Any Word on the Update ?

[fluffy_little_something]

Hehe, as I was fast-reading the posts my mind indeed read top priority in there somehow
Anyway, I think it says on your site that Sylenth1 is already free of aliasing But judging from your post, it does have aliasing artifacts.
Either way, it is already way better in this respect than most other synths I have tried to far. Maybe because I don't use extreme modulation or very high notes.
So, assuming cpu load might double, it should be enough to use the HQ setting only during mixdown, right?

Is a real last-note retrigger mono mode on your to do list? There is some space left for a third option on that switch in the corner

[Teksonik]

Message boards are chock full of vocal minorities -- some random guy on the internet might scream about feature X when a thousand offline users wouldn't care about it, or perhaps would be turned off from it.
Listening to your customers as a whole? Sure, great idea. But taking any one given customer too seriously? Not so much.

Where else would an online company get customer feedback ? Contact address from the Website, Facebook and other social media and yes Forums as well. All users were online at one time if for nothing else than to buy the software.

Like I said.......

Listening to what your customers or potential customers want never fails.

No mention at all of taking any one user's opinion over another.

If customers don't express their opinions then they're just along for the ride. The idea is to take the most asked for features and if adding them makes sense from a technical and financial standpoint and follows your vision for the product you consider adding them. Applies to any developer and any product.

I don't think Sylenth 1 "needs" anything but there are some things I'd want to see added because I enjoy Sylenth and expanding it's sound palatte would simply expand that enjoyment. But that goes for any synth that I own.....except the ones I don't like which get deleted and forgotten.

[Lennard]

I think it says on your site that Sylenth1 is already free of aliasing But judging from your post, it does have aliasing artifacts.

No, please read more carefully. The site says:

At its core Sylenth1 houses 4 alias-free unison oscillators

The oscs are alias-free indeed, but driving the filter or the distortion effect can produce some aliasing.

[fluffy_little_something]

Well, my memory is not what it used to be I remembered reading something about the absence of aliasing on your site before I rebought S1 weeks ago.

So, there is no (audible) aliasing unless I use the filter drive knob or distortion unit? I hardly ever use the latter as it tends to sound ugly with polyphonic sounds. The drive knob is ok, but its sweet spot, or range rather, seems to be between the values of 1 and 4, beyond that it usually doesn't do anything good with the sound.


So, what is on your to-do list, the top 5?

I have no problem with adding stuff, as long as it doesn't break backward compatibility. Even adding that HQ mode doesn't really hurt S1's advantage of low CPU load as modern processors are so much more powerful than those 10 years ago.

[aumordia]

I've programmed 200+ patches for Sylenth1 at this point, the oscillators are indeed alias free. You'll notice when you play higher notes that something funny happens with the highest harmonics. It doesn't appear to be doing the standard bandlimiting/lowpassing tricks you see with other efficient plugins (which dulls the sound) -- but it's also, obviously, not doing the massive oversampling you see with the more "expensive" plugins (in terms of CPU usage). It seems to cleverly and selectively drop just those harmonics which would actually cause aliasing problems, so you get alias-free oscillators that are bright and punchy while barely pushing your CPU. Massive over sampling would probably produce a smidge more brightness, but at a huge CPU cost (see Diva, Serum, Spire, etc). I think this is a big part of why Hive failed to supplant Sylenth1, it looks like its using standard bandlimiting, so it just doesn't quite have the sparkle and, for lack of a better word, fullness of Sylenth1.

The only other synths I know of that are equally clever in their own way regarding efficient, high quality oscillators are Harmor (additive magic) and Dune 2 (black magic), but in both cases the ergonomics are markedly clunkier than Sylenth1 -- they provide a linear increase in power but with an exponential increase in user-unfriendliness.

(Please don't cry to me if I dissed your favorite synth, this is the internet, relax.)

All that said, if you crank the filter drive and/or the resonance, you'll notice aliasing in the higher notes -- especially if you crank both and don't lowpass. The distortion module can also produce aliasing, but you probably won't notice that what with all the distortion. The only other place I've noticed aliasing is when attempting extreme audiorate modulation -- e.g. if you mod phase a by lfo1, and mod lfo1's rate by lfo2, and crank the rate for both lfo's and keytrack them, you're gonna have a bad time. That said, take lfo2 out of the equation above, and you can get some very pleasant FM type tones, although those patches can only really be monophonic since the lfo's themselves aren't polyphonic.

A bit of ramble... at any rate, it's all pretty damn impressive for a softsynth of any age, but positively mind blowing for something a decade old. There is no other VSTi with as much sprezaturra as Sylenth1, and it's not even close.

[chk071]

I've programmed 200+ patches for Sylenth1 at this point, the oscillators are indeed alias free. You'll notice when you play higher notes that something funny happens with the highest harmonics. It doesn't appear to be doing the standard bandlimiting/lowpassing tricks you see with other efficient plugins (which dulls the sound) -- but it's also, obviously, not doing the massive oversampling you see with the more "expensive" plugins (in terms of CPU usage). It seems to cleverly and selectively drop just those harmonics which would actually cause aliasing problems, so you get alias-free oscillators that are bright and punchy while barely pushing your CPU. Massive over sampling would probably produce a smidge more brightness, but at a huge CPU cost (see Diva, Serum, Spire, etc). I think this is a big part of why Hive failed to supplant Sylenth1, it looks like its using standard bandlimiting, so it just doesn't quite have the sparkle and, for lack of a better word, fullness of Sylenth1.

Not to stir up something... but, Urs explained that they basically did the same thing Sylenth1 does in Hive: viewtopic.php?p=5980895#p5980895 As it's a pretty technical matter, and i only understand half of that, i can't really comment on it, and don't want to either. I'd say the differences are rather in the underlying sound engine, in the filter, and envelopes characteristics, stuff like that. I do perfer Sylenth1 too.

[aumordia]

Yeah I'm familiar with that thread. Who am I to disagree with Urs, but see for yourself: pull up a spectrogram and run a naked saw up the keyboard in both Sylenth1 and Hive, you'll see that Hive fades out upper harmonics very regularly, whereas Sylenth1 removes them selectively, and seemingly erratically.

Urs also thought he was doing the same thing workflow wise with Hive as with Sylenth1 and, well...

(I actually quite like Hive, it was a very close toss-up in the end between it and Sylenth1, and the additions like PWM and polyphonic LFO's are really nice. But Sylenth1 was just more fun, plain and simple.)

[chk071]

Did you check it for different notes, as Urs described in the linked thread? I remember i checked that out, in VPS Scope, and, it definitely behaved differently depending on the played notes.

[fluffy_little_something]

18kHz, hehe, my hearing ends at 14kHz by now

[fluffy_little_something]

S1 and Hive may use the same principle, but for some reason S1 sounds clearly more pleasing to me. Add to that the superior user interface and lower CPU load...

[chk071]

Actually, i just checked that out again, just, and the frequency meter in Scope behaves differently than in Span... so, most probably was an issue with the display in Scope. Feeling a bit ashamed now to have claimed such a thing, based on what is seemingly an error in Scope... deleted the stuff for now from my post above.

[2ZrgE]

S1 and Hive may use the same principle, but for some reason S1 sounds clearly more pleasing to me. Add to that the superior user interface and lower CPU load...

Superior user interface?

Having fun spreading stupid misinformation, do we?

Can't really comment on the CPU though...but I guess we all know what kind of 'expertise' we can expect from you giving your history here...

[fluffy_little_something]

S1 and Hive may use the same principle, but for some reason S1 sounds clearly more pleasing to me. Add to that the superior user interface and lower CPU load...

Superior user interface?

Having fun spreading stupid misinformation, do we?

Can't really comment on the CPU though...but I guess we all know what kind of 'expertise' we can expect from you giving your history here...

Yes, I find the GUI superior. It looks much more inviting, it can be scaled to any custom size, fonts are more legible, there are no graphics problems with older video cards, etc. The only thing I like better in Hive is the big value readout.

And yes, CPU load is lower, which is no surprise as I read somewhere that Hive uses zero-delay feedback filtering to a certain extent, which S1 does not.

[aumordia]

lol 2ZgrE maybe chillax a bit bro, there are worse things than someone saying they think Sylenth1 is better than Hive... in the Sylenth1 forum, no less.

[Teksonik]

In my opinion Sylenth 1 and Hive make perfect companions. Each has it's own character and they complement each other quite well.

As for the GUIs....how soon can we use the new Sylenth 1 GUIs ?