OB-Xf by Surge Synth Team

[EvilDragon]

Comment noted, but we are not returning to the banks method, sorry.

One thing we do want to reinstate is Ctrl+clicking on the 16 programmed buttons would change the group (if Group button is unselected) or change the patch (if Group button is selected. That should speed things up some (and that's also how it worked previously).

Perhaps even adding Ctrl+click on prev/next buttons to jog through the categories. That's also be neat and would reduce the number of visits to the browser menu.

[EvilDragon]

del

[Largos]

You might as well just not have the groups at all if you can't save the layout. Everyone will just load patches into 1 of 1. Nobody is going populate 256 slots if it can't be saved.

[ampetrosillo]

Yup that's exactly what happened.

If an alleged rewrite produces identical sounding results it is not sonically superior in any way, it is producing identical sounding results. It doesn't matter if the code is 10 years old if it sounds identical. LOL.

Also we have polyphonic unison, too.

I guess discoDSP's product is more efficient though due to vectorisation. Which is something that makes itself noticeable with very high note counts (across a large number of instruments). But as for sound quality there should be little difference?

[EvilDragon]

You might as well just not have the groups at all if you can't save the layout. Everyone will just load patches into 1 of 1. Nobody is going populate 256 slots if it can't be saved.

I have explicitly mentioned that you can have "banks" by using the Project field when saving patches. So then, you can simply pack that folder up and voila, you have a bank to share.

The way things are now the programmer buttons simply index into the last selected folder. That's a fairly simple concept to grasp I'd say.

[ampetrosillo]

Also, maybe the "premium" BLEP oscillators produce less aliasing with cross-modulation and that sort of stuff?

[EvilDragon]

I mean, anyone can do their own comparisons and draw their own conclusions. From my shootout, even crossmod sounds the same (with the caveat that we have doubled the range of the Crossmod knob so you can push things further - so 50% Crossmod in OB-Xf is 100% Crossmod in OB-Xd).

[Largos]

I have explicitly mentioned that you can have "banks" by using the Project field when saving patches. So then, you can simply pack that folder up and voila, you have a bank to share.

The way things are now the programmer buttons simply index into the last selected folder. That's a fairly simple concept to grasp I'd say.

My bad, that read weird because I hadn't realised that you'd changed the buttons to browse through the sub folders. Which is all very well until you have more than 256 patches in a sub folder.

None of this is more simple than a one click menu with the all the patches laid out thus

Screenshot_20251213_132530.png

[EvilDragon]

Some liked that huge popup menu, some didn't. More people are appreciating things split into folders by category than the other way, it seems.

In any case, we do have plans for a full-screen patch browser with category filtering etc. etc. but not for 1.0.

[baconpaul]

Look for folks who don’t like the choices we made I get it. But disco dsp and the original code base are all still there! As is the arturia oberheim which I quite like. And others. It’s a “yes, and” thing

The banks - especially the way they expressed themselves as daw programs in logic - were super confusing so we turned them off in our fork and made patches work more like surge. (In fact almost exactly like that). That makes in 1.0 the directory the bank - although we want to improve this when we add things like mpe and so on

But if that workflow doesn’t work for you there’s an easy way to not use the synth! I’ll even pre emptively give every user of ob-xf a full refund

And look take a not really building 10 year old code base, clean it up, ship a stable, and improve when we have time is exactly what we did with surge in 2019. Dunno if the expansion here will be as ambitious but that’s the playbook we deciddd to use when we realized a few people were trying to get the code runnable again

[Largos]

I don't know why you are getting passive aggressive, I just said I preferred one thing you did to the other and why but if getting feedback doesn't work for you, it's easy not to open threads and githubs. wink.

[soniccraft]

Yup that's exactly what happened.

If an alleged rewrite produces identical sounding results it is not sonically superior in any way, it is producing identical sounding results. It doesn't matter if the code is 10 years old if it sounds identical. LOL.

Also we have polyphonic unison, too.

Fascinating. You've responded to precisely none of the technical points.

Let me simplify what you claimed:

1. "discoDSP didn't recode v3 from scratch." That's false. They paid the original developer for a multi-month rewrite. New architecture. You were wrong.

2. "Spectrum analysis proves the oscillators are identical". That's technically illiterate. BLEP oscillators produce clean output regardless of implementation. Your test proves nothing about the underlying code.

3. "It sounds identical": It doesn't. BLEP+BLAMP+64x internal oversampling with kernel interpolation achieves higher sound quality.

4. "We have polyphonic unison too": So does OB-Xd v3. Difference is, theirs runs on SIMD processing up to 8 voices in parallel.

You've now shifted from "they didn't rewrite it" to "it doesn't matter if they did." You made false public claims. You got called out. And now you're deflecting with "LOL sounds the same."

It's disgraceful. Disco DSP has maintained OB-Xd for a decade, kept v2 free for the community, invested in a proper v3 rewrite, and this is what they get? False accusations from someone who forked their work, hasn't seen their code, and doesn't understand the analysis methods he's citing?

Truly inspirational stuff. Keep up the good work, mate.

[baconpaul]

I don't know why you are getting passive aggressive, I just said I preferred one thing you did to the other and why but if getting feedback doesn't work for you, it's easy not to open threads and githubs. wink.

Ha fair

If you are interested I could share the cases which broke in logic with the free code (and some of the real memory errors in the GitHub code base and so on). and your tone was indeed different than the other person in this thread so apologies for getting a bit shirty

Anyway I was worried at the outset of this project that we would get negative reactions because of disco dsp still having a closed version. Perhaps that was the right instinct after all.

I dunno.

[baconpaul]

Disco DSP has maintained OB-Xd for a decade, kept v2 free for the community,

The primary thing that motivated me to touch this project (which you are now successfully making me regret!) was that this wasn’t quite true. The free version didn’t have signed binaries, had errors and bugs, didn’t compile easily on various platforms, didn’t have a vst3 etc…. When we started so seemed like a nice cleanup community effort!

[rasmusklump]

Don't forget the nagscreen discodsp added. That was the final thing that made me delete it from my hd