FXpansion D-CAM: Synth Squad for sale now!

[Echoes in the Attic]

what oversampling rates were the audio demos recorded at on the fxpansion site? I'd be curious to hear side by side comparisons of them at 1x, 2x and 8x.

[Angus_FX]

The preset audio demos were all done at 1x. Needless to say they're all MP3'ed as well.

[Echoes in the Attic]

The preset audio demos were all done at 1x. Needless to say they're all MP3'ed as well.

That's pretty impressive. I was sure that some of those were rendered at higher rates.

[Echoes in the Attic]

There may be a day when this thread finally fades into the abyss, but today is not that day.

I finally had many hours to sit and play with synth squad yesterday, to really tweak the crap out of it (I've only had a little time here or there since release to mess with it, been rather busy lately). And I just had to say that that synth squad firmly deserves the 138 pages of this thread. The subtleties are just so there.

It's funny that I didn't fully appreciate it when I beta tested it. I tried it for a while and thought "Cool, but not for me". Wow was I wrong. Simply the best VA's to date.

Do yourselves a favor though. Keep strobe and cypher at 2x oversampling. Although it still sounds good at 1x, 2x is where it truly shines.

[cYrus]

Do yourselves a favor though. Keep strobe and cypher at 2x oversampling. Although it still sounds good at 1x, 2x is where it truly shines.

too bad it's broken in fusor. hope there's a fix soon.

[Klemperer]

There may be a day when this thread finally fades into the abyss, but today is not that day.

Well you might always put the thread back on top, as you know

It's funny that I didn't fully appreciate it when I beta tested it. I tried it for a while and thought "Cool, but not for me".

So that being the case, I'd kindly ask you to let me beta-test next time for Fxpansions instead of you. I, on the other hand, would inform you about all sound possibilities, and you had your wow-effect after release, just like now

Do yourselves a favor though. Keep strobe and cypher at 2x oversampling. Although it still sounds good at 1x, 2x is where it truly shines.

Thanks for this advice. Let's see how I can milk my cow, er, get my laptop to do this.

[andy-cytomic]

Which of the FX dudes came up with the load to mod slot idea? The rest of you guys owe him a beer I reckon.

Well to FXpansion's credit they have bought me many beers and allowed me the freedom and time to bounce ideas around and give me feedback and suggestions on them

The idea for the TransMod slots was inspired by the excellent nord modular synth's "morph groups". I extended on this idea way further by allowing all TransMod slots to be polyphonic, and allowing anything to be a mod source, not just midi sources, and adding the "via" slot to scale the modulation depth (thanks for Michu for hassling me to add this). Since each mod slot is basically a variation on a preset allowing loading these from other presets seemed a very useful thing to do, although it does take some explaining since it's not something people are used to.

Andrew Simper

[rouge]

@Andrew: Could you please consider creating a properly analogue modelled Ring Modulator at some point? It would seem like large chunks of the code and technology is already in place for this. Anybody who has experience with analogue ring modulation will have a hard time using plugins for that task. The current digital implementations are extremely grainy and nasty compared to the real deal.

Cheers!
bManic

I would love an analogue modeled Ring Mod as well. Are their any plans
for something like this ? Is it very computationaly expensive ? Maybe it could be implemented as an update for Cypher or something ?

How come you guys decided to implement such high SR possibilities? Is it worth it beyond 4x?

For reasonable distortion amounts on guitar type frequencies you need a minimum of x8, which is the default setting for render oversampling and will cover 95% of people even with agressive sounds. For those few that want to do full frequency high gain distortion sweeps you will need x32-x64. If on top of that you want to do very extreme fm, not just simple belly tones, you will need at least x256-x1024 depending on the depth of fm and the pitch of the modulator. I have left it up to the user to decide how much time they want to spend on a render, I just set a decent default value.

Andrew Simper

Is there like a "developer mode" or something to get access to these oversampling amounts ? And why were they removed from the final product ?

Hey Andrew, did you see my questions a page back ?

[lagavulin16]

I set oversampling for all of them to 8X and haven't had scratching or anything. 16X put at least one of them over the edge. I'm on a mac pro octo from early 2008.

[rouge]

I set oversampling for all of them to 8X and haven't had scratching or anything. 16X put at least one of them over the edge. I'm on a mac pro octo from early 2008.

Yeah, I set them between 8x and 16x myself. But I really wanted the option to set it higher as I tend to really like to push things like FM and Drive to the limits and would like to hear the effect on the sound. Andrew said in his post on the subject that extreme FM and Drive would require 256x plus

[ZenPunkHippy]

There is a file in the FXpansion user folder for each synth and Fusor called "io.xml" which contains the render settings. You could try editing the file with a text editor to set the extreme values. I haven't verified if this will work, but the worst that could happen is the GUI crashes trying to set an incorrect value, or your CPU melts if it does work

Peace,
Andy.

[rouge]

There is a file in the FXpansion user folder for each synth and Fusor called "io.xml" which contains the render settings. You could try editing the file with a text editor to set the extreme values. I haven't verified if this will work, but the worst that could happen is the GUI crashes trying to set an incorrect value, or your CPU melts if it does work

Peace,
Andy.

Thanks for the tip, ill give is a try

[andy-cytomic]

@Andrew: Could you please consider creating a properly analogue modelled Ring Modulator at some point? It would seem like large chunks of the code and technology is already in place for this. Anybody who has experience with analogue ring modulation will have a hard time using plugins for that task. The current digital implementations are extremely grainy and nasty compared to the real deal.

Cheers!
bManic

I would love an analogue modeled Ring Mod as well. Are their any plans
for something like this ? Is it very computationaly expensive ? Maybe it could be implemented as an update for Cypher or something ?

I don't know how computationally expensive it is as I've not modeled one yet, but the most simple circuit involves two inductors with 3 taps each and 4 diodes - which as a first guess would place it in the same league as solving a stereo analog modeled compressor, so it would probably best be done as a plugin in it's own right.

Andrew Simper

[andy-cytomic]

How come you guys decided to implement such high SR possibilities? Is it worth it beyond 4x?

For reasonable distortion amounts on guitar type frequencies you need a minimum of x8, which is the default setting for render oversampling and will cover 95% of people even with agressive sounds. For those few that want to do full frequency high gain distortion sweeps you will need x32-x64. If on top of that you want to do very extreme fm, not just simple belly tones, you will need at least x256-x1024 depending on the depth of fm and the pitch of the modulator. I have left it up to the user to decide how much time they want to spend on a render, I just set a decent default value.

Andrew Simper

Is there like a "developer mode" or something to get access to these oversampling amounts ? And why were they removed from the final product ?

Sorry for not knowing the answer to this, but I'm sure one of the FXpansion staff will get back to you very soon with some more info.

I just want to clarify what I said before:

"For those few that want to do full frequency high gain distortion sweeps you will need x32-x64." - This would be for +60 dB gain on high pitches signals > 5 kHz. Just to put this in perspective the highest note on a guitar is around 1 kHz and if you chained two stomp boxes together at full gain you would get around +60 dB gain. At these settings everything gets turned into a square wave since it's so clipped.

"if you want to do very extreme fm, not just simple belly tones, you will need at least x256-x1024 depending on the depth of fm and the pitch of the modulator." - What I'm talking about here are high frequency extreme depth modulations that still have very low aliasing. Since these sounds have no discernible pitch the difference between x256 and x16 might not actually be audible in a blind a/b comparison.

Andrew Simper

[Captain]

@Andrew: Could you please consider creating a properly analogue modelled Ring Modulator at some point? It would seem like large chunks of the code and technology is already in place for this. Anybody who has experience with analogue ring modulation will have a hard time using plugins for that task. The current digital implementations are extremely grainy and nasty compared to the real deal.

I would love an analogue modeled Ring Mod as well. Are their any plans
for something like this ? Is it very computationaly expensive ? Maybe it could be implemented as an update for Cypher or something ?

Sorry if I'm asking something stupid here, but since Cypher already already seems to have a simple ring modulation feature, I'm assuming you are talking about something different?

EDIT: Or are you talking about modulating external signals...? Couldn't find bmanic's original post, so I assumed the topic was Synth Squad, but maybe that wasn't the case?