Vital - Released

[deejay2]

just a thought for a feature...

i would like to see possibility to share internally presets from users (if they wish to share) something like melda has it, any chance we could have it implemented?

[bmanic]

f**k knows what was going on with Vital but I fired it up last Saturday, just as I had done two and three days previously, and the filter was quite different. All of a sudden there was depth to the amount of resonance available. As far as I could tell I had done nothing differently, I was just getting very different results from it. And the different filter types actually started to sound a bit different, where before the Ladder filter sounded much the same as the Analog and Dirty types.

I had assumed that maybe it had auto-updated but, judging from Matt's post about the filters, I don't think that was the case. Whatever, it's way more usable now. The filters aren't stellar by any measure but, like PhasePlant and Equator, they are at least useful.

But, man! It was so frustrating when some people are saying "the filters sound perfectly OK, what are you on about?" and what I was hearing was basically worthless garbage. So if anyone was upset by my venting of said frustration, then I can only say - grow up and stop acting like babies.

Vital has an unfortunate system for gain staging. Simply put: If your oscillators are pushing the filters a bit too hot, even with the filter Drive knob at zero, you very quickly loose the clean resonance (basically it's narrowness and "whistle") of ALL the filter types.

This is one of my main gripes with Vital at the moment. There is a lot of juggling about you need to do to keep the gain stage as you want it. The filters are extremely picky about how loud the signals enter them. It's doubly frustrating as there is no output volume for the filters themselves, thus you sometimes end up with really weak signals if you want clean whistling resonance, that needs to be compensated elsewhere (like in the FX section or the main output volume).

It easily gets even more confusing when you realize that there is no typical signal flow of Oscillator -> Filter -> Amplifier. The amplifier part is in the oscillator, pre filter.. and no way to do post filter amplification polyphonically. Thus if you make a pluck sound, it's amplification coming pre-filter means that while the pluck is at it's loudest peaks, it'll have a different filter response at this moment than it has once it's volume envelope has decayed a bit. This can be abused to your advantage too but it would be nice if we could switch the oscillator volume knob to be post filter.. or more flexibly have each filter have their own output volume and let the user choose which one Envelope 1 is modulating (currently it's hard coded to modulate the oscillator volume knob).

So yeah, I totally believe what you experienced. It's very easy to run into the issue you describe.

[BONES]

Yeah but I didn't change anything. I just loaded the instrument, activated Filter 1, turned the cutoff to zero, added envelope modulation to it and then turned the resonance up to max. Four times I got one result and then on the 5th, and every time since, I got something else. It's just weird.

[clipnotic]

so, there's a "free" but badly coded wannabe Serum clone and CPU killer synth ... let the shitstorm begin!

[Q9000]

I wouldn't call it badly coded. One point to consider is that not many people can even build the sound engine similar to Vital, let alone the great UI, etc. Where is your Synth?
I am pretty happy with Vital.

Every software has shortcommings (here hardcoded filter paths).

[liquidsound]

so, there's a "free" but badly coded wannabe Serum clone and CPU killer synth ... let the shitstorm begin!

Well... I love both.
Let the Lovestorm begins!

[sqigls]

i'll say it again and again until preset creators get their shit together...
It's not Vital specific, but...
If one loads an instance of a synth, and the channel fader is on unity, there should be be NO CLIPPING.
Why on earth do people need to do this!? Put their fader at -18 and write patches??
When you're creating your presets, PLEASE leave the fader at unity. Almost every glob dang soft synth goes over 0 when browsing presets. So pull the fader down man - but the signal is still running into the effects plugin way too hot, almost every preset, it's so flipping irritating.

[clipnotic]

Where is your Synth?

"My" synth is Serum, CPU friendly, great and outstanding filter quality, endless great soundbanks ... so, there's no need for a clone. If I would program my own synth, I would program a completely different one! And I'm also collecting thumb down votes

[cron]

I don't know if it's system specific, or if Vital takes advantage of more modern CPU architectures like Zen 2, but it's vastly lighter than Serum on my system. With equivalent oversampling/unison/osc FX/filters etc, it hits the CPU around half as hard as Serum does. It's not even close.

[Whywhy]

f**k knows what was going on with Vital but I fired it up last Saturday, just as I had done two and three days previously, and the filter was quite different. All of a sudden there was depth to the amount of resonance available. As far as I could tell I had done nothing differently, I was just getting very different results from it. And the different filter types actually started to sound a bit different, where before the Ladder filter sounded much the same as the Analog and Dirty types.

I had assumed that maybe it had auto-updated but, judging from Matt's post about the filters, I don't think that was the case. Whatever, it's way more usable now. The filters aren't stellar by any measure but, like PhasePlant and Equator, they are at least useful.

But, man! It was so frustrating when some people are saying "the filters sound perfectly OK, what are you on about?" and what I was hearing was basically worthless garbage. So if anyone was upset by my venting of said frustration, then I can only say - grow up and stop acting like babies.

Vital has an unfortunate system for gain staging. Simply put: If your oscillators are pushing the filters a bit too hot, even with the filter Drive knob at zero, you very quickly loose the clean resonance (basically it's narrowness and "whistle") of ALL the filter types.

This is one of my main gripes with Vital at the moment. There is a lot of juggling about you need to do to keep the gain stage as you want it. The filters are extremely picky about how loud the signals enter them. It's doubly frustrating as there is no output volume for the filters themselves, thus you sometimes end up with really weak signals if you want clean whistling resonance, that needs to be compensated elsewhere (like in the FX section or the main output volume).

It easily gets even more confusing when you realize that there is no typical signal flow of Oscillator -> Filter -> Amplifier. The amplifier part is in the oscillator, pre filter.. and no way to do post filter amplification polyphonically. Thus if you make a pluck sound, it's amplification coming pre-filter means that while the pluck is at it's loudest peaks, it'll have a different filter response at this moment than it has once it's volume envelope has decayed a bit. This can be abused to your advantage too but it would be nice if we could switch the oscillator volume knob to be post filter.. or more flexibly have each filter have their own output volume and let the user choose which one Envelope 1 is modulating (currently it's hard coded to modulate the oscillator volume knob).

So yeah, I totally believe what you experienced. It's very easy to run into the issue you describe.

You're absolutely right bmanic, it was my first request some months ago, and I wasn't the only one, Matt know that and a gain control, per voices, after filters signal out, is at the top on his feature list.
But now, I think, his pretty over busy with all the support. It's hard to manage a one man company!
Different daw, different os, different linux distros, different users levels of knowledge, support is a hard thing, it not something I would like to do as my my job, for sure!
Big respect to people's working in that area.
( when the support is well done).
Ps:Nothing to do with this thread, but I got an Ilok problem, Katie from the support team response to me so fast and her help was so precious, Big up.

[AJYoung]

a gain control, per voices, after filters signal out, is at the top on his feature list.

Technically this exists (Global>Voice Amplitude in the modmatrix), but there's not a knob for it on the interface. Certainly not intuitive.

More gainstaging options has been asked for by the beta team for a good while, so it's definitely on the list.

[vertibration]

Its taking them a while to release an update, and frankly, good for him.....Im sure he is blasting away lots of issues, and bugs. Once Vital becomes more efficient, the store goes live, and more artist content is released, its going to be a really competitive product for people time when producing new and exciting music.

[SneakyBeats]

Where is your Synth?

"My" synth is Serum, CPU friendly, great and outstanding filter quality, endless great soundbanks ... so, there's no need for a clone. If I would program my own synth, I would program a completely different one! And I'm also collecting thumb down votes

Not too long ago people complained about Serum having shit filters

And when it comes to clones, Vital is quite far from being a serum clone.. Only thing common is that they're both wavetable and have basic synth blocks like adsr, lfo...

Serum is overpriced, especially now that it can't even be resold. Vital is free to use if you don't need support. And Vital could be easily charged for a premium price.

So for me, IF Xfer allows license transfers again at some point.. I'll instantly sell my license.

[Paree]

Where is your Synth?

"My" synth is Serum, CPU friendly, great and outstanding filter quality, endless great soundbanks ... so, there's no need for a clone. If I would program my own synth, I would program a completely different one! And I'm also collecting thumb down votes

How much did Steve Duda pay you? Move on and quit complaining. Oh btw, I’m not surprised that you are getting ratio’d.

[revvy]

Steve Duda is a solid dev, can't imagine forum shit stirrers are his doing.