Enhancement suggestion for SS2

[Squids]

Kevin Gilbert cover tune? How rare and odd that you have that in your sig. I suppose I should listen to it!

As for which sounds have macros in SS2... well, there are about 6,000 sounds so I can't recall off the top of my head. I do know that we didn't go nuts on macros at that time and most of the macros came over from Sonic Synth 1 (so basic stuff for convenience). I had always planned to do some extra spicy stuff with them for SS2 so like I said, this is something that we plan in a future update for SS2. In the meantime, a lot of the programming and performance aspects are more of the synthesis engine stuff like the filter section, envelopes, lfos, effects (using the ST2 engine like a subtractive and LA-type synth).

[chisel]

There are presets that have macros, but they are all greyed out. So if you have a MIDI controller assigned to the respective CCs, you can call up each preset and twiddle the knobs to see what changes. I agree that not having a global CC assignment makes using a MIDI controller all but useless. The info doesn't show up for any of the presets either. But I heard that it works fine in the ST2 UI and the macros probably show up fine also. THe SS2 UI needs some serious work. I've learned to live with the quirks and just appreciate the amazing sounds

Peace \/
Chisel

[Squids]

You guys make some extreme statements sometimes. Because the CC assignment isn't global it is useless? I don't think so. I use it all the time. You just assign it and save your assignment with the patch. I think that's great and it annoys me when some programs are ONLY global and you CAN'T save an assignment with the patch. Of course, ideally it would be nice to have both options.

As for "SS2 GUI needing serious work"... seems a bit drastic. The greyed out macros I have to check on but this isn't necessarily a GUI issue. It may be how we programmed the sounds or how they were brought over from SS1 (in some cases). But, as I said before, the macros are not the focus of Sonik Synth 2! If they are still there even greyed out and you want to use them then by all means go ahead but they don't do anything that you could just do with the 50 synth parameters anyway. They only have preset controllers assigned.

I am glad you guys are interested in the macros though because there ARE some cool things that we can do with them. It requires even more work than the massive amount of programming that would happen for these workstation plug-ins and sometimes can't all be done at once (ie. SS2 has close to 6,000 sounds which you can imagine was a tremendous amount of work already!). But, SS2 is alive and there are some great plans for its future that DO involve some additional proprietary macros. As I said, we did this for Miroslav Philharmonik and they are useful, fun and add functionality to the performance/editing features. So, if this sort of thing is appreciated by the users then we're game for doing it more and more. It takes a lot of effort to set up so you wonder sometimes as a developer if the users even notice.

[blades]

Hey, thanks again for the answers, folks...again - not a complaint, just a curiosity. I really like SS2 quite a lot (check my review over at esoundz!).

Squids - would love to know what you think of the Kevin Gilbert cover - it's actually "oifficially" on the kg web site, so that's cool...anyway, surprised you didn't notice it in the sig before now, but didn't want to "bug" you about listening...

Sorry for the contiunued hijack! Back to macros and whatnot