TSC Request for Help with Tracking Down Collective Silence Bug

[zzz00m]

Well for me it was simple. When track 1 goes silent in my test project, switch off Effect 4. Sound again! Switch effect 4 back on, silent immediately. This was while using factory preset "Mouse Chords JH", the Effect 4 was "Reverb Natural".

This did not happen on every run of the project, but when it does happen the effect is as I just described. Immediate and verifiable.

But to be fair, I cannot reproduce this now with the latest Beta version of Waveform & Collective.

OK, I spoke too soon. I just reproduced this problem again several times with an older test project I had not tried recently.

Running Waveform 8.1.14 x64, this project has 4 tracks with Collective 1.06. It is set up with a 7 bar loop and a MIDI clip/Pattern Generator on each track, progression I-vi-V-iii. Project is C Major, 4/4, 120 bpm, no plugin effects or master plugins.

Track 1. "3 Notes Fun JH" pattern style chords, octave 6.
Track 2. "B3 Perc 1 EM" pattern style bassline, octave 5.
Track 3. "B3 Perc 1 EM" pattern style bassline, octave 5 (the notes on PRV are an octave below track 2).
Track 4. "Waldorf Pulse Bass JH", pattern style bassline, octave 4.

During this most recent test session I had the sound cut out at various times starting with either track 1, 2, or 3. But the entire project output goes silent. The cause is the Collective track where the output meter is now zero. The other meters remain active, but no sound at the master.

With the transport still running the loop, If I turn off all of the effect slots in the affected Collective plugin, the sound resumes. I can turn them on again without any further issues.

The main difference with this test project and the others that ran clean, is that I had removed all instances of the Pattern Generator to eliminate that. This is the only test project that still used the generators. Coincidence?

[magicmusic]

here is video and you can see only 1 track is play. if all with the demo noise is ok, i do not know. on sec 40 of video you can see my settings for audio and cpu


the below setting x2 i have change only now for test. before it was x1. x2 bring too sound silence soon with more collective VSTi

[Hermu]

here is video and you can see only 1 track is play. if all with the demo noise is ok, i do not know. on sec 40 of video you can see my settings for audio and cpu


the below setting x2 i have change only now for test. before it was x1. x2 bring too sound silence soon with more collective VSTi

hi magicmusic,

in this video i see tracks 2 and 3 are muted, is this correct ?

[Hermu]

Hi Wolfram,

i have already sent request (10967) and (11022) with demoprojects, because the same problem occours also with BioTek but got no response until now!
i think there is a problem with other incomming midi controller data which makes both synths silent and it's not a oscilator problem, because both synths works with other DAWs.

[zzz00m]

Therefore, may I again ask you if someone of you could do the tedious task to make a track that shows the erroneous behaviour, load that track again and switch off *one* of the sound generating modules, check if Collective still goes silent and if so, repeat this procedure switching off more and more modules until the problem doesn't occur anymore? That would really, really help.

Thank you all in advance,

Wolfram

Done! It is the on-board effects modules.

[chico.co.uk]

The developer of the plugin says they can't reproduce the issue, and you argue about whether he's using the right version to test?
You need to re-read the last few posts, which explain what he's asking someone to do, to help get to the bottom of it.

[magicmusic]

here is video and you can see only 1 track is play. if all with the demo noise is ok, i do not know. on sec 40 of video you can see my settings for audio and cpu


the below setting x2 i have change only now for test. before it was x1. x2 bring too sound silence soon with more collective VSTi

hi magicmusic,

in this video i see tracks 2 and 3 are muted, is this correct ?

yes track 2 and 3 are mute and it use only 1 collective. There is before told that 1 collective work ok. only when 2 or more collective are use problems come

but the support always told to make a song that fail with only 1 track. this is not possible
because it seem there is a instance shared value problem in. and instance shared variable problems can only find when use more instances. the more instances you use the more problems get. i think if the support make a testsong with 16 collective tracks and use a screen recorder as i do then it should fail too. i do this video with free screen recorder and you can hear the sound is not dropout(without demo noise). when use 2 or more collective tracks then with screen recorder sound dropout happen very often

Edit: I also disable with older collective versions 3 CPU in Bios so i use a single core system. win 10 boot was much longer and waveform give a warn message that more core should use, but it can use and the sound dropouts happen not so often

[Hermu]

How can i set multi midi channel input for Collective?

today i have tested a midi project with different midi channels and it was wondering, because only one track was playing and with a midi monitor i found the reason why.
it seems, Collective plays only tracks with midi channel 1 ??
now i have set all tracks to midi channel 1 and now all my tracks are playing!
this is a big limitation, because channel 10 is for Drum track and shows drummap notes in midi editor!

i've found nothing to change that, not in manual or Collective synth

[chico.co.uk]

How can i set multi midi channel input for Collective?

today i have tested a midi project with different midi channels and it was wondering, because only one track was playing and with a midi monitor i found the reason why.
it seems, Collective plays only tracks with midi channel 1 ??
now i have set all tracks to midi channel 1 and now all my tracks are playing!
this is a big limitation, because channel 10 is for Drum track and shows drummap notes in midi editor!

i've found nothing to change that, not in manual or Collective synth

Currently you can't, Collective only "listens" to midi input on channel 1. The devs said in a previous thread it's on their list of things to fix, it's just not there yet. But it's coming, in a future update.

As a workaround for the minute, put a Midi Patch Bay filter before collective, on a track with midi data on another channel (eg, a track with midi on channel 10), and map channel 10 to channel 1.

[Hermu]

here is video and you can see only 1 track is play. if all with the demo noise is ok, i do not know. on sec 40 of video you can see my settings for audio and cpu


the below setting x2 i have change only now for test. before it was x1. x2 bring too sound silence soon with more collective VSTi

hi magicmusic,

in this video i see tracks 2 and 3 are muted, is this correct ?

yes track 2 and 3 are mute and it use only 1 collective. There is before told that 1 collective work ok. only when 2 or more collective are use problems come

but the support always told to make a song that fail with only 1 track. this is not possible
because it seem there is a instance shared value problem in. and instance shared variable problems can only find when use more instances. the more instances you use the more problems get. i think if the support make a testsong with 16 collective tracks and use a screen recorder as i do then it should fail too. i do this video with free screen recorder and you can hear the sound is not dropout(without demo noise). when use 2 or more collective tracks then with screen recorder sound dropout happen very often

Edit: I also disable with older collective versions 3 CPU in Bios so i use a single core system. win 10 boot was much longer and waveform give a warn message that more core should use, but it can use and the sound dropouts happen not so often

i have created a single track project and this was a drum track, before i found out, that Collective plays only tracks with channel 1!

sometimes i have also tropouts if i have newly assigned Collective synths to any new tracks and at this moment playback without dropouts is not longer possible. what you can do in this situation, is to save your project and restart waveform again and in most cases playback runs now without dropouts.

[Hermu]

How can i set multi midi channel input for Collective?

today i have tested a midi project with different midi channels and it was wondering, because only one track was playing and with a midi monitor i found the reason why.
it seems, Collective plays only tracks with midi channel 1 ??
now i have set all tracks to midi channel 1 and now all my tracks are playing!
this is a big limitation, because channel 10 is for Drum track and shows drummap notes in midi editor!

i've found nothing to change that, not in manual or Collective synth

Currently you can't, Collective only "listens" to midi input on channel 1. The devs said in a previous thread it's on their list of things to fix, it's just not there yet. But it's coming, in a future update.

As a workaround for the minute, put a Midi Patch Bay filter before collective, on a track with midi data on another channel (eg, a track with midi on channel 10), and map channel 10 to channel 1.

thanks for this info and to use Midi Patch Bay is what i also thougt to do, but it's not comfortable ...

[Wolfram Franke]

Hi everyone,

Collective only receives and plays MIDI data on MIDI channel 1. I don't remember right now why we did it that way but we had a reason (early versions of BioTek, where Collective is based on, received MIDI on all channels). Depending on the sound you choose, the output level might be quite low as well, since some MIDI files make heavy use of the MIDI Expression Controller (#11), which is applied to Collective's output volume, together with MIDI Volume Controller (#7).

Best wishes,

Wolfram

[Wolfram Franke]

Therefore, may I again ask you if someone of you could do the tedious task to make a track that shows the erroneous behaviour, load that track again and switch off *one* of the sound generating modules, check if Collective still goes silent and if so, repeat this procedure switching off more and more modules until the problem doesn't occur anymore? That would really, really help.

Thank you all in advance,

Wolfram

Done! It is the on-board effects modules.

Hi zzz00m,

it might be that the reverb is the culprit, but it doesn't need to be. A reverb effect works by feeding back audio data over and over and if one of the samples contains an invalid float value such as NaN (not a number) or infinity, any resulting calculation also results in such an invalid float value.

Therefore, your observation that activating the reverb kills any audio output is correct, but the reverb might have received an invalid float value as input, which means that it by itself is not the culprit but some audio module in one of the voices.

Best wishes,

Wolfram

[zzz00m]

Therefore, may I again ask you if someone of you could do the tedious task to make a track that shows the erroneous behaviour, load that track again and switch off *one* of the sound generating modules, check if Collective still goes silent and if so, repeat this procedure switching off more and more modules until the problem doesn't occur anymore? That would really, really help.

Thank you all in advance,

Wolfram

Done! It is the on-board effects modules.

Hi zzz00m,

it might be that the reverb is the culprit, but it doesn't need to be. A reverb effect works by feeding back audio data over and over and if one of the samples contains an invalid float value such as NaN (not a number) or infinity, any resulting calculation also results in such an invalid float value.

Therefore, your observation that activating the reverb kills any audio output is correct, but the reverb might have received an invalid float value as input, which means that it by itself is not the culprit but some audio module in one of the voices.

Best wishes,

Wolfram

I said it was the effects, not specifically the reverb. That was just one example. In my detailed breakdown of my test project you should notice that the other presets use various effects.

In some cases I had to turn off 2 or 3 active effects to restore audio, just depends on the preset.

[zzz00m]

Therefore, your observation that activating the reverb kills any audio output is correct, but the reverb might have received an invalid float value as input, which means that it by itself is not the culprit but some audio module in one of the voices.

I did not "activate" the reverb. I was just using a factory preset in my test project that already had the reverb effect active. During playback, the audio spontaneously stopped outputting, and by disabling the effect, audio then resumed by itself as the transport continued to play in loop mode.