One Synth Challenge #155: Any One Synth (Photonic Wins!)

[k2006]

Sometimes Vital uses less cpu if gui is closed(not minimised)

[Taron]

Hiya! I was wondering how some of the commercial synths were on the CPU, so I did a little bit of testing with some synths I have that were candidates to use for the month. I was surprised by some of the results. Here are the tests I did:
...

What a brilliant post, Z, thanks! I'm expecting Bazille and Repro to come close to Diva. You'd sort of dedicate a whole computer to one of these, hahaha. Gorgeous sounding, though.

Again, great post!

[FrogsInPants]

Is there any big rules problem with me changing the parameter range like this? I'm still only using one synth, as this change affects all instances.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

[z.prime]

Sometimes Vital uses less cpu if gui is closed(not minimised)

All of these were with GUI closed, I'm pretty sure -- it's REAPER, which I believe closes the GUI as opposed to hiding it like some DAWs do. I'll definitely double check on this! GUI definitely can affect performance, sending audio and events across threads, etc.

I'm expecting Bazille and Repro to come close to Diva. You'd sort of dedicate a whole computer to one of these, hahaha. Gorgeous sounding, though.

Haha yes, whole computer plugs, those! I own the whole u-he bundle so I could add them to the list if you really wanted, but I can tell you from playing around with them in the past (and doing a Bazille OSC track a long while ago, when it was in open beta) I'm pretty sure it would be: Bazille falls somewhere in the middle of Diva and Zebra whereas Repro (either one) is like waaaay worse than Diva.

I had a request for Surge, so I'll add that one tonight and update the post for those who are interested.

[Double Tap]

Hiya! I was wondering how some of the commercial synths were on the CPU, so I did a little bit of testing with some synths I have that were candidates to use for the month. I was surprised by some of the results. Here are the tests I did:

1) Kicks

Since kicks are sorta indicative of a percussive sound that would frequently need to be playing in many musical genres, I thought this would be interesting to know, a basic 1-voice thing. I tried to set this up in each synth as close to the same:

• 1 volume env
• 2 mod envelopes - MSEG wherever possible
• one main sine/wavetable oscillator with both envelopes on pitch
• second noise oscillator with env2 on level
• LPF with env1 on cutoff

Here are the results:
kick-numbers.png


2) Saw Chord Stacks

The next test was saw chord stacks... not too different, I suppose, but stacks of 8 notes - something that is a staple to very many electronic songs:

• 1 volume env
• 1 mod envelope - all ADSR
• one main saw oscillator
• LPF (ladder or other "analog") with mod envelope on cutoff

Results:
chord-numbers.png


3) Idle

Of course, using one synth means having a lot of instances. If they are using a bunch of CPU when doing nothing, it is no fun (ahem Aalto, ahem):
idle.png

One of the most surprising things to me is that Serum is at the low end of CPU usage, almost the best in every case. It is not really a surprise that Massive X and Diva were pretty heavy. I was expecting Vital to be on the lower end, or maybe hoping, but alas it is not and the idle CPU is not ideal. I was also surprised Falcon was so good but man is that thing clunky to program! Also someone who shall remain nameless told me Phase Plant was very good on the CPU, but it seems not to be the case.

There is a thread on discord with audio samples if you want to hear.

If there are other synths you might be interested in, I could possibly add it, if I own the synth already.

Anyway, if you're considering one of these synths there's some more information for you! I have pretty much settled on Serum if I can manage to make a track at all, but might change my mind...

Great bit of public service synthcasting.

[z.prime]

Hiya, so a bit of an update to the performance tests here.

I should also be very transparent: these tests were originally done on an M1 Mac, which came with a bit of a problem getting relative performance numbers for plugins that did not have a native ARM version; specifically: Massive X, Phase Plant, and Vital. However, I intend to use this M1 Mac so the tests were actually pertinent to me.

Warning! Nerd talk: Reaper bridges x86_64 plugins to a new process and uses Rosetta to translate the commands to M1's ARM, which, from what I've read in the past is ~10% slowdown. I don't know how REAPER is measuring the performance of these, though, and it could be IPC is measured as part of it, which would probably be even more of a slowdown.

Anyway, I updated all these plugins on my x86_64 MacBook Pro and re-ran the tests. I also added: Synthmaster 2, Surge, and Thorn, because I thought those would also be good candidates to use for an OSC if someone was so inclined. So here are the numbers, a bit more fairly represented. Keep in mind these should all be viewed as relative numbers (e.g. "Serum and Synthmaster are almost exactly the same") rather than expecting those specific CPU percentages on your own machines:

x86_64-numbers-small.png

And when idle (ideally this would be very low so you could have a lot of instances not affecting the overall performance too much):

x86_64-numbers-idle.png

Hope someone finds that interesting or useful!

My takeaways from this test are: Vital is pretty good on x86_64 (I hope an ARM version is released sometime!), Serum is still one of the best performers, no surprise but Surge is a pretty great choice too, and ANA 2 is a sleeper - low cpu and really a great sounding synth; don't use x86_64 plugins on an M1 Mac; and the M1 is super silent compared to the x86_64 Mac with its fan running nonstop but the latter has about twice the CPU power, from the look of it... Also, an updated audio sample is on discord.

[] Peter:H []

Hiya, so a bit of an update to the performance tests here.

Hope someone finds that interesting or useful!

Yes, interesting and useful.

My takeaways from this test are: Vital is pretty good on x86_64 (I hope an ARM version is released sometime!)

At least with Vital Windows Owners have a slight advantage over M1 ... good to know
I just scanned through the forks of Vital on Github. There are 77 with only little activity in the past according to the network graph. But I think none of the "active" forks had the goal to make it M1 compatible... https://github.com/mtytel/vital/network

[z.prime]

At least with Vital Windows Owners have a slight advantage over M1 ... good to know
I just scanned through the forks of Vital on Github. There are 77 with only little activity in the past according to the network graph. But I think none of the "active" forks had the goal to make it M1 compatible... https://github.com/mtytel/vital/network

To be clear: this is a Mac with Intel x86_64 chip. I would expect Windows to be similar. I think the M1 problem for Vital is just the fact it has to run in a separate process.

Also, I'm pretty sure Matt said he was not looking to accept pull requests, so I dunno if it would be worthwhile pursuing any of those forks, maybe this will change in the future. But he's definitely still working on Vital. Maybe not the things I had hoped to see... but things nonetheless:

vital-graphics.jpg

(Source: Vital Discord)

[Yadrichik_Chaya]

Living Under A Rock

Edit: Heard some blue notes here and there - not jazzy blue notes but blue as in cubase velocity blue and out of key New version up!

@bjporter please download the new one Many thanks!

Reading that we this month could use commercial fx and any synth we feel like (including hardware) my first thought was to create a really crazy jam with only the Boss SY-300. The plan was also to trigger the SY-300 with other instruments besides guitar!

When I started installing the new plugs I had bought from Pluginboutique that I wanted to use for this project I also decided to finally install Vital.
I've had my eyes on Vital for a very long time - like over 5 months but I've never tried it.
I planned to install Vital later on only if and when I had bought QAPT Music's really great presets called VANTAGE.

But since I had even started a thread here on KVR about the great FREE presets pack made by Tancla for Vital viewtopic.php?f=257&t=575350
without even having played with Vital myself I really felt it was time to actually try Vital!

I started jamming, one idea led to another and now my entry is a Vital track instead of the planned Boss SY-300 track…

Vital is sadly, like I now see already mentioned in the thread, a real CPU hog!
With only 38 instances in my project and at buffer size 1024(!) I still get audio dropouts and crackles…

I might just show up before the deadline with a crazy Boss SY-300 track instead But for now this is my entry:



https://soundcloud.com/user-414219875/y ... der-a-rock

Midi controllers: Boss SY-1000 (Guitar to MIDI mode) & Axis-49

DAW: Cubase Pro 11

Instances of Vital: 38

DAW effects: Steinberg Autopan, Roomworks, Squasher

Free effects: Mcharmverb, ValhallaSupermassive

Commerical effects: Unfiltered Audio BYOME, NI Raum, NI Replika, Bleass Delay, W.A SphereDelay, Ozone 9 Elements, Klevgrand Reamp, Klevgrand Knorr, United Plugins QuickBass

This weekend I will finally go through all the Triple Cheese tracks (many really great ones that I've just listened to real fast but deserve proper listening) and then vote.

[SamDi]

Hi all,

a question regarding the rules:

Samples are not allowed, even when they are part of the synth content, e.g. granular engine for Pigments with stock samples is against the rules, right?

What about "border conditions", e.g. noise OSC, which use samples internally?

[ELEX]

Regarding the first: that's correct AFAIK. On the latter: the mentioned noise osc should be no problem at least. I'd use one of those without hesitation.

[IV!]

Reading that we this month could use commercial fx and any synth we feel like (including hardware) my first thought was to create a really crazy jam with only the Boss SY-300. The plan was also to trigger the SY-300 with other instruments besides guitar!

Oh, you could do both if you have enough time and mood! Hardware submissions are doubly welcome!

[Yadrichik_Chaya]

Reading that we this month could use commercial fx and any synth we feel like (including hardware) my first thought was to create a really crazy jam with only the Boss SY-300. The plan was also to trigger the SY-300 with other instruments besides guitar!

Oh, you could do both if you have enough time and mood! Hardware submissions are doubly welcome!

IV! Firstly many thanks for the soundcloud comment! But an even more thank you for this comment resulting in me sitting with only the SY-300 and some really cool guitar licks and a song that is like progressive rock but also funky/jazzy. This new song should not be done with any restrictions so it is not really fit for OSC but I will post it on soundcloud sooner or later.

[gorgorgathgorgorgor]

so as most of you know, I've been composing random strangeness in VCV Rack since the VCV challenge, and I don't intend to quit anytime soon. I would like to use VCV for Any One Synth this month as well, but I wonder what will be acceptable to all of you, because of the nearly endless possibilities within the rack itself. Do I limit myself to one particular oscillator for all sound generation? to one brand of module? what are y'all's thoughts? I have two creations in the works, one limiting myself to instruo modules where possible, one limiting myself to Bogaudio FM-OP and NOISE for sound generation. I want to restrain myself in some way!

[emikaela]

so as most of you know, I've been composing random strangeness in VCV Rack since the VCV challenge, and I don't intend to quit anytime soon. I would like to use VCV for Any One Synth this month as well, but I wonder what will be acceptable to all of you, because of the nearly endless possibilities within the rack itself. Do I limit myself to one particular oscillator for all sound generation? to one brand of module? what are y'all's thoughts? I have two creations in the works, one limiting myself to instruo modules where possible, one limiting myself to Bogaudio FM-OP and NOISE for sound generation. I want to restrain myself in some way!

one brand for all sound sources seems reasonable to me. most synths we use here have more than one type of oscillator after all. omri cohen held a challenge a couple of months ago where you could only use vult, geodesics and core modules which was quite interesting to try and work with.