Vital - Released

[vertibration]

I am using Live 10 playing Abbysun on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro i5 (but I got batch lucky and it is i7 level. My laptop had the highest GeekBench single core test for an i5 for months). 39% cpu hit for a sustained 3-note chord.

Most people actually report low CPU usage but a few people are reporting high CPU usage like you're seeing, mainly on Mac. I think there's an issue where the graphics drawing is getting registered as DSP usage on some systems so that might be what's happening with you. To be clear this really isn't an efficiency problem but an issue with separating the processing that goes into drawing graphics.

Windows 10, its not so much high cpu overall, its spikes. That is the problem, lots of presets have random spike hits

[mrsugmad]

Today Plugin Guru went through Vital and showed some tips and tricks:

He will be creating new patches for Vital and Unify; Can't wait !

[cron]

I am using Live 10 playing Abbysun on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro i5 (but I got batch lucky and it is i7 level. My laptop had the highest GeekBench single core test for an i5 for months). 39% cpu hit for a sustained 3-note chord.

Most people actually report low CPU usage but a few people are reporting high CPU usage like you're seeing, mainly on Mac. I think there's an issue where the graphics drawing is getting registered as DSP usage on some systems so that might be what's happening with you. To be clear this really isn't an efficiency problem but an issue with separating the processing that goes into drawing graphics.

That might be it. In my comparisons to Serum earlier in the thread, I noted that it was about twice as heavy on the GPU as Serum, but around half as CPU intensive. IDK anything about Macs to be honest, but CPU and GPU hit are always separated in Windows Task Manager.

[BONES]

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

What? I've never even bothered to look at Serum, nothing about it appeals to me in anyway. OTOH, Vital is actually pretty good - well thought out, well made and with a very enticing price. The GUI kraps all over Serum for a start.

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 would there be clipping? Are you using an 8 bit host? I can turn any preset in Vital, or any other synth I own, up as high as it will go and there is never, ever any clipping.

Why on earth do people need to do this!? Put their fader at -18 and write patches??

Why do you need to make an issue of something that hasn't mattered in 20-odd years? We all have different priorities and, personally, I find it much easier to turn something down when it's too loud that to turn it up when it's not loud enough. Why? Because when you turn something down, you have considerable depth to work with but when you have to turn something up, you run out of gain quite easily.

And I'm also collecting thumb down votes

Clearly that was your intent, so what's the problem?

Matt is smart enough not to have a corporate structure such as NI,with team of over paid "experts" sucking on the company tits...

They do very little in terms of end product development, but they get generous salaries to preside over the ad campaigns and the bean counting...

So what you're saying is that NI look out for the community, providing jobs for many people who might otherwise struggle to get work, while Matt is a greedy bastard who wants to keep all the money to himself. These things all depend upon your perspective and each approach is valid, as are many others.

[digitalboytn]

Matt is smart enough not to have a corporate structure such as NI,with team of over paid "experts" sucking on the company tits...

They do very little in terms of end product development, but they get generous salaries to preside over the ad campaigns and the bean counting...

So what you're saying is that NI look out for the community, providing jobs for many people who might otherwise struggle to get work, while Matt is a greedy bastard who wants to keep all the money to himself. These things all depend upon your perspective and each approach is valid, as are many others.

That is not what I meant at all and you know it

[liquidsound]

Another unique hidden way of creating wavetables.

[Noumena]

The clipping is an issue, Bones, is not because of the DAW, but because many many plugins do not like >0db signal coming into their inputs. If I put Vital in front of any reverb that I use (Blackhole, Reaktor 6Rev, Seventh Heaven Pro) and most of the compressors that I use, like Silika, clip like crazy. I have to step the gain down coming out of Vital (and some other instruments that I've got.) It's possible the the above poster has other issues. But gainstaging is absolutely central to my workflow (as it ought to be) and having synths come in so hot is irritating. That said I know a lot of people that are mixing at very low db levels.... maybe it is because I'm old and started on analog mixers, but I tend to mix closer to 0db.. so maybe this is a cultural shift, in which case I'd love a master gain setting in the synth like, say, the one in Kontakt.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Dell E640 laptop 2.26 dual with nvidia graphics.

Is that a Core 2 Duo at 2.26 GHz ?

yes. running Win 7 and Reaper

[ThomasHelzle]

Today I checked online for text to speech options and found a freeware called Balabolka: http://balabolka.site/balabolka.htm
Windows only (the mac comes with great voices onboard), but quite fun to use once you figured it out. By default, it uses the different Microsoft voices installed on your machine, which aren't that hot. But it also allows to convert longer text to wavefiles via several online services and I found especially the IBM Watson V3 voices to be very good. You can hack the generated audio files into pieces and drag them onto the wavetable in Vital to convert them to WT or use them in the sample osc as they are.

Cheers,

Tom

[Teksonik]

Thanks, cool tip.

I'll post again that those who own FL Studio can use its built in Speech plugin to create files to use in Vital.

Anyway I've been doing some testing and I notice that Vital's FX are generating some CPU usage when at idle, no audio being processed.

Just taking the Init Patch and enabling all the FX can quadruple the idle CPU demand. Perhaps that's one thing that's causing some people to complain about CPU demand.

I don't find it overly demanding but of course any optimization would benefit everybody. I imagine an option to turn off the animations would be useful.

[pdxindy]

I am using Live 10 playing Abbysun on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro i5 (but I got batch lucky and it is i7 level. My laptop had the highest GeekBench single core test for an i5 for months). 39% cpu hit for a sustained 3-note chord.

Most people actually report low CPU usage but a few people are reporting high CPU usage like you're seeing, mainly on Mac. I think there's an issue where the graphics drawing is getting registered as DSP usage on some systems so that might be what's happening with you. To be clear this really isn't an efficiency problem but an issue with separating the processing that goes into drawing graphics.

Windows 10, its not so much high cpu overall, its spikes. That is the problem, lots of presets have random spike hits

Same for me on Mac... Using Vital and another VST synth for comparison, the CPU use may be about the same, but I am having CPU dropouts/spikes in Vital.

[Teksonik]

What patches are causing Spikes for you guys ? I'd like to check them out.

[Psuper]

What patches are causing Spikes for you guys ? I'd like to check them out.

Was just about to ask the same. I'm not having any issues at all with CPU -- in fact Vital is one of the most efficient synths I own, especially when messing with the cranked up oversampling.

So let us know what patches, and what oversampling option.

[mtytel]

What patches are causing Spikes for you guys ? I'd like to check them out.

Was just about to ask the same. I'm not having any issues at all with CPU -- in fact Vital is one of the most efficient synths I own, especially when messing with the cranked up oversampling.

So let us know what patches, and what oversampling option.

This may not be an efficiency problem, but instead some issue with a library I’m using to draw graphics. It’s possible a library I’musing for graphics is halting the audio thread on some systems but I’m still looking into why that could be because most people don’t actually see this.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

I will do a more detailed analysis this afternoon but something I found odd was that Reaper was reporting 2% cpu even with gui on but I noticed the fan staying on so I checked windows system monitor and found it was much higher with gui open. Not sure why Reaper isn't seeing the true load.