One-Synth-Challenge 57: Tunefish - Chat & Gossip

[H-man]

This morning during all the Cyber Monday madness, I had a moment of clarity and decided to go over to the TuneFish website and make a small donation to Payne to assist him with V4 and cross-platform support.

I think Payne's efforts were commendable and I for one would like to see the TuneFish(es) grow Not tryin to big-up myself or spruke for Payne but

...like-minded souls could do the same I suppose.

[RichardSemper]

I have posted the patches I created for this challenge:-
http://www.kvraudio.com/product/tunefis ... /downloads

Voting for the entries was interesting. As I played them on main hi-fi I was impressed by the quality of the submissions.
And disappointed in the quality of production on my track
(well I ran out of time, and ended up doing the final mix on headphones in the middle of the night between work shifts) Still I felt I owed it to Payne to submit in spite of being unfinished, after all the hard work he put into this challenge.
Maybe I will go back and finish it later (if I can bear it )

Just a couple of notes for Payne -
I have more ideas for this synth (better ones) and would like to use it further.
However, the timing issue makes it difficult to sit alongside other synths in my setup, and while reducing the latency minimised the problem while using only tunefish, it has not gone away.

Also, there appears to be a sort of underlying grainy medium wave tape hiss kind of noise which reduces the quality some of the sounds. I think I am detecting this in some, but not all of the entries. It may be down to my poor patch design abilities, but I definitely struggled with it.
I think its possible the synth works better on some systems than others.
mines an I7 quad core with 64bit win7 creative x-fi titanium, cubase artist 6.5

Finally the patch management system

Please don't take this in the wrong way, its meant as constructive feedback

This has been a most interesting and excellent challenge. IMO the best part has been the feeling that we were helping a worthy developer.

[payne_bc]

Just a couple of notes for Payne -
I have more ideas for this synth (better ones) and would like to use it further.
However, the timing issue makes it difficult to sit alongside other synths in my setup, and while reducing the latency minimised the problem while using only tunefish, it has not gone away.

Those timing issues are something I'd love to get fixed, although I still have not heard or experienced them myself. Is this something that is recordable so I can hear (or see it in a wave editor) ? That would be most helpful. I am now in the testing stage of Tunefish4 which is cross platform. VST works on Win, Mac and Linux, Audio Unit is in the works. I want this to be a better experience than TF3 so any input or help on this is welcome

Also, there appears to be a sort of underlying grainy medium wave tape hiss kind of noise which reduces the quality some of the sounds. I think I am detecting this in some, but not all of the entries. It may be down to my poor patch design abilities, but I definitely struggled with it.

Could this possibly be overtones? I still have not implemented antialiasing which in higher octaves sounds horrible! But even in lower ones I can imagine it is detectable.

Finally the patch management system

Yep I know. It's unintuitive and not working really effective. Anybody care to give input on how to do this properly? I've not implemented one so far in Tunefish4 so everything is possible

Please don't take this in the wrong way, its meant as constructive feedback

This has been a most interesting and excellent challenge. IMO the best part has been the feeling that we were helping a worthy developer.

Construcive feedback is always welcome. And so far all feedback has been very helpful and kind.

[idfpower]

Facing the shortcomings of your setup & synth is IMO part of the challenge I'm struggling with an ancient Dualcore 3GHZ / 3GB RAM PC and I still try to attent OSC every month (and I was forced a couple of times to bounce all tracks to audio to finish a song).

CPU wise Tunefish is an absolute champion - the lowest consumption I've ever seen. Quite amazing, really...I would have expected it to be the other way round.

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

[RichardSemper]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.[/quote]

not aware of the rule against lrics - the sound all come from the synth - simply noise automated and using tf inbuilt effects!

[payne_bc]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

From the rules:
"No external samples or live sounds like voice, guitar etc allowed."

I don't think that outrules vocals done with the synth itself

[RichardSemper]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

I'm not aware of this rule against lyrics - the sounds all come from the synth - noise automated and using inbuilt formant fx

[RichardSemper]

Those timing issues are something I'd love to get fixed, although I still have not heard or experienced them myself. Is this something that is recordable so I can hear (or see it in a wave editor) ? That would be most helpful. I am now in the testing stage of Tunefish4 which is cross platform. VST works on Win, Mac and Linux, Audio Unit is in the works. I want this to be a better experience than TF3 so any input or help on this is welcome

I will try to record some examples for you tomorrow. (got to go to bed now)
I would love to get my hands on tf4 and test it!

[crimsonwarlock]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

I'm not aware of this rule against lyrics - the sounds all come from the synth - noise automated and using inbuilt formant fx

I think the rules need clarification on this point, but I seem to remember there has been discussion on this in the past and anything lyrics-related seemed to be outlawed.

[RichardSemper]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

I'm not aware of this rule against lyrics - the sounds all come from the synth - noise automated and using inbuilt formant fx

I think the rules need clarification on this point, but I seem to remember there has been discussion on this in the past and anything lyrics-related seemed to be outlawed.

Well I never expected to get into a controversy on only my second challenge
Please vger, help I cannot see anything in the rules which outlaws this, nor have I seen these previous discussions.

Perhaps I should simply withdraw, its unlikely to win anyway

[H-man]

Yep I know. It's unintuitive and not working really effective. Anybody care to give input on how to do this properly? I've not implemented one so far in Tunefish4 so everything is possible

IMHO it's a little ironic, the built-in patch management was full-featured but tedious, eg:

1. Tweak existing patch
2. Click Manage
3. Copy to new empty slot
4. Save
5. Click manage
6. Rename new patch
7. Click save
8. Navigate back to original patch (from step 1)
9. Click Restore

While on the other hand Podium was able to store all current settings for TuneFish(es)over 25 + instances without fail, to the point where I stopped worrying about saving patches to the internal patch management at all and just relied on the fact that my latest refinements would be saved with the project.

This is a lot more than I can say for some other commercial synths

My suggestion would be to stream-line the above to:

1. Tweak existing patch
2. Click Save As (or even save as new version - like Aalto)
3. Enter name
4. Click save

Any tweaks to the original patch would be dropped when the plugin loads next (ie. The vsti reads from the patch bank on loading.

Just a suggestion. I'm sure others may have varied preferences

One more thing, has anyone every seen a synth that stores all changes to parameters through the UI in a similar way to the History function in Paint.Net et al?

This may be complicated to implement but would give one the ability to jump back to any point as well as delete or roll-back specific changes anywhere ....like a detailed undo n' redo system.

Maybe just crazy talk

[H-man]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

I'm not aware of this rule against lyrics - the sounds all come from the synth - noise automated and using inbuilt formant fx

I think the rules need clarification on this point, but I seem to remember there has been discussion on this in the past and anything lyrics-related seemed to be outlawed.

Well I never expected to get into a controversy on only my second challenge
Please vger, help I cannot see anything in the rules which outlaws this, nor have I seen these previous discussions.

Perhaps I should simply withdraw, its unlikely to win anyway

I'm certainly no authority around here however if you can get a synth to say it's own name that's cool with me

I tried to do it with Aalto last month and no-one complained (which could be due to the fact that I failed at my goal entirely).

Also, from memory the winner of the Zebralette OSC managed to get that synth talking as well?

Just sayin...

[animehaus]

Regarding the lyrics issue, I believe it's only got to do with using voice samples and so on.

To be honest, what Richard managed to do with TuneFish was really astounding, really pushing the synth to its limits.

[bjporter]

Oh, and Richard, please don't use any form of vocals/lyrics/etc next time, please - since it is not allowed by OSC rules it makes grading your song very difficult and it's a shame 'cause you're a really good composer.

I'm not aware of this rule against lyrics - the sounds all come from the synth - noise automated and using inbuilt formant fx

I think the rules need clarification on this point, but I seem to remember there has been discussion on this in the past and anything lyrics-related seemed to be outlawed.

Well I never expected to get into a controversy on only my second challenge
Please vger, help I cannot see anything in the rules which outlaws this, nor have I seen these previous discussions.

Perhaps I should simply withdraw, its unlikely to win anyway

I checked out your project, and of course you're 100% legit, and followed the rules. Congratulations

[H-man]

Nice

Sooooo ...for clarification's sake, are vocal "sounding" patches quite legit or generally discouraged?