when you use arp's, drums, or other sounds that have to be tight, you'll notice this immediately.

So in total, another example : When you make an arpeggiator with 2 instrument layers, and add for example an UAD API to one layer, results in 1) The 2 layers not playing in sync plus 2) the whole arp playing with a delay in your daw.

Hope this info helps. Good luck and thanx for listening

Ps : I haven't heard this in other chainers.

[DrMEM]

^^^
You mean
-- get all the delay values from the plug-ins.
-- sum them for each layer (possibly rounded up to an integral number of audio buffers),
-- sum them for the longest possible signal path: the longest MIDI layer, longest Instrument layer, longest Aux layer and Master layer,
-- pass that value to the DAW

It's a little more complicated than that because you'd need to delay the things that aren't on the longest signal path appropriately within Unify to make every sound coming out of Unify line up correctly, but basically yes.

dionenoid's post right above this one lays out the problems well, and to clarify his point 2) further, if you put a note (with 0ms attack) at the start of measure 2 in your DAW's piano roll, that note should sound at the start of measure 2 during playback, no if's, and's, or but's.

[getdunne]

(a) in the User Manual, are "lanes" the same as "layers"?
(b) some plug-in names are very long, can I give them shorter aliases which are used by Unify?
(c) From the User Manual "Signals above 0 dB will almost certainly be distorted"; is that correct? I thought that such signals would only get distorted once they hit the analogue domain.
(d) can the factory / bundled plugins be used in other DAWs?
(e) can I load Unify as an instrument into Unify?

(a) Yes, we used to refer to MIDI and Audio Effects as "lanes" and only Instrument layers as "layers". Lately we're using "layers" for all three, but the docs have yet to catch up. Thanks for reminding me!
(b) Plug-in names reported by Unify are the exact strings obtained by querying the plug-ins themselves. Can you give an example of one whose name is too long?
(c) This will vary from system to system. Some audio interfaces will be more forgiving than others. The point is that our "dB" values are "dBFS" where 0 dB means "full scale" and you can't expect to be able to push signals harder than that (as in analog days) because your A/D converter might not support that.
(d) The built-in plug-ins aren't exposed as separate VST files, so you can't use those in other hosts. The bundled ones live in a special folder, but otherwise they're just ordinary VSTs. Although you could point your DAW at that folder to find the VSTs, we recommend that you simply install the standard versions (we provide all the download links in the README file that comes with the installer) into standard VST locations. This is because our versions usually have less bundled content (e.g. patch presets), and a few also have specific code changes.
(e) Yes, absolutely, and it won't even cause the universe to implode.

[getdunne]

@dionenoid Thank you, thank you, thank you for explaining in this level of detail! I haven't had enough experience working with high-latency plug-ins to develop a strong understanding and instinct for these issues.

I totally get the internal latency issue, where all layers need to sound together in sync, but I want to make sure I understand what you're saying about reporting latency to the DAW. If you're using some high-latency plug-ins inside Unify, the best the DAW can do is delay playback of all other tracks to match, correct? It wouldn't be practical to play a setup like that live, because the same high-latency plug-ins would cause too much delay between MIDI note events and the corresponding sound. So this is mainly about getting a properly synchronized mix "in the box", correct?

Thanks again for your patient explanations!

[dionenoid]

@dionenoid Thank you, thank you, thank you for explaining in this level of detail! I haven't had enough experience working with high-latency plug-ins to develop a strong understanding and instinct for these issues.

I totally get the internal latency issue, where all layers need to sound together in sync, but I want to make sure I understand what you're saying about reporting latency to the DAW. If you're using some high-latency plug-ins inside Unify, the best the DAW can do is delay playback of all other tracks to match, correct? It wouldn't be practical to play a setup like that live, because the same high-latency plug-ins would cause too much delay between MIDI note events and the corresponding sound. So this is mainly about getting a properly synchronized mix "in the box", correct?

Yep that is correct. I don't play live, it's all about how it's playing back inside the daw.

I honestly don't know how other chainers do this btw. But i can imagine you would need Unify to correctly apply the latency that's reported from those plug-ins and then report that number to the daw. I'm not a technical guy so i don't know how that's done, but i can guess it's not that easy to implement.

Anywho, good luck with the work. Despite the latency thing i'm very happy i bought it

[DarkStar]

Thank you for your answers.

(b) Plug-in names reported by Unify are the exact strings obtained by querying the plug-ins themselves. Can you give an example of one whose name is too long?

I don't know about them being too long for Unify, but shorter names would make it easier to see what plug-ins are in the chain. Just for info, the longest plug-in names that I see here (in Waveform) are:


And I wasn't expecting the built-in / bundled plug-ins to be available outside Unify. In fact I would prefer to keep them invisible to my DAWs.

[grdh20]

I'm going to suggest that you allow saves over sound guru presets. Some presets like Bass 3am for instance, at least for me, are over modulated and have to be tamed down a bit. I know I can save users presets, but to have to come back to a factory preset that needs manual adjustments when you don't really want to save user presets is a pain. If you're worried about bad overwrites or something, you could restore defaults from backup or something. Anyway,, I hope this request could be made possible. It is a pet peeve of mine when you can't overwrite factory ones.

[mrsugmad]

For Shane Dunne:

Just found out that pluginguru.com has its own forum. But there doesn't seem to be a link to it at pluginguru.com
Could you please check into this?

The forum is at:
https://forums.pluginguru.com/

Thanks
Mike

[getdunne]

For Shane Dunne:

Just found out that pluginguru.com has its own forum. But there doesn't seem to be a link to it at pluginguru.com
Could you please check into this?

The forum is at:
https://forums.pluginguru.com/

Thanks
Mike

Thanks Mike. The forums are very new on PlugInGuru.com - John set them up - and I didn't realize there wasn't a link from the main site. I'll let him know.
-shane

[mrsugmad]

For Shane Dunne:

Just found out that pluginguru.com has its own forum. But there doesn't seem to be a link to it at pluginguru.com
Could you please check into this?

The forum is at:
https://forums.pluginguru.com/

Thanks
Mike

Thanks Mike. The forums are very new on PlugInGuru.com - John set them up - and I didn't realize there wasn't a link from the main site. I'll let him know.
-shane

Great ! Thank you.

Today's Livestream was very informative. John's insights and your awesome online help are much appreciated.

Regards,
Mike

[DrMEM]

A request and a question:

Request: Make double-click on the macro knobs open the linked parameters page. Right now double-clicking resets them to 0, which is easy to do with a quick click-drag instead. I know alt-click can open the linked parameters page, but alt-clicking makes me take my hand off the mod wheel!

Question: Can macro knobs not send cc data? One of the reasons I bought unify was to be able to edit CC curves for some of my more annoying-to-control instruments. Maybe what I'm after can be achieved with some free midi effect I can load into Unify?