OB-Xf by Surge Synth Team

[baconpaul]

Can we just let it die? Evil said some things which were wrong and some which were right and some which were between. That user got pretty upset etc. The thread went all bad-kvr shaped.

The facts are all in the code. And the choice of kinda oberheimy synths is enormous. And im just trying to write some code for fun people that make music with. I know thats the motivation of the other folks on the team too including evil. So let’s get back to jumping over Tom Sawyer in the subdivisions yeah?

[Vortifex]

Your efforts are definitely appreciated here

[Iu Gob]

Your efforts are definitely appreciated here

+1.000.000

[JonSolo]

I hope to god its not George. I miss the one-on-one with him as DiscoDSP and have since cut all ties with them because I am dis-enamored with the bot answers and weird, almost snotty interactions. I bought the complete DiscoDSP bundle back in the day (think 2017-ish) and have felt zero love since George stopped responding personally...so no paid updates for this guy. And I hate that because they used to do a great product for a fair price.

Grateful for the tireless (and thus far, pro bono) work done by the Surge team on OB-Xf.

[pough]

Can we just let it die?

I know I can. I just jumped in to say that I'm really enjoying the synth and that open source projects like this seem really cool to me, which is why Surge Synth Team seems really cool to me. I appreciate your work on this and other projects. Please don't get too discouraged by the, um... inherent humanity of KvR and whatnot.

[Unreflected]

Thanks a lot Surge Synth Team, OB-Xf sounds fantastic.

[Aloysius]

Does is sound as good or better than the gazillion GForce Oberheim's?

[Largos]

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.

I doubt I'd understand them if you shared them

I prefer mostly making sounds and saving them with synths rather than browsing patches. I guess most people just use synths as romplers, so for this reason I find patch browsers are generally geared to that and thus just have annoyances or a lack of utility for saving, creating and organising patches.

As it seems you're going to borrow from that, I'll use surge xt as an example. The patch browser is divided into four columns. If I am wanting to work with my own patches, the first two columns/half of the menu are just clutter and there's no way to toggle them off. Nested Pop out menus are annoying. If type "Bass" in the search field, then the user patches are right at the bottom. If I want to change the name of a folder, I have to go into the file manager, change the name there and refresh the browser.

Changing the one click patch save and having to go through nested menus to get patches is extra annoyance. Not being able to delete patches using the synth is meh, though I presume that is coming as it's in Surge XT.

What I think would be better (from a non coder perspective) would be

1: There was a "create project" entry in the menu.
2: Clicking this selected a name and then created a folder with 256 fxp files
3: These files are linked to the buttons
4: The folders/projects have a separate button and menu. Or maybe a text display with the folder name.
5: Instead of what is there now. The patch number has a pop out menu same as the nested menu for each folder but one click rather than going through the nested menu. It only shows fxps that have been altered rather than 256 default files to reduce visual clutter.
6: The (rest of the) functions should be on the patch buttons instead.

[EvilDragon]

You could install Surge with no factory patches and then the first two columns won't show for you. This is an option in the installer. So there is a way to "toggle that off", just FYI.

For OB-Xf, this is a stepping stone towards an improved patch browser post-1.0. It won't be changed this close to the release.

[baconpaul]

Yeah those are pretty solid ideas though for once we get it shipped

I especially like the idea of “populate a blank project” but the naming is tricky. I’ll ponder that idea of having a unit of distributable work which is a project even though the unit of state is still patch

[anomandaris1]

Does it have microtuning?

[ATS]

Does is sound as good or better than the gazillion GForce Oberheim's?

imho GForce is THE best dev when it comes to virtual synths.

[EvilDragon]

Does it have microtuning?

MTS-ESP is supported!

[Rivanni]

Menus are not supposed to scale with plugin zoom level,

Of course they should. They are part of the plugin. What use is it to have a zoom option but not zooming everything? Small text is onr of the most important reasons to zoom.
Now I have a plugin at 200% and menus at 50% because the plugin ignores the OS zoom level.
I'm curious to hear what other users with a High-PPI display are experiencing.

I think Evil meant: menus should scale with OS scaling but not content scaling. If I zoom in excel or a browser on my document my menus don't expand. So your plugin at 150% with an OS at 150% should show 150% not 225% menus. Right now it probably shows 100% in OBXF.

We probably get that wrong in OB-Xf now.

There's a few reasons for that. (You can skip this, but: 1: The windows HDPI api is, to use a technical term, 'kinda dogs@%!', 2: the result of that has contaged plugin apis on windows and linux, 3: we have bitmap assets so have to unwind all the scales to get to pixels or we blur; 4: I use primarily a mac where the OS does this right and HDPI works great without any shenanigans so wouldn't really notice a bug and 5: Evil uses 1x nonHDPI so same, except his uis are all pixely and his life would be better with a mac but I am yet to convince him of this and, 6: since linux doesn't really exist the popup menus aren't an OS thing anyway so you need to communicate the zoom to them in the app which here is the plugin, and 7: JUCE has a way to do that but it conflicts with 3 in an annoying way which will require some careful work that I expect we got wrong).

So the answer is we need to open an issue to try and get popup menus on linux scaling properly with OS zoom.

Amazingly to do that in a way that works for you is daw dependent (see #1 and #2 above) so need to know the DAW you are running in to test. Or I'll just test it in bitwig and reaper and if it doest work in your daw, they need to use the VST3 scale api properly.

I just installed the Zebra3 beta on my Linux machine. After opening it, the UI was very small (plugin zoom was 100%), but the context menus were at the system level. According to Urs, system menus are used in Zebra3. Anyway, seeing the correctly sized menus reminded me of the issue I was having and still have with OB-Xf.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.
I use Bitwig 5 and 6, but the issue with the small menus also occurs in Reaper 7.5. SurgeXT has (not surprisingly) the same problem.

[audiojunkie]

Hopefully by the end of year, we'll see!

I'm not sure if anything is missing from OB-Xd 3.x, apart from patch management being different, and patches not being compatible (due to certain parameters changing their scaling and ranges, for consistency reasons). We have improved on almost every aspect of the original codebase, and included some features that 3.x doesn't have at all.

I was curious so I compared and OB-Xd 3 has a completely rewritten engine with some SIMD thing that processes multiple voices at once, better oscillators, polyphonic unison, hardware-accurate modeling and self-oscillating filters. They rebuilt it from scratch with loads of new features.

Meanwhile, you lot are running the 2013 code - your own repo says "continuation of version 2.11." So that's the old engine, one voice at a time, with forced 2x oversampling eating CPU.

So... you've taken decade-old code, added a handful of features that aren't exactly groundbreaking (second LFO, noise modes, independent pitch bends - lovely, but hardly revolutionary), given it a new coat of paint with UI improvements, broken backwards compatibility without providing a converter, and you're genuinely claiming you've "improved almost every aspect" compared to OB-Xd 3? That's either monumentally ignorant or monumentally arrogant, and I'm not sure which is worse.

Yeah, but These developers are awesome, and don't have shady business practices. If you don't like this, you can always go try your luck with OB-Xd. I'll take OB-Xf any day of the week, and support these developers any day of the week too. You do you. I'll do me.